524 INFECTIOUS ABORTION 



tious in his work on cattle, "How to keep cows which are 

 great bellied with calf." In Germany the disease seems to 

 have existed in a somewhat severe form in the latter part of 

 the eighteenth century. According to the "Veterinary Dic- 

 tionary" (1897) this trouble existed in Great Britain. The 

 literature on animal industry and agriculture of the last half 

 century contains many reports of the existence of this disease 

 in almost every cattle raising country. The most important 

 scientific investigations that have been made into its nature 

 are those of Nocard, 1885 ; in Great Britain, by a conmiittee 

 appointed in 1886 by the Highland Agricultural Society of 

 Scotland consisting of Drs. Woodhead, Aitken, M'Fadyean 

 and Campbell; and in Denmark, by Bang and Streibolt. Some 

 work was done on this disease in 1897-98 at the New York 

 State Veterinary College by Law and Moore. A number of 

 the State Experiment Stations have published on this disease 

 but the work reported has been more in the line of treatment 

 then a study of its etiology. 



§ 413. Etiology. Nocard found on bacteriological ex- 

 amination of cows that had recently aborted two different species 

 of bacteria present in large numbers in the purulent substance- 

 They were first a micrococcus, found abundantly in the fluid 

 lying at the base of the cotyledons and which grew either singly 

 or in short chains. The second was a short thick bacillus which 

 occurred most abundantly in the juice expressed from the 

 follicles of the cotyledons. His inoculation experiments were 

 negative. 



Bang and Streibolt found an anaerobic bacillus which 

 possessed somewhat peculiar properties and which they be- 

 lieved to be the specific cause of the disea.se. They found it 

 in a number of cases and report positive results from inocula- 

 tion experiments. The cultivation of this organism required 

 a medium composed of agar, gelatin and blood serum. Bang 

 considers the bacillus he discovered to be a purely pathogenic 

 organism which has no saprophytic existence. The fact that 

 when it is injected into the blood stream it grows only in the 

 pregnant uterus and in the fetus is considered evidence of this. 



