166 DISEASES OF SWINE AND OTHER ANIMALS. 



Contagious diseases are produced either by a virus capable of causing 

 them by inoculation, as in small-pox, or by miasma proceedmg from the 

 sick, as in the plague, measles, and scarlet fever. No two physicians 

 agree as to which diseases are contagious and which are not. The con- 

 tagia of the plague and typhus, especially the latter, is denied by many. 

 It seems probable that a disease may be contagious under certain cir- 

 cumstances and not so under others. That is, a case of ephemeral fever, 

 fever of acclimation, the mildest form of fever known to the medical 

 profession, arising from cold superinduced by sudden and decided 

 climatic alternations, may, if the patient is kept in a close, foul condi- 

 tion, be converted into a disease capable of i)roducing emanations which 

 will reproduce a similar disease in those exposed to them, and with 

 great virulence. Ephemeral or camp fever is almost sure to manifest 

 itself in cases where large bodies of healthy men are brought into camp 

 sfrom different sections of the country. This is equalJy apt to be the 

 case when you bring together healthy young animals from dilferent 

 parts of a country, even if from different parts of the same county. We 

 know this much; but how much this materia morM weighs, what its 

 color is, how it smells, are to us secrets yet hidden from our view. We 

 know that if a man has fever and it intermits he becomes cold and 

 shakes; we say he has " intermittent fever," "chills and fever," "ague 

 and fever," and we know if he has a long continuance of this kind of 

 fever, one of the organs oi. his system (the spleen) is apt to become 

 enlarged, and this is about all we really do know as yet, because no one 

 has seen, weighed, or smelled the peculiar miasma which causes inter- 

 mittent fever. 



I noticed two facts which threw important light upon this subject of 

 hog-cholera in this Piedmont country, viz., that recently the larger por- 

 tion of the sick hogs were under twelve months of age (shoats), and the 

 larger portion of them were taken sick while eating the corn after cattle 

 which were being fattened for market. The i^opular name given this 

 disease is, as I have before said, a palpable misnomer. If I am correct 

 in my diagnosis — and I think I am — it is Botlieln^ or Dutch measles, and 

 should beclassed with the exanthemata, along with erythema, erysipe- 

 las, rubeola (measles), roseola, scarlatina, nettle-rash, and the artifi- 

 cial exanthemata. The young hogs being mostly the ones affected, 

 strengthens the hypothesis of its being an eruptive fever. As far back 

 as 1852 1 recorded the fact that I considered epidemic tonsilitis (Rotheln) 

 as the most frequent epidemic disease to which Piedmont, Va., was lia- 

 ble, and that this arose from the moist and variable character of the 

 climate. I have since seen nothing to make me change this opinion, 

 but much to strengthen and confirm me in this theory. Horses, hogs, 

 cattle, and sheep are as susceptible to disease from exposure to cold, 

 rainy weather, and to sudden climatic alternations, as the human family; 

 probably more so. They suffer from exposure to cold as.casilj-^, and are 

 as much given to catarrh or cold as the human race. 



A disease pecidiarly liable to bo felt by the young of both the human 

 and animal race, yet no age, sex, or color affords any certain protection 

 from this epidemic disease, called Eotheln, or German measles. In my 

 opinion, then, this so-called cholera is no cholera at all — has not a single 

 choleroid symptom, as the bowels are invariably constipated until moved 

 by medicines, or give way under the last throes of speedy dissolution ; 

 but that it is rather a fever prevailing in an endemic ajul epidemic form, 

 subject to all the natural laws governing fevers, from its inception to 

 its termination, in restoration or in death, and more closely resembling 

 scarlatina and scarlet fever than any other of the varieties of the auginose 



