THE LUNG PLAGUE. 11 



others; liints wliicli no doubt demoustrate that wliicli tew will question — 

 that ijulnionary disorders have existed throughout all time. 



The evidence we need is that definite record of outbreaks of a malady 

 marked by the leading characteristics of the lung plague. We have to 

 skip the age of pure quackerj-, when nothing but the unsatisfactory pre- 

 scriptions of ignorant pretenders in veterinary medicine were handed 

 down as valuable additions to human knowledge. A purpose is served, 

 however, by referring to these dark ages, when, in their blindness, men 

 sought to arrest the unrelenting torrents of fierce contagious by pills, 

 draughts, charms, and incantatio as. It makes one blush for the errors 

 and superstitions Avhich, in the Old World and the Kew, prevail up to 

 the xu'csent hour. For seven and twenty years, at least, my countrymen 

 have, in the main, favored nothing but quackery in this respect just as 

 much as continental nations that suffered in ignorance did in the seven- 

 teen hundred years succeeding the birth of Christ. So late as 18G5 the 

 outbreak of a virulent cattle plague in England developed in its train 

 the compounders of drugs and filth and the believers in the treatment 

 of isolated cases of a plague; of a plague, indeed, which advances in 

 direct ratio to the delay in extinguishing its virulent poison, and the 

 rapidity of whose spread may be likened to that of the confluent moun- 

 tain waters that form inland seas and navigable streams. Let the peo- 

 ple learn from the ancient history of veterinary medicine, as they can 

 learn from recent events, that to dam the Mississippi and annihilate its 

 waters is quite as easy a process as attempting to save a country from 

 incalculable loss by the medical treatment of isolated cases of a si^ecific 

 and contagious cattle x)lague. 



That is the lesson which the want of knowledge regarding the lung 

 IDlague in the first seventeen hundred years of the Christian era impresses 

 upon us to-day. The wisdom of that conclusion may be demonstrated 

 by tracing up the progress of the malady from 1G03 to 1869. 



The first notice, that may be declared less im satisfactory than all pre- 

 ceding ones, of the ravages produced by an epizootic bovine pleuro- 

 pneumonia, we owe to Yalentini.* There is a fact of great importance 

 in relation to the history and i)rogress of pleuropneumonia that writers 



* Writing with l)ut a small selection of books from my lil)rary, I am only in a position 

 to give a second-hand reference to Valentiui's observations, and their importance induces 

 me to reprodnce Hensiuger's quotation: "Pnecedente hyeme pluvioso, sed in line geli- 

 dissimo, sub primo vere et insolitus aeris fervor ingruebat, qualis et iwv omnem a'statis 

 cursum observabatur ; quie mutatio subitanea nou potcrat uou iutequalem et pra>ter- 

 naturalem humorum et siiirituum motum causare, quem et hominum et brutoruni 

 strages insecuta est. Boves sane et vacciB catervatim succumbebant, cujus rei causa 

 statucbatur inter alia ros cotTOsivus, lintea maculis plus minus lutois conspurcans, et 

 omnino corrodcns. Ex carnilicumoliscrvatione plcrunu[iie plitliisi pulmonali ii('("i))an- 

 tur, ad <iuam sine dubio haustus frigidiie copiosior post icstum iuteusissiniuui niiiltum 

 contribucre potcrat. n()niinil)us ])r;cter dyscntcriani ct febrcs maligna sub linciii .Iimii 

 et initium Angusti liic locorum infciisa erat febris qua'dam intermittens, ut ])hirimum 

 tcrtiana." Ephem. Nat. Cui". et Sydeiduim. opp. ed Geneva, 1, ji. 276 — quoted in Ee- 

 cherches de Pathologic Comi)aree — Cassel, 1853. 



