( 197 ) 



IX. — Report on Sfeppe Murrain or Rinderpest. JBy James 

 Beart Simoxds, Professor of Cattle Pathology in the Royal 

 Veterinary College. 



Epizootic diseases, and particularly those that have prevailed 

 among cattle and sheep, have in all ages excited much attention 

 and taxed the pen of the faithful historian, as well as the culti- 

 vator of the science of medicine, to record their successive out- 

 breaks and devastating effects. It is not, however, our intention 

 in this report to follow in a succinct manner the account which 

 has been given of these diseases, extending, as it does, from the 

 period of the infliction of " a grievous murrain " of " boils and 

 blains " on the cattle of Egypt, as a Divine punishment to the 

 obdurate Pharaoh down to our own times, but to record the result 

 of our investigations into the nature and consequences of the 

 disease which recently seemed to threaten to invade our shores. 

 Whether " the murrain " that fell upon the cattle of the Egyptians 

 has been permitted, in an altered or mitigated form, to remain as 

 a scourge to succeeding nations, is a problem which cannot, we 

 opine, be satisfactorily solved by any supposed resemblance 

 which our present cattle-plagues may bear to the one described 

 by the Sacred historian. This fearful and miraculous visitation 

 must be regarded as the chief of these scourges, however destruc- 

 tive they may since have been. In the times of the ancient Greeks 

 and Romans these outbreaks were not unfrequent, and numerous 

 records of them are left by Homer, Plutarch, Virgil, and others. 

 Columella, at about the commencement of the Christian era, speaks 

 of them as contagious diseases ; and Vegetius, in the fourth cen- 

 tury, treats largely of their contagious properties, and recommends 

 that the diseased animals should, " with all diligence and care, be 

 separated from the herd, and put apart by themselves." Fra- 

 castorius and Weierus also describe the sad effects of one of these 

 "visitations in 810, when it is said that the greater part of the cattle 

 perished throughout the Emperor Charlemagne's dominions. 



The first recorded instance, however, which Ave find of the cattle 

 in England being affected by one of this class of diseases, is in 

 1713-14, at which period an epizootic, that for a few years pre- 

 viously had prevailed in several Continental states, suddenly 

 broke out here, and swept off many of our cattle. No account 

 sufficiently explicit upon the nature and progress of the disease 

 has been handed down to us, so that it is difficult to speak with 

 certainty of its true characters, and much more either of its dura- 

 tion or the amount of loss which the country sustained. It ap- 

 pears, however, that the malady possessed many of the features 

 of Eczema epizootica, now common in this country, and it may 

 possibly have been identical with this disease. The infection 



VOL. XVIII. P 



