BOVINE TUBERCULOSIS.

THE REPORT OF THE ENGLISH COMMISSION.

BY THE EDITOR.

We are glad to be able to present our readers with the analysis, and review of the final report of the Royal Commission, which has been long deferred and expected as announced in the London Lancet of July 15th, 1911, by reason of our delay in going to press.

The relation of Human Tuberculosis, to Bovine and their inter-communicability, is beyond all doubt, the most important problem for investigation, confronting the World of Science at this moment. It is the most absorbing and intricate problem of the hour in Forensic Medicine and transcends all others in its importance.

Are human and Bovine Tuberculosis distinct and separate diseases? Can Human Tuberculosis be communicated to man, by the milk of the cow?

Is there tenable, and certain ground for the assumption that the Bacilli, Tubercle, discovered by Koch, and now well known, accurately defined as the certain indication of the Human Tuberculosis, reveals and locates a disease, that has been communicated to the Human Race by or through the milk of a cow which has been suffering from Bovine Tuberculosis/?

The Report of the English Royal Commission, may be said, to thoroughly affirm the proposition that each of these forms of the disease is a separate and distinct disease, clearly definable, recognizable to the Eye of Science, each with its seperate and different Bacilli.

While this is not absolutely and exactly demonstrated as a scientific truth, and a scientific fact, there is now but little doubt, that this was the opinion of Koch and of the great body of scientific workers, throughout the world.

The vital question now remains. Is Bovine Tuberculosis communicable to man through the milk of the cow?

The attitude of Koch served to leave that question in doubt. Both at Stockholm and at the Washington Congress he can not be said to have denied it as a fact. He had investigated it for his Government and with great persistency and most thorough and painstaking research, and at the end of it was compelled as the result of all his work to confess, and to state that he was unable to demonstrate, that Bovine Tuberculosis was communicable to man through the milk of the cow.

This action, and this position of this marvellous man, his doubt while it was not shared by the American observers, with a few exceptions, nor with the English or other continental observers was entertained by those most competent to form an opinion based on personal research. It was stoutly assailed here almost universally by the mass of our men who we must concede had not had the requisite, experience and study to entitle their opinion to weight. (Dr. Koch had few supporters at the Washington Congress, but this doubt prevented any authoritative action at Washington on this critical question of the hour.

The foreign observers of the front rank, compelled to speak from their own researches were as a rule silent. The report of the English Commission, long delayed, has come at last, and as we read it, may be regarded, on the whole as at issue with the doubts Dr. Koch expressed.

It can not be said to assert as a scientific fact, that Bovine Tuberculosis through the milk of a cow is or has been the cause of Human Tuberculosis in any given, well defined, case. The death of Koch at this period was a public calamity.

The American International Congress on Tuberculosis that had been announced for this Fall at New York, decided that it was wise to adjourn its session for one year, shortly before this report became public.

The question is not one where the opinions of men no matter how eminent in their professional standing is of any particular value. It is a question of fact. It must be determined by actual research, by scientific work, that is susceptible of demonstration.

The American International Congress on Tuberculosis has this problem before it. So have all the bodies who are confronted by its momentous consequences.

More or nearly one half of the State Boards of Health in Arnerica had taken action, which had assumed as a fact, that Bovine Tuberculosis is transmissable to man, and enormous expenditure of money in various states for sanitariums, had been authorized and the integrity of the American Boards had been put in extreme peril, by this assumption of a fact, that was without demonstration on a scientific basis.

The medical profession in America made no attempt to have an investigation, perhaps because of the difficulties in the way.

The leading American observers who had given the subject study, were with scarcely an exception committed officially, with great salaries and its financial relation to their pay, and to the requirements of their several institutions, which would disqualify them from giving a free and fully unprejudiced opinion on this vital question. Not one of the American men of high note identified with the interest they represented could have held his place or his pay, f he had even shared the doubts Koch expressed. But what if Koch was right, in five years the costly sanitariums would be for sale or to lease for other purposes.

The English Commission is entitled to thanks for its work and we shall regret to see that Commission disbanded. It should be continued.

