Title: Milk sterilizer

Identifier: Country Doctor Museum   (https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/14343)

Description: Arnold’s Steam Sterilizer, a milk sterilizer and pasteurizer, was a very common appliance during the late 1800s and early 1900s. New models were featured in the 1903 Sears, Roebuck and Co. Surgical Instruments and Physicians Supplies catalog and the June 1895 New York Medical Journal. Used sterilizers were routinely offered for sale in newspaper classifieds. During this time, doctors were concerned that typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and other diseases could be spread through the consumption of contaminated milk. This sterilizer could destroy the germs that caused these diseases. The Arnold Steam Sterilizer, manufactured by Wilmot, Castle & Company, was patented in 1882 and is made of tin and copper. The ability to sterilize milk was particularly important to the health of infants and children; ads billed the Arnold sterilizer as the best way to sterilize cow’s milk, making it “the best known substitute for mother’s milk.”