Foot-and-Mouth Disease. 
465 
through its stages without attempting to retard or modify its 
development. 
Some ten years ago a veritable cure for small-pox was pub- 
licly announced, and there was no mistake as to the meaning of 
the terms employed. The North American plant Sarracenia 
purpurea was said to arrest tlie development of the pustules by 
destroying the poison of the disease in the system. This would 
have been true curative action, positive destruction of the morbid 
material, and the arrest of the abnormal process ; further inquiry, 
however, proved that the plant did not possess the power 
ascribed to it, and the disease remains, in the present state of 
our knowledge, incurable, that is to say, not susceptible of 
arrestation by the action of medicine. The most that the phy- 
sician hopes to effect is to get the disease favourably through 
its various stages, and to support the system under the exhausting- 
influence of the virus. 
In exactly the same sense that small-pox of man is incurable, 
so is the foot-and-mouth complaint of cattle, a disease much less 
virulent in character, insusceptible to the action of medicines. A 
cure for this disease should be capable of arresting the course of 
the fever and preventing the formation of vesicles ; should, in 
fact, cut short the morbid process ; so that an animal which had 
been exposed to the infection, and gave indications of being the 
subject of the incipient disease by a rise of internal tempera- 
ture, should be restored to health by the use of the medicine, 
without the manifestation of any further symptoms. No such 
curative agent as this has yet been discovered, and all the 
special modes of treatment which have been at different times 
advocated on the plea of their curative powers, may be safely 
relegated to the regions of quackery. 
Curative means, in the extended sense of the word, may be 
successfully applied to foot-and-mouth complaint as to all other 
diseases ; that is to say, the sick animal may be taken care of, 
the symptoms may be sedulously watched, complications may 
be dealt with as they arise ; strict obedience to sanitary laws 
may be enjoined, and all hygienic appliances may be brought 
to bear with corresponding benefit to the patient ; but the con- 
scientious practitioner, while he developes all the resources of his 
art, knows and admits that the means Vhich he employs are 
palliative and not antagonistic to the morbid processes which 
he seeks to assist rather than to obstruct. The problem which 
he has to solve is how to assist in the elimination of a poison, 
and at the same time to support the vitality of the system, a 
widely different thing from neutralising the poison or preventing 
its formation. 
The first thing which the therapeutist is called upon to deter- 
