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 rugae 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 
