PUERPERAL OR MILK LEVER IN CATTLE, 
147 
I will pass over the other symptoms which I have remarked as 
constantly occurring, viz. an inclination to turn the head back on 
the sides, and no maternal anxiety, with just stating, that 
though I do not directly trace the reasons for these to the same 
origin as the others, yet I certainly find nothing in them to 
militate against the opinion. 
I come now to those which I have called the variable symp- 
toms ; and, first. Pain. In some cases that I have seen, the 
nerves of merely animal sensation appear to he quickened in 
the exact ratio that the motor nerves become obtuse ; in others, 
both sets of nerves seem to partake of the same death-like 
quietude, and no pain is evinced. I argue from this, that in either 
case the affection of the sensitive nerves is secondary; for while 
that of the organic ones is always of the same kind, that of the 
sensitive varies from seeming insensibility, through every gra- 
dation to extreme acuteness. 
Next comes. More or less inflammation of the stomachs, intes- 
tines, and other viscera, according to the time the beast lies, or 
the previous state of plethora, &c. This is indeed a very variable 
symptom. Turn to the case of the first cow I have noticed in 
this paper : she was down only four or five hours before she died, 
and really there was so little inflammation in the stomachs in 
her (and this the only inflammation existing at all), that any 
practitioner would have been ashamed to have pointed it out as the 
cause of death in any other case than puerperal fever. It availed 
me, because I was prepared to find nothing else, and I was 
proved to be correct. I have now no doubt that so much were 
the organic motor nerves affected in her case, that they did not 
afford sufficient influence to carry on the functions of life, and 
that from this cause alone death ensued. And this will not be 
thought strange, that, besides the organs of digestion, some of 
respiration, &c. the great fountain of life, the heart itself, receives 
the only motor supply it has from organic nerves. 
In the third case, that of the fat cow, there was positively no 
inflammation at all : she was sold by the butcher as regularly 
slaughtered meat ; and really, except from the circumstance of 
her having just calved, I would have defied any one to have 
detected disease in her. Joining this circumstance with the 
fact that she had been through a deep pond immediately before 
she fell, I conclude the disease here was one purely of the 
nervous system. There was as great an expression of pain as 
I ever remember to have seen in one ; and this seems naturally 
to be accounted for by the circumstance which caused the dis- 
ease affecting both systems of nerves equally and instanta- 
neously. 
Again ; may not inflammation be caused simply by loss of 
