Reports on the diseases of cattle in the United States, made to the Commissioner of Agriculture, with accompanying documents / Department of Agriculture.

  • United States. Department of Agriculture.
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Reports on the diseases of cattle in the United States, made to the Commissioner of Agriculture, with accompanying documents / Department of Agriculture. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Others; hints which no doubt demonstrate that which few will question— that indmonaiy disorders have existed throughout all time. The evidence we need is that definite record of outbreaks of a malady marked by the leading characteristics of the lung plague. We have to skip the age of pure qiiackery, when nothing but the unsatisfactory pre- scriptions of ignorant pretenders in veterinary medicine were handed down as valuable additions to human knowledge. A purpose is served, however, by referring to these dark ages, when, in their blindness, men sought to arrest the unrelenting torrents of fierce contagions by pills, draughts, charms, and iucantatioas. It makes one blush for the errors and superstitions which, iu the Old World and the Hew, prevail up to the present hour. For seven and twenty years, at least, my countrymen have, in the main, favored nothing but quackery in this respect just as much as continental nations that suffered in ignorance did in the seven- teen hundred years succeeding the birth of Christ. So late as 1865 the outbreak of a virident cattle plague iu England developed iu its train the compounders of drugs and filth and the believers in the treatment of isolated cases of a plague; of a plague, indeed, which advances in dii‘ect ratio to the delay in extinguishing its virulent poison, and the rapidity of whose spread may be likened to that of the confluent moun- taiu waters that form inland seas and navigable streams. Let the peo- ple learn from the ancient history of veterinary medicine, as they can learn from recent events, that to dam the Mississippi and annihilate its waters is quite as easy a process as attempting to save a country from incalculable loss by the medical treatment of isolated cases of a sx>eciflc and contagious cattle plague. That is the lesson which the want of knowledge regarding • the lung plague in the first seventeen hundred years of the Christian era impresses upon us to-day. The msdom of that conclusion may be demonstrated by tracing up the progress of the malady from 1693 to 1869. The first notice, that may be declared less imsatisfactory than all pre- ceding ones, of the ravages produced by an epizootic bovine pleuro- pneumonia, we owe to Yalentini.* There is a fact of great importance in relation to the history and progress of pleuro pneumonia that writers riting witli Ijiit a small selection of looks from my libx’ary, I am only in a position to give a second-hand reference to Valentini’s observations, and their importance induces me to reprodneeHensiuger’s quotation: “Pnecedente liycnie pliivioso, sed in tine geli- dissimo, snb primo vere et insolitns aeris fervor iugruehat, qualis et per omnemsustatis cnrsnrn ohservahatur; qnxe mutatio snhitanea non potorat non inasqual'em et prmter- natnralem humomm et sj)intunm motnni cansarc, quem et liominnm et hrntorum strages inseenta est. Boves sane et Amccic catervatiiu succumhehant, enjus rei causa statmjhatiir inter alia ros corrosivus, lintcii macnlis ])lus minns Intcis cons])nrcans, et omriino corrodens. Ex carnificum ohservationc i)leriim([uo phtliisi pnlmonali nccahan- tnr, ad qriam sine dnhio lianstns frigidte coi>iosior post a;stnni intensissimuiu mtiltnm contrihiiere poterat. Hominihus pradcr dysenteriam et fehres maligna snh (inem Jiniii et initiiim Angiisti hie locfjnim infeiisa erat fehris (|mc(1am intermittcMis, ut i)Iiirimum tertiana.” f.phem. Nat. Ciir. et Hydeiiliam. o])p. ed Geneva, 1, p. 27G—quoted in Ko- cherches de I'athologie Compardc—Cased, IHuh.