Raw Milk Near Santa Maria, California

Harold J. Harris’s 1945 Coronet article “Raw Milk Can Kill You” shaped American pasteurization law on a fictional epidemic and survey data the author knew was misleading.

Milton J. Rosenau’s 1912 public health synthesis covered milk composition, disease transmission, certified milk, pasteurization standards, and infant mortality across 309 pages and six editions.

Before pasteurization reached milk, it was applied to wine and beer. The chemist who first proposed heat-treating milk was Franz von Soxhlet, in Munich in 1886.

Imprisoned in Prussia for his role in the 1848 revolution, Abraham Jacobi arrived in New York in 1853 and spent the next six decades building the institutional foundations of American pediatrics and shaping the debate over how urban children should be fed.

Bavarian-born merchant and Macy’s co-owner Nathan Straus built a privately funded network of 297 pasteurized milk depots across 36 American cities between 1893 and 1920, accumulating the mortality data that drove mandatory pasteurization legislation across the United States.

Fairfield Dairy produced the world’s first certified milk in 1894, became the movement’s showcase, then its most public failure.