GRANULAR VENEREAL DISEASE AND ABORTION IN CATTLE. 13 



animal of the same species from which the culture was procured 

 there need be little surprise if it cause irritation. Ostertag states 

 that the vaginal discharge comes from the formation of nodules 

 and that the discharge is at first purulent or muco-purulent. 



The granular venereal disease does not behave clinically like a 

 malady dependent upon streptococci or other pyogenic organisms. 

 It is not fundamentally pyogenic. The investigations of Thorns and 

 others have failed to show the formation of papules, ulcers, or necro- 

 sis of tissues. The granules or nodules do not suppurate. When the 

 granules become highly numerous, the vulvo-vaginal mucosa is 

 swollen and rough, the rugse overlap and strike against each other, the 

 epithelium at the apices of the granules becomes abraded by com- 

 pression and attrition, and, as Thorns relates, the result is a partial 

 denudation of the epithelium, naturally leading to streptococcic 

 infection and catarrh. 



The granules behave unlike the product of streptococcic infection 

 in their appearance and disappearance. They arise too suddenly 

 and with too slight signs of irritation. In the heifer calf they appear 

 as transparent or translucent granules or nodules, the body of 

 the granule showing little or no color, while the base has a yellowish 

 or red girdle or areola. They are not observed to grow. One day 

 they are unseen, the next they are full size. In their mode of dis- 

 appearance they behave very similarly. Their disappearance is 

 chiefly noted numerically and not by volume. 



PROGNOSIS, 



If we omit from our consideration such alleged consequences 

 of the nodular venereal disease as abortion, retained placenta, 

 cystic degeneration of the ovaries, pyometra, and other serious 

 affections of the genital organs, the prognosis as to the life of the 

 patient is excellent, and the prospect for the amelioration and 

 repression of the malady is highly favorable. But the outlook for 

 recovery, in the present state of our knowledge, is very poor, if not 

 hopeless. There is necessarily quite as wide variation in the prog- 

 nosis as there is concerning the essential symptoms and diagnosis. 

 If one holds, as many do, that the disease is present only when the 

 nodules are very numerous (each party having his own conception 

 of that definition) and there is a marked muco-purulent vaginal 

 discharge (the degree of which each must define for himself) and these 

 conditions shall be accompanied by sterility and abortion, the 

 prognosis may be good. With such a conception, however, there 

 can never be a clear line of demarcation between sound and diseased. 

 Different observers can not hope to agree upon the number of the 

 nodules which warrant a diagnosis of infection — whether there 

 need be present 1,000 or 10 nodules. Neither can there be agreement 



