Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/478

468 But, now, how is it with the susceptibility of man to bovine tuberculosis? This question is far more important to us than that of the susceptibility of cattle to human tuberculosis, highly important as that is too. It is impossible to give this question a direct answer, because, of course, the experimental investigation of it with human beings is out of the question. Indirectly, however, we can try to approach it. It i"-well known that the milk and butter consumed in great cities very often contain large quantities of the bacilli of bovine tuberculosis in a living condition, as the numerous infection-experiments with such dairy products on animals have proved. Most of the inhabitants of such cities daily consume such living and perfectly virulent bacilli of bovine tuberculosis, and unintentionally carry out the experiment which we are not at liberty to make. If the bacilli of bovine tuberculosis were able to infect human beings, many cases of tuberculosis caused by the consumption of alimenta containing tubercle bacilli could not but occur among the inhabitants of great cities, especially the children. And most medical men believe that this is actually the case.

In reality, however, it is not so. That a case of tuberculosis has been caused by alimenta can be assumed with certainty only when the intestine suffers first—i. e., when a so-called primary tuberculosis of the intestines is found. But such cases are extremely rare. Among many cases of tuberculosis examined after death I myself remember having seen primary tuberculosis of the intestine only twice. Among the great post-mortem material of the Charité Hospital in Berlin 10 cases of primary tuberculosis of the intestine occurred in five years. Among 933 cases of tuberculosis in children at the Emperor Frederick's Hospital for Children Baginsky never found tuberculosis of the intestine without simultaneous disease of the lungs and the bronchial glands. Among 3,104 post-mortem examinations of tuberculous children Biedert observed only 16 cases of primary tuberculosis of the intestine. I could cite from the literature of the subject many more statistics of the same kind, all indubitably showing that primary tuberculosis of the intestine, especially among children, is a comparatively rare disease, and of the few cases that have been enumerated it is by no means certain that they were due to infection by bovine tuberculosis. It is just as likely that they were caused by the widely propagated bacilli of human tuberculosis, which may have got into the digestive canal in some way or other—for instance, by swallowing saliva of the mouth. Hitherto nobody could decide with certainty in such a case whether the tuberculosis of the intestine was of human or of animal origin. Now we can diagnose the two. All that is necessary is to cultivate in pure culture the tubercle bacilli found in the tuberculous material and to ascertain whether they belong to bovine tuberculosis by inoculating cattle with them. For this purpose I