NINTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART X 
469 
the teats and udder are affected the application of carbolized vaseline, 
camphor ointment, or borated glycerin has given excellent results. If 
the symptoms of heart weakness are manifest, give digitalis, camphor, or 
alcohol, while excessive fever may be reduced with phenacetin. 
The complications that may follow the disease are usually the result 
of contaminating bacteria, and it is therefore desirable to have the ani- 
mals and their surroundings kept in as cleanly a condition as possible. 
The cattle should be fed on soft meal or grain and given a plentiful sup- 
ply of clean water. 
THE TUBERCULIN TEST. 
The tuberculin test, which is marvelously accurate in its indications, 
has been almost universally adopted for the detection of tuberculosis. 
Tuberculin is a drug prepared by sterilizing, filtering, and concentrating 
the liquids in which the tubercle bacillus has been allowed to vegetate. 
It contains the cooked products of the growth of these bacilli, but not the 
bacilli themselves. Consequently, when this substance is injected under 
the skin of an animal it is absolutely unable to produce the disease, 
cause abortion, or otherwise injure the animal. In case the inoected 
animal is normal there is no more effect upon the system than would be 
expected from the injection of sterile water. However, if the animal is 
tuberculous, a decided rise of temperature will follow the use of tuberculin. 
This substance, discovered by Koch, has the effect when injected into the 
tissues of a tuberculous animal of causing a decided rise in temperature, 
while it has no such effect upon animals free from the disease. The 
value of tuberculin for this purpose was tested during the years 1890 and 
1891 by Guttman, Roeckl and Schutz, Bang and Salomonsen, Lydtm, Johne 
and Siedamgrotzky, Nocard, and many others. It was at once recognized 
as a most remarkable and accurate method of detecting tuberculosis even 
in the early stages and when the disease had yet made but little progress. 
The tuberculin test came into existence through the most careful and 
thorough scientific experimentation. In practice it is applied by first 
taking the temperature of the animal to be tested, at intervals of about 
two hours, a sufficient number of times to establish the normal tempera- 
ture of the body under the ordinary conditions of life. The proper dose 
of tuberculin is then injected under the skin with a hypodermic syringe 
between 8 and 10 P.M. on the day of taking the prelimnary temperatures. 
On the following day the temperatures are taken every two hours, be- 
ginning at 6 A. M. and continuing until twenty hours following the in- 
jection if the fullest information is desired. From average temperatures 
calculated by De Schweinitz in 1896 of about 1,600 tests of tuberculous 
cows, it appears that in general rise of temperature begins from five and 
one-half to six hours after the tuberculin is injected, reaches its greatest 
height from the sixteenth to the twentieth hours, and then gradually de- 
clines, reaching the normal again by the twenty-eighth hour. 
As a result of this method an accurate diagnosis may be established 
in over 97 per cent of the cases tested. The relatively few failures in 
diagnoses are included among two classes of cattle. The first class con- 
tains those that are tuberculous, but which do not react either because 
