Cattle and Their Diseases: Embracing Their History and Breeds, Crossing and Breeding, and Feeding and Management; with the Diseases to Which They Are Subject, and the Remedies Best Adapted to Their CureJennings, Robert
Science
Cattle and Their Diseases: Embracing Their History and Breeds, Crossing and Breeding, and Feeding and Management; with the Diseases to Which They Are Subject, and the Remedies Best Adapted to Their Cure
Jennings, Robert
Cattle -- Diseases
Case 10.--Killed. Hair looked badly; but the cow, it was said, ate, and
appeared well. This case, however, occurred in a herd, of which no
reliable information, in detail, could be procured.
Autopsy.--Base of lung hardened, adherent to diaphragm; containing a
cyst, in which was a lump, of the size of a quart measure, but little
pus. This lump had air-tubes running through it, which were not yet cut
off by suppuration; and in one place, the cyst was perforated by a
bronchial tube, letting in the external air to the lump, which was
undergoing disorganization, and swelling badly. When cut into, it did
not present the red, mottled, organized appearance of those cases with
air-tight cysts.
Quite a number of other cases were examined, but these ten present all
the different phases. One or two cases are needed of an early stage of
the disease, to settle the point, whether, in all cases, the primary
disease is lung fever, and the pleurisy a continuation, merely, of the
primary disease; together with some six or eight cases, during five,
six, seven, eight months from attack, and so on till entire, final
recovery. Some cases were sick almost a year since, and are now
apparently quite well; perhaps all the lump and pus are not yet gone.
Many practitioners think that no severe case will ever recover, and some
think that none ever get entirely well. Others, however, can see no
reason why, as a general rule, all single cases should not recover, and
all double cases die.
The disease was the most fatal in Mr. Chenery's (the original) herd,
although it was the best-fed and the warmest-stabled. He attributed the
fatality, in part, to a want of sufficient ventilation. The other herds,
in which all the fatal cases occurred in two hours, consisted,
originally, one of forty-eight head, of which thirteen died, or were
killed, to prevent certain death; of twenty-three head, of which seven
died; of twenty-two head, of which eight died; of twenty-two head, of
which eight also died; and of twenty-one head, of which four died. A
little less than thirty per cent., therefore, of these herds died.
This estimate excludes the calves. Most of the cows which had not calved
before being attacked, lost their calves prematurely. The probable time
of incubation, as deduced from those Massachusetts cases, is from two to
three weeks; of propagation, about the same time; the acute stage of the
disease lasting about three weeks.
The author's attention was first directed to this disease, upon its
appearance in Camden and Gloucester counties, New Jersey, in the year
1859, at about the same time it made its advent in Massachusetts. The
singularity of this coincidence inclined him for the time to regard the
disease as an epizooetic--having its origin in some peculiar condition of
the atmosphere--rather than as a contagious, or infectious disease,
which position was at that time assumed by him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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