THE LirN&quot;O PLAGUE. 



41 



unabated in 1851 and 1852. Every effort had been made by the distillers to arrest the 

 disorder -ventilation, fumigation, whitewashing, turning the cattle out for a period, the 

 placing of pigs in the stables, under the impression that they might destroy the putrid 

 materials supposed to engender the disease, and so on. 



It so happened that the son of the senior member of the first firm of distillers whose 

 cattle had been affected in 1836 had devoted himself to medicine. Dr. Willems studied 

 the lung disease with discrimination, but even so late as 1850 he had not fully made up 

 his mind as to the essentially contagious character of pleuropneumonia. Dieterichs had 

 attempted the inoculation of the disease in order to prove its contagious character, and had 

 failed. Vix repeated the experiments, and obtained results in the form of pneumonia ; a 

 pneumonia, says Dr. Willems,* due, in all probability, to purulent infection. The French 

 commission inoculated cows with the blood, nasal discharge, and excrementitious fluids, in 

 order to test the contagious properties of pleuropneumonia. Dr. Willems had, moreover, 

 observed that injiis father s stables there had been, since 1836, over 500 animals that 

 had suffered from pleuropneumonia, a considerable number of which had recovered, and 

 remained ever after free from the disease. Yvart, Lafosse, Verheyen, and P6try had made 

 similar observations. These facts led Dr. Willems to institute a series of experiments as 

 to the possibility of communicating the disease by inoculation, and the extent, if any, of 

 the immunity thus secured to cattle. 



Dr. Willems adopted the rational plan of performing experiments on animals of dif 

 ferent species. His first series was as follows : 



Dr. Willems observed that inoculations which were usually accidental in man were 

 unattended by ill-effects. 



Mcmoire sur la Peripnenninnie Epizootiqne An Gros Uo tail, par L. Willems, Docteur en Medicine a Hasselt, 19. 

 6 



