335 
Contemporary Progress of Veterinary Science 
and Art. 
By John Gamgee, M.R.C.V.S., 
Late Lecturer on Veterinary Medicine and Surgery, London ; 
Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the Edinburgh 
Veterinary College. 
(Continued from p, 286.) 
TREATMENT OF PLEURO-PNEUMONIA. 
When the most sedulous care and attentive, though, 
perhaps misdirected, study has been thwarted in the prose- 
cution of an object, a morbid anxiety and reckless propensity 
to advance at any cost may be engendered. This, like many 
other dogmas, may be established by reasoning on various 
subjects, and not least by reflecting on how individuals 
attempt to. prove the validity of a theory — the monster 
creature of their imagination — by experiments, or in striving 
empirically, without the guide of sound principle and true 
doctrine, to discover the treatment of many forms of disease. 
The intractable nature of pleuro-pneumonia has been the 
cause of much curious thinking, more reckless doing, and 
of incomparably less attentive, calm, considerate study and 
reflection. I am not without facts in every way to prove this 
assertion. 
Besides the random trials of the repudiators of sound 
research, three views have been taken of the nature of the 
lung disease, and on these have been based three systems of 
treatment. 
1st. By one, the larger section, perhaps, of the vete- 
rinary world, it has been looked upon as an inflammatory 
affection of a specific nature — infectious, contagious, or 
manifesting itself under the combined agency of cognizable 
causes and epizootic influences. 
2dly. It has been viewed as a non-inflammatory disease. 
Those who participate in this idea reason not on the cause, 
except as some depressing agency; and the inference is drawn 
by one series of observers from the total intolerance for 
antiphlogistics ; and by another, whose advocate is Schmelz, 
of Grebenstein, from post-mortem study — from the view 
taken of the modus operandi of the supposed agencies in the 
production of the disease. 
3dly. A more determined, and more prejudiced and noise- 
creating party, hold to the specificity of a pleuro-pneumonic 
virus— to its transmissibility, its reproduction, its property, 
even, of latent vitality — and, not content with this much. 
