VETERINARY MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. 
709 
Mr. Wallis. — Was it consequent on the predisposition that 
had been produced — the artificial state of the constitution — 
by over-feeding — or over-work, or any other cause ? In many 
of the cases which he had seen, the horses had been turned out 
during the summer ; therefore it could not result in their over- 
work, or over-feeding, or any other cause, predisposing or ex- 
citing, connected with the stable. It was some unknown at- 
mospheric agency. 
Mr. Sibbald . — Many horses had come under his care that had 
been out at grass for months. He had had very few hackney-coach 
or cab horses, although it might have been thought, from the 
manner in which they were fed and worked, that they would 
have been the most of all predisposed to be affected by this dis- 
ease. 
Mr. Sewell. — The disease did not seem to spread in the course 
of the wind, it prevailed in hot weather and in cold, but cer- 
tainly most when the temperature was high. It had appeared 
in Scotland in the spring, and it was now raging there again. 
There was not a corner in the country in which it had not pre- 
vailed. There are two breweries in this town, on different sides 
of the river; they are managed in the best possible manner: 
to the cleanliness and to the ventilation there could not be the 
slightest exception. It broke out in one of them. It fairly ran 
through the stables. Scarcely a horse escaped. In the other 
brewery not a horse was affected. Three weeks or a month passed, 
and it was all quiet and right at the first brewery ; when it sud- 
denly broke out in the second, and it is raging there now. In 
both, they took the sick from the healthy as soon as they were 
attacked ; and the change of situation had the best possible 
effect. In the College he gives his patients every possible ad- 
vantage to be derived from pure air; but he does not quite ap- 
prove of their being altogether turned out. He has lost only 
four horses out of about two hundred. From what he has heard, 
he concludes that where the mortality has been considerable, the 
patients have nearly all died from drastic purging. 
Mr. E. Braby. — In the first stage was any particular organ 
or membrane affected ? He believed not. If it was any, it was 
the conjunctival, or some portion of the respiratory membranes. 
Then, what was the disease at its first stage ? 
Mr. Sewell. — A constitutional disturbance that increased the 
action of the heart, but produced more general irritability than 
inflammation, properly speaking. 
Mr. E. Braby. — Then inflammation is not a correct term. 
It is some mysterious energy, some extreme nervous sensibility ; 
the surfaces are generally affected — the membranes are diseased ; 
VOL. ix. 5 B 
