406 IXFLAMMATIOXS. 



PHTHISIS, OR CONSUMPTION. 



This disease, though very commonly fatal among highly-bred 

 animals, has not been noticed by the writers on the diseases of the 

 dog in this country, neither Blain, Youatt, nor Mayhew making 

 the slightest allusion to it. I have, however, seen so many cases 

 of tubercular disease in the dog, that I cannot doubt its existence 

 as an ordinary affection, and, since I know that hundreds die 

 every year from it, I cannot pass it over without notice. I have 

 seen the tubercules in almost every stage of softening, and have 

 known scores of cases in which a blood-vessel has given way, 

 j)roducing the condition known in the human being as " spitting 

 of blood," without any other attendant symptoms than those 

 which are seen in man. 



The symptoms of consumption are, a slow insidious cough, with- 

 out fever in the early stage, followed by emaciation, and ending 

 after some months in diarrhoea, or exhaustion from the amount of 

 expectoration, or in the bursting of a blood-vessel, which last is 

 generally the termination in those dogs that are kept for use, the 

 work to which they are subjected leading to excessive action of 

 the heart, which is likely to burst the vessel. In the latter stages 

 there is a good deal of constitutional fever, but it is seldom that 

 the dog lives long enough to show this condition, being either 

 destroyed as incurable, or d3'ing rapidly from loss of blood or 

 diarrhoea. Treatment is of little use, as, though the attack may be 

 postponed, the disease cannot be cured, and no phthisical animal 



