A similar exemption from any evil effect following the consumption of diseased flesh is recorded by Professor Brucke, of Vienna.
Not many years since the cattle of a locality in Bohemia, being attacked by rinderpest, were ordered by the Government to be slaughtered, after which they were buried. The poor people dug up the diseased carcases, cooked the meat, and ate it, with no injurious result.
Parent Duchâtelet cites a case where the flesh of seven cows attacked with rabies was eaten without injury; and Letheby states that pigs with scarlet fever and spotted typhus have been used for food with equally harmless results. The flesh of sheep with smallpox had been found to produce vomiting and diarrhœa, sometimes accompanied with fever.
One obvious suggestion of the immunity from disease recorded in part of the cases above given is that the injurious properties of the flesh had been destroyed by the heat to which it had been subjected in the process of cooking, combined with the antiseptic and protective power of the gastric juice. The subject, however, has not been sufficiently examined to warrant the conclusion that every kind of unsound meat may be rendered innocuous by culinary means.
But even were this so the idea of partaking of meat which had once been unsound, from whatever cause, and, as in the instances above quoted, with the pustules of smallpox, the spots generated by typhus, and the rash of scarlet fever upon it, becomes unspeakably repulsive and revolting. But we must not be misled because of the difficulty of reconciling the contradictory statements above given, nor by the evidence some of them appear to afford as to the innocuous character of diseased meat, since it is just possible that closer and more
prolonged observation of the facts may have led to different conclusions. Thus, for example, pork, infested with that formidable entozoon, the Trichina spiralis, had been partaken of for years, under the impression that it was a perfectly healthy food, until Dr Zencker, of Dresden, discovered that the parasite was the cause of a frightful disease, which he called Trichinosis, and which had hitherto baffled all attempts to find out its origin. Dr Letheby, writing on this subject, says: “I have often had occasion to investigate cases of mysterious disease, which had undoubtedly been caused by unsound meat. One of these, of more than ordinary interest, occurred in the month of November, 1860. The history of it is this:—A forequarter of cow-beef was purchased in Newgate Market by a sausage-maker who lived in Kingsland, and who immediately converted it into sausage-meat. Sixty-six persons were known to have eaten of that meat, and sixty-four of them were attacked with sickness, diarrhœa, and great prostration of vital powers. One of them died; and at the request of the coroner I made a searching inquiry into the matter, and I ascertained that the meat was diseased, and that it, and it alone, had been the cause of all the mischief.”[29]
[29] Letheby, ‘Lectures on Food,’ Longman and Co.
Here are two instances in which but for subsequent investigation the evil effects narrated would not have been debited to diseased meat, but to some other cause.
“One of the principal and by far the most prolific sources of food-poisoning is the sausage, the eating of which, in Germany more particularly, has caused the death of a number of persons.
The sausages in which these poisonous qualities occasionally develop themselves are the large kinds made in Wurtemburg, in which district alone they have caused the deaths of more than 150 out of 400 persons during the last fifty years. The poisonous character of the sausage is said to develop itself generally in the spring, when it becomes musty, and also soft in the interior. It is then found to be acid to test paper, and to have a very disagreeable and tainted flavour.