166 SCOTTISH METROPOLITAN VETERINARY MEDICAL SOCIETY. 
long since we came to the conclusion that it is better to prevent 
than to try to cure pleuro-pneumonia. It has long been the 
great bugbear of the profession, our chief thorn in the flesh, as it 
were ; had it not been for it, I believe the standing of veterinary 
surgeons would have been much higher. People are loth to believe 
that it won’t pay to treat this disease of cattle ; they can scarcely 
believe that the men so successful otherwise fail here ; but when 
convinced, they are apt to forget all the good we have done them, 
and jeer at us when we tell them that the most we can do is to 
prevent the disease. If, as our President remarked, and I dare say 
we all believe, “ pleuro-pneumonia might in a few years be banished 
from the British Isles,” the sooner we aid in measures to realise it 
the better. We trust that the Act now in operation is a step in the 
right direction, though, as remarked to me by Professor Williams, 
I fear the clause allowing cattle to be removed for slaughter may be 
so acted on as to defeat, in a great measure, the very ends for which 
the bill was framed. 
Epizootic, contagious, and infectious diseases have been great 
stumbling-blocks to us. We have yet much to learn as to their 
nature, cause, and treatment. Had we known more of rinderpest 
and f ‘ lung disease” when they came among us it would have been 
greatly to our advantage ; and besides these are other epizootics, 
from which we gain but little credit, the vesicular epizootic or foot- 
and-mouth disease, rheumatic fever, or the stiffness, for example. 
The former is not so bad when confined to the mouths and feet ; 
but when it affects the membrane lining the teats and interior of 
the udder, it is almost as great a scourge to dairymen as the lung 
disease itself. 
Diseases of the Organs of Circulation . — These are not uncommon, 
but their study is an interesting one. Owing, however, to the fact 
of their being for the most part incurable, their importance has been 
somewhat underrated. The various states and appearances of the 
heart under disease, the seat of aneurism, and other diseased con- 
ditions of the blood-vessels, are most interesting to the pathologist, 
and to us also as practitioners. It is not the first time that a 
healthy-looking horse has been certified sound by first-rate veteri- 
nary surgeons, when a touch of the pulse or a minute’s listening 
at the side would have shown that he had a diseased heart. Peri- 
carditis, I am convinced, exists frequently among cattle, and is often 
mistaken for, or confounded with, lung disease, and in its first stages 
with fardel-bound. When a horse dies from haemorrhage from the 
nose, it is well when we can dissect and show the aneurism from 
which it proceeded. With the symptoms of internal haemorrhage 
we must be well acquainted. They are generally very distinct ; but 
I have seen cases in which the orifices in the blood-vessel was small, 
the horse bleeding to death, as it were, drop by drop, present very 
peculiar symptoms. 
Diseases of the blood are now claiming much attention. Diseases 
formerly attributed to various organs and causes are now shown to 
depend on an altered, vitiated, or impoverished condition of the 
