I found the general period of incubation from
five to six weeks. I have taken the greatest pains with the byres where
the infected cattle stood, having the wood-work taken out, the roofs
and greeps carefully scraped and washed with soap and warm water,
lime-water, and afterwards with chloride of lime; and yet, after all
this labour, I have seen the disease break out again and again. After
repeated outbreaks, I not only removed the wood-work, but the whole of
the stones in the stalls and greeps, and buried them. I had the roofs
and stone mangers, &c., carefully scraped, and washed with soap and
warm water, and afterwards with chloride of lime. They were then
closely painted, and lastly coal-tarred; but it was only after five or
six months' perseverance that I got clear of it. Having heard a report
that a cow belonging to my cousin, Mr M'Combie, editor of the 'Free
Press,' was labouring under pleuro-pneumonia, I went to see her. Mr
Sorely, veterinary surgeon, was in attendance. As there had been no
disease in the neighbourhood for five years, I was unwilling to credit
the report. But a more marked case I have never witnessed; and the
_post-mortem_ examination showed all the symptoms of the fell
disease. Mr Sorely, Mr M'Combie's overseer, and I, all agreed that as a
wood dividing-partition had been allowed to remain since the time of
the previous infection, and the cow was seen chewing pieces of the wood
that had got rotted at the base, the wood had retained the poison, and
the cow had been infected from the chewing of it. The breath is the
cause of the infection when cattle are housed together and the disease
introduced. It generally attacks the animals standing at the walls
first. The breath is driven by different currents through the building
to the walls, where it is stopped; it rebounds, and hence the beasts at
the walls generally fall the first victims--so, at least, I have found
it in my experience. I had forty beasts divided by a stone-and-lime
mid-wall to the level of the side-walls; up to the roof there was a
strong and close division of wood. Unfortunately there had been a small
aperture about two feet square left open. I made an observation to the
cattleman that I should not be at all surprised if the disease came
from the infected byre through the opening to the byre where the cattle
were sound. The first or second day thereafter the animal standing
below the aperture was seized, and got down in the disease.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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