DISTEMPEE. 67 



Sir W. Burnett's disinfecting fluid, after the dogs are removed, and 

 some few days, or even weeks, should elapse before others are 

 placed in them. Dogs seem to be peculiarly liable to distemper 

 when approaching maturity, the greater number being attacked 

 between nine and eighteen months old ; but, as in the typhus fever 

 of man, it is not confined to that age. The suckling and the old 

 dog are also open to its attacks, though in a much less degree. 

 As in the human being again, one attack generally, though not 

 always, preserves the individual from a second. Indeed, the laws 

 of contagion and the statistics of the two diseases are precisely 

 identical, making allowance, of course, for the difference in the 

 time of coming to maturity, and reckoning age in the dog by 

 months, as in the man by years, so that a dog twenty-one months 

 old may be considered as mature as a man of twenty-one years 

 of age. 



TIME OF INCUBATION. The disease is generally, as in typhus 

 fever, about ten days or a fortnight, after infection, before making- 

 its appearance. 



DURATION. Distemper varies in the length of the attack from 

 a few days to two or three months ; but the average period, like 

 that of typhus fever, is twenty-one days. 



DIAGNOSIS. In its mildest form distemper is very often 

 mistaken for ephemeral fever, or influenza, to which I have alluded 

 at page 58. Severe distemper is most likely to be confounded 

 with hydrophobia, from which it may be distinguished either by 

 the absence of all aberration of intellect, or by the difference in 

 the form of its manifestation. In distemper there is no restlessness, 



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