History of Influenza. 63 



own experience leads me to the belief that it is 

 not. During the last ten years I have had up- 

 wards of one hundred cases of undoubted in- 

 fluenza, and have watched it very closely, yet up 

 to the present time I have never seen one single 

 clear case of the affected animal communicating 

 the distemper. I have had cases of young horses 

 in the farm yard all running together, drinking 

 out of the same trough, eating out of the same 

 manger; some of them have had influenza, and 

 others not. "We frequently see one or more 

 horses in a large stable affected, and the horse in 

 the stall next to the worst case perfectly healthy. 

 I must remind my readers that contagion, strictly 

 speaking, implies the capability of certain dis- 

 eases being produced by actual contact of the 

 healthy animal with some part of the one labour- 

 ing under disease, and not through the medium 

 of the atmosphere. On the other hand, infection 

 is the word used to denote the propagation of 

 maladies through the medium of the air, which 

 becomes charged with the contaminating principle 

 given off in the form of exhalations from the 

 diseased animal, and which excites the like 

 disease in those animals that are subject to its 

 influence, they being predisposed to take the 

 malady. Now I come to the nature of influenza. 

 Most influenzas have been noted for affecting 

 severely the mucous membranes of the air passages, 

 but in the epizootic of 1872, the most fatal year 

 in New York with only rare exceptions, nothing 

 of the kind occurred. Their phases varied in 

 several points of detail, but they had all many 



