60 DISEASES OF THE GREYHOUND. 



THE DISTEMPER, OR TYPHUS FEVER. 



At one time I was inclined to believe, from the numerous forms 

 which distemper assumes, that there was really no such distinct 

 disease, but that a variety of complaints had been ignorantly 

 jumbled together, under a term, too, which affords no distinguish- 

 ing mark by which to test its separate existence. But a closer 

 observation has enabled me, I think, to seize the clue which 

 explains all these apparent discrepancies, and also leads the way 

 to the scientific treatment of this sometimes unmanageable dis- 

 order. I began my investigation by considering what symptoms 

 invariably attend upon distemper, and certainly at first I was com- 

 pletely puzzled, for I found in one series of cases apparently 

 nothing but cough and running at the nose and eyes ; in another 

 these signs were absent, and their place supplied by head-symptoms 

 and fits ; whilst again, in a third set, the dogs all suffered from 

 diarrhoea, with discharges of blood, and had neither head nor 

 chest-symptoms, in any stage of the disease. In all these cases, 

 however, I observed that there was fever, and that of a particular 

 kind not like the ordinary inflammatory feverishness which dogs 

 are subject to, and which attends upon almost all their acute 

 attacks, but of a low typhoid nature, with great exhaustion, entire 

 loss of appetite, and, in the latter stages, a collection of brown fur, 

 or, as it is called in human medicine, sordes, about the teeth. 

 c Surely then,' I said, ' this is typhus fever,' and immediately the 

 truth flashed across my mind, that in the ideas represented by 

 that word typhus might be found the key to the anomalies so 



