Distillery Dairies, Pasteurization,
Certified Raw Milk and the Milk Cure
“Raw
milk cures many diseases.” [viii]
- J.E. Crewe, MD, The Mayo Foundation, January,
1929
The War of 1812 with England resulted
in the permanent cutting off of the whiskey supply
America procured from the British West Indies.
As a result, the domestic liquor industry was
born, and by 1814, grain distilleries began to
spring up in the cities as well as the country.
Distillery owners then began housing cows next
to the distilleries and feeding hot slop, the
waste product of whiskey making, directly to the
animals as it poured off the stills. Thus was
born the slop or swill milk system.
Slop is of little value in fattening cattle; it
is unnatural food for them, and makes them diseased
and emaciated. But when slop was plentifully supplied,
cows yielded an abundance of milk. Diseased cows
were milked in an unsanitary manner. The individuals
doing the milking were often dirty, sick or both.
Milk pails and other equipment were usually dirty.
Such milk sometimes led to disease. By the last
decade of the nineteenth century, a growing number
of influential people throughout the country believed
that American cities had a milk problem.
Pasteurization, begun around 1900, was a solution
of sorts. The other was the certified raw milk
movement, which insisted on clean, fresh milk
from healthy, grassfed animals. Henry Coit, a
medical doctor, was the founder of the first Medical
Milk Commission and the certified milk movement.
Physicians in cities throughout the country considered
raw milk essential in the treatment of their patients;
they worked together to certify dairies for the
production of clean raw milk. This resulted in
the availability of safe raw milk from regulated
dairies. Initially, from around 1890 to 1910,
the movements for certified raw milk and pasteurization
coexisted and in many ways even complemented one
another. From about 1910 until the 1940s, an uneasy
truce existed. Certified raw milk was available
for those who wanted it, while the influence of
the pasteurization lobby saw to it that most states
and municipalities adopted regulations that required
all milk other than certified milk be pasteurized.
The end of this truce (detailed below)has led
to the subsequent outlawing of all retail sales
of raw milk in most states and even of on-farm
sales in many.
Many people today find it surprising that support
of raw milk among physicians was widespread in
the first half of the twentieth century. The use
of raw milk as a treatment of chronic disease
has a rich and well-documented history. In 1929,
J. E. Crewe, MD, one of the founders of the Mayo
Foundation, the forerunner of the Mayo Clinic
in Rochester, Minnesota, published an article
entitled “Raw Milk Cures Many Diseases.”
Here are excerpts from Dr. Crewe’s account
of his experience with raw milk:
“For fifteen years the writer has employed
the certified milk treatment in various diseases
and during the past ten he had a small sanitarium
devoted principally to this treatment. The results
obtained in various types of disease have been
so uniformly excellent that one’s conception
of disease and its alleviation is necessarily
changed.” [ix]
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