The Use of Boiled Milk in Infant Feeding and Elsewhere

In our progress upward, whether in religion, in economics or in the science and art of infant feeding, we advance by epochs, and often the gospel of one epoch becomes the heresy of the next, only to become again the gospel in the light of some newer truth. In the first flush of bacteriologic activity, the idea that infantile diarrheas were infectious and that milk carried pathogenic micro-organisms naturally led to sterilization of the baby's milk by heating it. Then scurvy intruded itself, and pasteurization at lower heat, yet high and long enough to destroy pathogenic germs while influencing the milk less, took its place. But pasteurization was still held as only less objectionable, and for the same reasons, than sterilization, and offered serious technical difficulties. There naturally followed a demand for a milk clean and fresh and nearly enough germ free to be safe without heating. By analogy with