1864. | Sanatory Science. 165 
1862 he was requested by Mr. Simon to prepare a special report, which 
is included in the volume. The result of the very elaborate inquiries 
which Mr. Gamgee has conducted has been to show that disease has 
prevailed during the last few years, and still prevails very extensively, 
amongst horned cattle, sheep, and swine, and that the diseased animals 
are largely employed as human food. The diseases with which these 
animals are affected may conveniently be classed under three heads :— 
Ist, Contagious Fevers ; 2nd, Anthracic and Anthracoid Disorders ; 
ord, Parasites. The chief forms of the contagious fevers are those 
which are more commonly known as the pleuro-pneumonia, or lung 
disease, of horned cattle, and the aphthous fever, murrain, or foot and 
mouth disease, which attacks not only horned cattle but also sheep and 
swine. Small-pox also sometimes attacks sheep, and not many months 
ago an outbreak of it excited much alarmin Wiltshire. What influence 
then will the consumption of the flesh of animals so diseased have 
upon those consuming it ? Repulsive though it may be to our notions 
to eat the flesh of animals which have died of such disorders, and 
though we may be inclined on @ priori grounds to suppose it might 
generate disease in those who eat it, yet more extended investigations 
must be made before we can state absolutely what the disorders are 
which it induces in the human frame. 
The anthracie and anthracoid diseases are, it is said, frequently 
accompanied with peculiar changes, in some respects putrefactive, 
in the blood ; erysipelatious and carbuncular affections also sometimes 
occur, and the body of the animal may develope in itself a specific 
morbid poison, which, by inoculation, can be communicated to cther 
animals, and cases have been recorded in which disease and even 
death in man have followed the use of cooked meat derived from 
animals suffering from anthrax. 
The parasitic diseases of the domestic animals are both numerous 
and important. The so-called “ measles” of the pig is nothing more 
than the diffusion of a parasite, the cysticercus cellulose, through the 
muscular system of the animal; the “sturdy” of the sheep is due to 
the development of the ccenurus cerebralis in the brain ; the ‘“‘ rot” of 
sheep to the production of flukes, a species of distoma, in the liver ; 
a form of lung-disease is produced by the development in those 
organs of different kinds of strongylus ;* and the muscular system may 
be infested by multitudes of a minute microscopic worm, the trichina 
spiralis. Now, there can be no question that meat affected with one 
or other of the above parasites may become the source of disease in man. 
Observations on this head have been so multiplied that this statement 
may be made in the most positive manner. That most troublesome 
and annoying of all the worms infesting the human bowel, viz. the 
tapeworm, has been shown by the researches of Von Siebold and 
Kiichenmeister to be derived from eating the flesh of “measly” 
pork, the cysticercus cellulose of the pig becoming developed into 
the tenia solium of the human bowel: and by the ingestion of the 
ccenurus cerebralis, another form of tenia, the tenia ccenurus is pro- 
duced. But perhaps the most curious of all these parasites is the 
* A nematoid worm. 