If Mr. Carnegie or Mrs. Russell Sage would organize a foundation, and secure the services of competent men, who would be independent of colleges, cliques, and schools, and devote themselves to research along these lines, for even one year, or at most two, who could devote their talent and genius to the research necessary to the solution of this question, it would be a tremendous upward and forward step.

We have a few men in America who have the ability and who have won their spurs in this field of scientific labor, who are free and not bound by obligations to existing bodies. The exigency will furnish the man! Who is the man to learn and solve this greatest problem of the hour?

What is needed is the means to do it and American men should lead in this work, because our immediate future and destiny is concerned more than any country on the globe, in its correct decision.

Prudence would indicate a delay in building costly hospitals for the treatment of the Consumptive, till we have a clearer vision of the causes. It is safe to assert that hospitals for the eradication of consumption is not a possibility. The victims are very many millions, more than a thousand hospitals could hold, or relieve.

If milk had been the cause of consumption, it would long ago have decimated the race.

If research demonstrates that the doubts expressed and entertained by Koch were well founded and we can see that the present view as to the cow and her relation is erroneous, it will be worth the delay to dissipate the error and call a halt to the present popular craze against the cow, and her relation to the great white scourge.

EMANUEL SWENDENBORG.

BY CLARKE BELL, ESQ., LL. D.

As time passes, men of intellect, more and more realize, admire and respect, the great gifts of this man's genius, who was perhaps more in touch with the infinite than any human being of his century or indeed of the 19th Century or the decade succeeding it.

His writings are now on the shelves of the ablest writers and thinkers of our era.

When I was a boy I read all of his then published works through the kindness of an old lady friend who was one of his most ardent disciples. He was the most spiritual of men and has influenced the spiritual side of men more than any writer of his time.

It is wise for us to look into his works now and then and I have lately reviewed them.

The opinions of those we esteem and respect of Swedenborg and his I work and mission is of interest and Mr. John Bigelow's work, "The Mystery of Sleep," cites the opinions of others, which I quote with great pleasure.

The views of Swedenborg as to these men as revealed to him, are such as will be of interest to our readers.

Mr. John Bigelow has given these reviews of Swedenborg in his "Mysteries of Sleep."

Read before the Medico-Legal Society, October 18, 1911.

Ralph Waldo Emerson says: "Emanuel Swedenborg, who appears. to his contemporaries a visionary, no doubt led the most real life of any man then in the world; and now, when the royal and ducal Frederics.... of that day have slid into oblivion, he begins to spread himself into the minds of thousands. As happens in great men, he seemed, by the variety and amount of his powers, to be a composition of several persons, like the giant fruits which are matured in gardens by the union of four or five single blossons.... He was a scholar from a child.... The genius which was to penetrate the science of the age with a far more subtile science, to pass the bounds of space and time, venture into the dim spiritrealm, to attempt to establish a new religion in the world, began its letters in quarries and forges, in the smelting-pot and crucible, in ship-yards and dissecting-rooms. No one man is, perhaps, able to judge of the merits of hs works on so many subjects.... It seems that he anticipated much science of the nineteenth century.. His superb speculation, as from a tower, over nature and arts, without ever losing sight of the texture and sequence of things, almost realizes his own picture in the Principia of the original integrity of man.... One of the misouriums and mastodons of literature, he is not to be measured by whole colleges of ordinary scholars. His stalwart presence would flutter the gowns of a university. Our books are false by being fragmentary. But Swedenborg is systematic, and respective of the world in every sentence; all the means are orderly given; his faculties work with astronomic punctuality, and his admirable writing is pure from all pertness and egotism. He named his favorite views, the Doctrine of Forms, the Doctrine of Series and Degrees, the Doctrine of Influx, the Doctrine of Correspondence. His statement of these doctrines deserves to be studied in his books. Not every man can read them, but they will reward him who can.... His writings would be a sufficient library to a lonely and athletic student; and the Economy of the Animal Kingdom is one of those books which, by the sustained dignity of thinking, is an honor to the human race.... The Animal Kingdom is a book of wonderful merits. It was written with the highest end-to put sceince and the soul, long estranged from each other,