ON THE PLEURA PNEUMONIA AMONG CATTLE. 737 
either gets convalescent, or other symptoms induce me to change 
the mode of treatment. 
I would have my readers to understand that I do not confine myself 
to one bleeding; but, if the symptoms warrant it, (which I often find 
to take place two or three times during the disease), I subtract the 
vital fluid fearlessly, under the controul of that grand criterion, the 
pulse. 
When I am called in to a patient in the sub-acute stage, and 
find him with the following symptoms, pulse weak and waver- 
ing — ears, horns, and legs cold, — with a general chilliness over the 
surface of the body — combined with a dull sunken state of the eye — 
a purging of dark-coloured foetid dejections, attended with great 
debility, & c., offers to us that stage of fever denominated malig- 
nant typhus, so characteristic in the low fevers of cattle. 
Treatment . — In this stage of the disease to bleed and purge 
would be unpardonable ignorance on the part of the medical at- 
tendant, and to the patient sure dissolution ; but if, by any means, 
I can rouse the dormant powers of life into more active energy, get 
the pulse quicker and fuller, with other symptoms of more active 
energy , or acute disease — which I have many times done, to the 
no small gratification both of the owner and myself — by giving the 
spt. nit. ether, and tinct. opii in full doses, combined with ginger, 
gentian, carbonate of ammonia, See. two or three times in the 
course of the day — in all these cases, if I can rouse the system to 
bear bleeding, my prognosis is favourable, more so than if I cannot 
attain that end. No doubt there are cattle that would recover 
without bleeding ; but in my practice, when I have not been able 
to abstract blood freely, and particularly at the outset of the 
disease, my patients were either longer in getting convalescent, or 
never became convalescent at all. 
After this, I pursue the treatment for the acute stage, taking 
care to vary my prescriptions according to the different symptoms 
that present themselves. 
There are several states of this disease, and as many symp- 
toms by which to judge of these states; but, as I have spun 
out my paper to a greater length than I intended, and these dif- 
ferent stages have been so ably pointed out by Professor Dick, in 
his reply to Mr. Fulton, of Wigtoun, in The Veterinarian for 
1843, p. 277, to enlarge upon them would, on my part, be 
ridiculous ; because I consider the advice there laid down is con- 
sistent with the best possible pathological reasoning, and 1 must 
leave the reader to peruse that essay, as being far superior to any 
thing I can point out; I shall therefore only ask leave to make a 
few short remarks. 
First, then, in this disease, and in all diseases that I have had 
an opportunity of treating, I make it an invariable rule to visit my 
