384 Veterinary Medicine. 



cases the dead and mummified foetus was found in the womb, 

 which had not been stimulated to its expulsion. He even found 

 the bacillus in the mummified foetus, and still virulent, after an 

 apparent seclusion of seven months. 



ABORTION IN MARES. 



This follows the same general course as does the disease in 

 cows. In certain American outbreaks (Kilborne and Th. Smith) 

 it has been traced to a bacillus like the colon bacillus, propagated 

 in the womb and genital pas.sages, and which produced sup- 

 purating vaginal catarrh in cows and mares on which it was in- 

 oculated. It is liable to occur, without premonitory symptoms 

 having been observed, and to be followed by no marked sequelae, 

 so that, as in most cases in the cow, it may be looked on as a 

 purel}' local infection. In England, Penberthy, found it to oc- 

 cur not earlier than the fourth month of gestation, yet he ad- 

 duces several cases in which the first case in a breeding stud oc- 

 curred in four weeks after the introduction of an infected mare 

 from an aborting stud. In America on large breeding farms the 

 introduction of the infection has proved ruinous, as many as 70 

 or 80 per cent, of the mares having aborted in the same season. 



The conclu.sion is inevitable, that as in the case of cattle, the 

 sire may become the means of transmission, and that the same 

 measures of prevention are demanded. The fact that the affec- 

 tion is less widely spread or injurious, than in cattle, is largely 

 due to the usual presence of but one, two or three breeding mares 

 on a farm, so that there is little opportunity for a rapid extension 

 of the infection. Multiply and encrease our .studs of breeding 

 horses, as cows have been in our dairying districts, and abortion, 

 once introduced, would prove equally infective, spreading and 

 injurious. 



Therapeutics are useless in contagious abortion as the disease 

 usually runs its course before any danger is suspected. If pre- 

 monitory .symptoms are observed, the abortion may sometimes be 

 warded off for a time by secluding the animal in a quiet place and 

 seeking to obviate labor pains by opiates and ounce doses of 

 viburnum pruuifolium. 



Prevention. This is to be sought along two principal lines : 



