570 
ON INFLAMMATORY FEVEli IN CATTLE. 
during life were not characterized by distinctive inflammatory 
symptoms ; and seeing, on the other hand, that fevers may terminate 
fatally without at all presenting such signs after death, and yet the 
symptoms between the two classes of cases differ in no important 
particulars, we are justly led to query whether this inflammatory 
appearance, as it is usually described, is such in reality. As before 
remarked*, it has been found that in fever the fibrin of the blood is 
diminished in quantity. To what effects will such diminution tend 1 
Magendie ascertained the consequence of such condition to be ex- 
travasation of the corpuscles upon the surface of membranes and 
into parenchymatous tissues. Hemorrhage is known not to be alone 
due to appreciable lesion in the walls of vessels, but liable also to 
occur in a passive form under the peculiar conditions of the blood 
we are now noticing. This, I think, goes to support the view, that 
in fever the petechiae, internal congestion, and bloody evacuations, 
are due to the diminished proportion of fibrin permitting exudation of 
the red corpuscles into parts where these appearances are found, 
and that it is not correct to consider them as the result of inflam- 
mation merely. Taking, then, this in connexion with the fact, that 
in plethora we have also an increase of red corpuscles, and knowing 
that plethoric constitutions are liable to hemorrhagic and congestive 
diseases, as epistaxis, cerebral congestion, apoplexy, &c., but 
scarcely, if at all, more disposed to purely inflammatory affections 
than are other conditions of system, we arrive, I conceive, at a 
more satisfactory indication as to the true pathology of inflamma- 
tory fever in cattle than that mostly given, which considers it, as 
the name implies, an inflammatory disease alone. We have seen 
that it occurs almost exclusively among young animals in a ple- 
thoric state of body, and we are aware that plethora is characterized 
by an increase of the red corpuscles and a diminution of the fibrin 
of' the blood. We have seen, also, that, although there are tumours 
on external parts of the body, considered by some of a phlegmonous 
character, and although there are apparent evidences of inflamma- 
tion often nearly throughout the internal viscera, the symptoms 
during illness were not unequivocally those of inflammation, and 
that blood abstracted from the affected animal did not coagulate 
perfectly, if at all. These appearances, nevertheless, which seem 
irreconcileable with the symptoms as denoting inflammatory action, 
can be explained satisfactorily by taking into account the sanguin- 
eous state of system under which the disease occurs, as being those 
naturally resulting from the condition of the blood when a plethoric 
animal is suffering under febrile affections. 
My opinion, then, regarding the nature of the disease called “ in- 
* Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal, 1841. 
