History of Animal Plagues. 195 



The treatment consisted in bleeding, but only in the feverish 

 or hot stage, because in the cold one it was found to be hurtful. 

 In the latter stage, treacle and cordials were given, and gruel of 

 barley or bran, with sal-ammoniac dissolved therein. The liver of 

 antimony, and those drugs which induced salivation, were the 

 favourite medicines. Emollient enemas were much lauded. 

 Vesicants were not much used, but setons were thout'-ht to be 

 beneficial. Frictions with the hands, often and loner-continued, 

 were deemed of most service. If the disease extended to the 

 articulations, it formed swellings, which condition Lancisi, follow- 

 ing Vegetius, denominated the 77ialis arthritica, as he fancied it 

 to be the same disease as the malis of the Greeks. This exten- 

 sion, or transference, of the malady to the limbs, he indicates as a 

 favourable symptom. The disease, with careful treatment, was 

 not a fatal one; indeed, this author says that all the horses 

 might have been saved. 



Though in one part of his treatise he thinks it was not a 

 contascious disease, vet in another he believes that the saliva of 

 an aft'ected horse might communicate it to a healthy one. The 

 Italian hippiatrists termed it the ^epidemic fever of horses,' but 

 we have no difficulty, I think, in distinguishing an cpizooty of 

 the protean equine disease, ' influenza.^ The way in which they 

 induced salivation was to fix a bit in the horse's mouth around 

 which was wrapped in linen a quantity of assa-foetida, and a 

 like quantity of laurel-leaves, all mixed up with vinegar. 



Kanold, strangely confounding many diseases with the con- 

 tagious typhus of cattle, and believing that it might be com- 

 municated to horses, is yet strongly of opinion that at least in 

 Holstein, Alsace, Artois, and other places, the horse disease was 

 not contagious, that it could not be transmitted to cattle, and 

 that it was not propagated like the virulent malady of these ani- 

 mals, but that it ceased suddenly in the winter of 1712-13.^ 



The Cattle Plague, in the mean time, still raged in Russia, Po- 

 land, Silesia, and Turkey, attacking one place after another in 

 those countries it had missed in the preceding year.^ In Silesia 

 alone, Kanold computed that 100,000 head of cattle had per- 



1 Kanold. Op. cit., p. 124. * Ibid. Jahrcshistorie, p. 124. 



