The American Reformed Cattle Doctor: Containing the necessary information for preserving the health and curing the diseases of oxen, cows, sheep, and swine, with a great variety of original recipes, and valuable information in reference to farm and dairy managementDadd, George H.
Science
The American Reformed Cattle Doctor: Containing the necessary information for preserving the health and curing the diseases of oxen, cows, sheep, and swine, with a great variety of original recipes, and valuable information in reference to farm and dairy management
Dadd, George H.
Veterinary medicine
great quantity of straw they were obliged to eat, in order to obtain
sufficient nourishment, and the injury sustained by the third stomach in
expressing the fluid parts of the masticated or ruminated mass, together
with the large quantity of water they drank, while kept on this dry
food, were the real causes of the miscarriage.
"A farmer at Chariton, out of a dairy of twenty-eight cows, had sixteen
slip their calves at different periods of gestation. The summer had been
very dry; they had been pastured in a muddy place, which was flooded by
the Seine. Here the cows were generally up to their knees in mud and
water. In 1789, all the cows in a village near Mantes miscarried. All
the lands in this place were so stiff as to be, for some time,
impervious to water; and as a vast quantity of rain fell that year, the
pastures were for a time completely inundated, on which account the
grass became bad. This proves that keeping cows on food that is
deficient in nutritive properties, and difficult of digestion, is one of
the principal causes of miscarriage." Mr. Youatt says, "It is supposed
that the sight of a slipped calf, or the smell of putrid animal
substances, are apt to produce warping. Some curious cases of abortion,
which are worthy of notice, happened in the dairy of a French farmer.
For thirty years his cows had been subject to abortion. His cow-house
was large and well ventilated; his cows were in apparent health; they
were fed like others in the village; they drank the same water; there
was nothing different in the posture; he had changed his servants many
times in the course of thirty years; he pulled down the barn and
cow-house, and built another, on a different plan; he even, agreeably to
superstition, took away the aborted calf through the window, that the
curse of future abortion might not be entailed on the cow that passed
over the same threshold. To make all sure, he had broken through the
wall at the end of the cow-house, and opened a new door. But still the
trouble continued. Several of his cows had died in the act of abortion,
and he had replaced them by others; many had been sold, and their
vacancies filled up. He was advised to make a thorough change. This had
never occurred to him; but at once he saw the propriety of the counsel.
He sold every beast, and the pest was stayed, and never appeared in his
new stock. This was owing, probably, to sympathetic influence: the
result of such influence is as fatal as the direst contagion."
My own opinion of this disease is, that it is one of nervous origin;
that there is a loss of equilibrium between the nerves of voluntary and
involuntary motion. The direct causes of this pathological state exist
in any thing that can derange the organs of digestion. Great sympathy is
known to exist between the organs of generation and the stomach: if the
latter be deranged, the former feels a corresponding influence, and the
sympathetic nerves are the media by which the change takes place.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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