the penitentiary. An unexpected freak, however, was
the appearance of fifteen or twenty cases in another state institution
farther down on the same stream, which did not draw its water-supply
from the flume, but from deep wells of tested purity. This was a puzzle,
until it was found that, owing to a fall in the wells, the water from
the flume had been used for sprinkling and washing purposes in the
institution, being allowed to run through the water-pipes only at night,
while the well-water was used in the daytime. This was enough to
contaminate the pipes, and a small epidemic began, which promptly
stopped as soon as the cause was suspected and the flume-water no longer
used.

This last instance is peculiarly interesting, as illustrating how
typhoid infection gets into milk, the second--though at a long
interval--most frequent means of its spread. It does not come from the
cow, for, fortunately, none of the domestic animals, with the possible
exception of the cat, is subject to typhoid. Nor is it possible that
cattle, drinking foul and even infected water, can transmit the bacillus
in their milk. That superstition was exploded long ago. Every epidemic
of typhoid spread by milk--and there are scores of them now on
record--can be traced to the handling of the milk by persons suffering
from mild forms of typhoid, or engaged in waiting upon members of the
family who are ill of the disease, or the dilution of milk with infected
water, or even, almost incredible as it may seem, to such slight
contamination as washing the cans with infected water.

Health officers now watch like hawks for the appearance of any case of
typhoid among or in the families of dairymen. The New York City Board of
Health, for instance, requires the weekly filing of a certificate from
the family physician of all dairymen that no such cases exist. And the
more intelligent dairymen keep a vigilant eye upon any appearance of
illness accompanied by fever among their employees, some that I have
known even keeping a fever thermometer in the barn for the purpose of
testing every suspicious case. How effective such precautions can be
made may be illustrated by the fact that, in the past five years, there
has not been a single epidemic of typhoid traceable to milk in Greater
New York, even with its inadequate corps of ten inspectors, and the six
states they have to cover. The moment a single case of typhoid appears,
the dairy or milkman supplying that custome