690 PATHOLOGY OF PARTURITION. 



Several Italian authorities, and among them Brusasco, Oreste, 

 Metaxa, and Provizano, have drawn attention to a peculiar disease of 

 Goats and Sheep, accompanied by the gradual loss of milk. Often 

 lameness is observed, and within fourteen days the secretion of milk is 

 reduced to one-fifth of the usual quantity. This fluid soon becomes 

 sour. The disease appears to be contagious, for it could be produced by 

 injecting the milk from affected Sheep into the teats of healthy Sheep 

 and Goats. All the animals so experimented upon became affected, the 

 period of incubation being six, twelve, fifteen, or twenty days. The 

 secretion of milk ceases in from eighteen to thirty days. 



In the gangrenous mammitis of Sheep which Nocard investigated, 

 and which w^as due to a micro-organism, it was found that five drops of 

 the altered milk from a diseased gland, when injected into the teat of a 

 healthy Sheep, produced the disease and caused death in forty-two hours. 



Tuberculosis of the udder is sometimes a cause of mammitis, and in 

 all cases, when severe, it diminishes the secretion of milk. The mammae 

 are greatly enlarged, hard, and nodulated, and softening of the tubercular 

 masses may give rise to isolated or diffused abscesses. 



Cojnjjlications. 



With Euminants, the digestive organs are generally involved in the 

 disturbance, and require attention. Inflammation of the joints (arthritis) 

 is a frequent complication of mammitis ; any of the articulations may 

 become affected, but the patellar and tarsal aj^pear to be the most pre- 

 disposed. Septic infection and pyaemia are grave complications, and 

 appear when gangrene or extensive suppuration is present. There are 

 also the degenerations and new formations in the mammae which com- 

 plicate the malady when chronic, or subsequently. 



Prog7iosis. 



The prognosis of mammitis is generally unfavourable, unless the 

 inflammation is superficial and limited, not severe, and treatment is 

 adopted early. 



When the inflammation, and particularly in the Cow, attacks the 

 whole of the mammas, it is then most serious, and rarely indeed can a 

 favourable result be prognosticated. When the inflammation is local- 

 ised and not likely to extend, and particularly when the suppuration is 

 superficial, the results may be trifling — provided always that judicious 

 treatment is early adopted and energetically carried out. With cattle 

 and sheep at pasture, mammitis is often a most serious disease, from 

 the fact that its existence is generally not perceived in time to check it, 

 and the causes which produced it are perhaps still in operation. The 

 permanent induration or sloughing away of one or more quarters of the 

 mammae, is always to be apprehended w^hen the inflammation is inter- 

 glandular or interstitial, and especially when it is acute. Gangrene, 

 and even death, may result ; indeed, the gangrenous termination of 

 mammitis is fatal in nearly every case. 



Treatment. 

 _ However slight the attack or mild the form of mammitis may be, in 

 view of the serious consequences which it may entail, treatment should 

 be prompt and judicious ; as in two or three days alterations may be 

 produced in the secretory apparatus of the gland which medical skill 

 may be unable to amend. 



