180 VETERINARY SURGICAL THERAPEUTICS, 
to the development of the septicamic process. One may inject with 
impunity into the veins of a susceptible animal filtrated septic serosity, 
free from its figurated elements and containing only ptomaines (Chau- 
veau & Arloing). Although serosity, not filtrated, injected in rather 
large quantity, produces death with generalized lesions, which are par- 
ticularly marked in the serous membranes, small doses of this serosity 
do no harm, providing the vascular walls have no solution of continuity 
to allow the irritation of the septic germs into the tissues ; but if a sub- 
cutaneous trauma is started in an animal in which virulent serosity has 
been injected, a septic center appears at the injured spot. We may re- 
call the celebrated experiment of the double-twisting (bistourage) 
made by Chauveau (1868), always repeated with the same results: the 
testicular traumatic center produced after the injection of the septic 
corpuscles into the general circulation became invariably the starting- 
point of a fatal septicaemic process. 
The smallest solution of continuity may be the starting-point of sep- 
ticaemia; it occurs, however, always by preference on extensive and 
deep wounds. Its appearance is singularly excited by the contused 
condition or the ischemia on a large surface of the injured tissues by the 
presence of cul de sacs, or anfractuosities where oxygen has difficult access, 
or by the presence of blood clots, of small spots which will gangrene or 
are already mortified. Even in recent wounds septicaemia has little show 
when the injured surface is widely exposed to the action of air, especially 
when it is submitted to continued irritation with aerated water. In 
those conditions the septic vibrios which mark its surface are destroyed 
by the oxygen and the spores remained inactive (Pasteur). 
Independently of puerperal septicemia, which is a streptococci in- 
fection (Chauveau), there are traumatic septicemias which are not due 
to the bacillus scpticus gangrene. ‘These infections are produced 
by micro-organisms—some of which are known (streptococci, bacil- 
lus of Novy), while others remain to be studied. We wish only to 
mention them. 
Gaseous gangrene, more or less rapid in its progress, is announced by 
‘phenomena which mark it well. The suddenness of its invasion ; the se- 
vere phlegmasia which takes place round the wound and spreads rapidly 
in all directions ; the cedematous circle which binds it; the progressive 
mortification and the putrefaction which follow it soon; the fcetid odor 
exhaled from the septic center ; the hyperthermia and the other gen- 
eral symptoms, forma clinical picture which cannot be mistaken for 
any other, at least in horses, and in most of the other species. Except- 
ing the tumor of symptomatic anthrax, which cattle have, all the other 
inflammatory, crepitating tumefactions observed in animals and pro- 
duced by different microbes have in common, together with septic 
swelling, only crepitation. 
