The Nodular Venereal Disease 305 



would call such heifer calves sound, but, if two or three 

 typical nodules do not indicate the nodular venereal dis- 

 ease, it would be difficult to understand how two hundred 

 or three hundred nodules can assure us of the existence of 

 the malady. In other words, Ostertag describes, not the be- 

 ginning of the disease, but an "explosion" of the existing 

 malady under profound irritation. It is not strange that 

 virulent streptococci induced the symptoms he describes, nor 

 that he was able to recover from his experimental animals 

 pure cultures of the microorganism. 



The disease is so universal that an investigator is not 

 warranted in assuming that a given heifer or heifer calf is 

 not affected. Calves born during severe outbreaks are fre- 

 quently so badly diseased that they die. Therefore, it is not 

 unreasonable to assume that in some cases at least calves 

 are born with the nodular venereal disease. Extended ob- 

 servations upon the genital organs of veal calves upon the 

 killing floors of abattoirs show that almost all of them de- 

 velop clearly and positively the symptoms of the disease at 

 a very early age, usually within sixty days after birth. It 

 is not known, however, when the infection really became 

 established, but only when the clinical evidences became 

 visible to the naked eye. Recent investigations indicate 

 that, assuming that the calf is sound when born, which is 

 not the general rule, it remains free from the nodular ve- 

 nereal disease if fed upon boiled milk. Such being the 

 case, it would appear that the infection may enter the or- 

 gans of new-born calves with the first milk consumed, and 

 that the appearance of visible lesions in the genital tract 

 merely marks the duration of time between the ingestion of 

 the infection and the establishment of the clinical evidences 

 of its presence. Accordingly, any calf which may be se- 

 lected for experimental purposes, with a view to determin- 

 ing the transmissibility of the nodular venereal disease or 

 the power of any known organism to cause it, can scarcely 

 be accepted as sound, because it is not known how thor- 

 oughly the calf is already infected and upon what day the 

 evidence of such infection would ordinarily appear in the 



