CONGENITAL GOITRE. 153 



and I now regret that I have not experimented more fully in 

 order to ascertain the precise nature of the malady. 



I have learned some new facts in relation to it. Two or 

 three lambs which I saw, in 1862, decidedly affected by it, 

 but not as weak or as attenuated in the bony structures as 

 usual, very rapidly threw off all appearance of the goitrous 

 enlargement of the glands ; and they thenceforth grew about 

 as rapidly and appeared about as strong as ordinary lambs. 

 I saw another such case in 1863. I made no memorandum of 

 the facts at the time, but my impression is that in all these 

 instances the enlargement of the thyroid glands disappeared 

 within the space of as short a period as a fortnight. An 

 intelligent friend informed me that having some goitrous 

 lambs in his flock, last spring, he placed a bandage round the 

 neck of each over the thyroid glands, and wet it a few times 

 a day with camphor (dissolved in alcohol.) The swelling, he 

 thinks, disappeared in less time than a fortnight. Mr. Daniel 

 Kelly, Jr., of Wheaton, Illinois, who is represented to be a 

 highly successful flock-master, states in an article in the Rural 

 New-Yorker, that the disease is frequent among his lambs; 

 that he binds a woolen cloth about their necks and keeps it 

 wet " with spirits of camphor or the tincture of iodine " 

 that " there is little, if any, difference in the effectiveness of 

 these tinctures" that. either "is sure to cure them."* 



These facts would seem to add to the number of anomalous 

 features of the malady, when they are compared with those 

 which appear in the human subject of goitre, if indeed it is 

 the same malady ;f and they suggest some doubts of the latter 

 fact. But fortunately no question affecting the practical 

 treatment of the disease is to be settled by the determination 

 of that identity. It would now seem that mere evaporants 

 and external stimulants rapidly control it. Should the fact 

 be found otherwise, in the case of a lamb worth saving, the 

 application of iodine would undoubtedly remove the glandular 



* I should rather say the article is published under the head of Western Editorial 

 Notes. Mr. C. D. Bragdon giving the statements as he received them from Mr. Kelly. 



t I was the first public writer, so far as I know, who classified the " swelled 

 neck " of lambs as goitre or bronchocele, (in Sheep Husbandry in the South,) 

 though conscious then that some of its conditions were very different from those 

 generally exhibited in the human subject of that disease. These exceptional condi- 

 tions were : 1. That it was so often congenital ; 2. That it so frequently affected the 

 progeny of parents that were not themselves subjects of the disease or known ever 

 to have been subjects of it ; and 3. That it should so often affect young animals, 

 and so comparatively rarely affect grown ones. The additional anomalies disclosed 

 by the facts stated in the text (if they are facts,) are the following : 4. The very sudden 

 and spontaneous disappearance of the supposed goitrous enlargement. 5. Its sudden 

 disappearance on the application of camphor, and the apparent equal power possessed 

 by camphor and iodine to cause its absorption. 



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