The slightest acquaintance with the methods of the farmer, the dairyman, and the milkman shows that pure milk is an unknown substance on our tables. Secreted perchance in a healthy mammary gland, the fluid is drawn through unwashed rustic hands into a pail placed under the dung-spattered udder and belly of a cow who spends at least half her time in a dark and noisesome byre, carpeted with a slush of decomposing urine and faeces and papered with the splashings of the same, while the air is thick with the bacterial flora of these admirable culture media and of the bovine alimentary canal. What wonder that the bottom of a milkcan nearly always exhibits a rich sludge, and thus serves the purpose of a cesspool or septic tank? It has been calculated that the inhabitants of Berlin consume in their milk 3 cwt. of excrement per diem. Even in the milk of one of the most model dairies of this district, where hand-washing and teat-washing are supposed to be de rigueur, have I seen this sludge, which the milkman said he could not understand, because he always strained the milk through a cloth before sending it out! And on arrival in the city do we not daily see a row of milk-carts in the bright and perfumed air of Station Street, where milk is being poured from big cans into smaller ones through dirty cloths which between their services lie about anywhere?
When in addition to the chances of pollution we recall the contaminated water with which in country places the milkcans are often washed, the contaminated atmospheres of shops and cellars in which the milk retailed to the poor is usually stored, we no longer wonder that milk, even from a healthy cow, occasionally makes people ill. (BMJ 1902;i:440)