When patients object to the taste of milk alone, they can be often induced to take large quantities by using it in various combinations or preparations, or by disguising its taste. Many patients when ordered a milk diet positively assert that they cannot endure the taste of milk; that it always nauseates them, or that it makes them bilious and constipated, and excites headache. They say, perhaps, that they have faithfully tried to drink it before, and never could tolerate it; but scarcely any one person has ever tried all the different methods of taking milk, and it does not follow that because it once disagreed several years before it will again. The objection to the taste can always be overcome by a little tact and perseverance, and there are very few persons who cannot assimilate a more or less exclusive milk diet for a few days or weeks if the milk is properly given, and, if necessary, artificially digested for them. Their previous unhappy experience is probably due to having taken a large dose of undiluted rich milk which promptly coagulated, soured, and was rejected, exciting all the distaste which they have treasured against it.

When, as in some febrile cases or in acute Bright's disease, a milk diet is imperative, such patients should begin with but a teaspoonful or two at a time, repeating it once in ten or fifteen minutes. If milk is only taken slowly enough into the stomach, and mingled on the way with saliva, like other food - eaten rather than drunk - it is impossible for it to form the large tough curds that it does when poured down by the tumblerful, like a dose of salts. By degrees the patient will be convinced of his ability to retain it, and then the dosage may be increased, making such further changes in the preparation of it as occasion demands.

In all cases where there is a tendency for milk to disagree it is better to give it alone to the patient, by which means various expedients used to increase its digestibility may be better tested. Patients will often digest both milk and beef broth or milk and whisky when these substances are given at alternating intervals of one or two hours, whereas if taken in conjunction they give rise to dyspepsia.

The methods of altering milk to suit the taste or digestive requirements are so numerous that it will be found convenient to group them under the following headings, although the classifications are somewhat arbitrary and here and there may overlap:

I. Methods of altering the taste of milk.

II. Methods of improving the digestibility of milk.

III. Methods of predigestion.

IV. Methods of sterilisation and preservation.

The first method beguiles the patient into taking larger quantities of milk without tiring of it; the second aims at preventing the formation in the stomach of dense tough coagulae which are difficult of solution and digestion by an enfeebled gastric juice; the third, by artificial digestion, relieves a weak stomach of much labour; the fourth prevents the accession of poisonous germs which would excite malfermentation and indigestion.