ON EPIZOOTIC DISEASES. 
247 
Even their sick used this food when they were laid up in the hos- 
pital. Our people did not scruple after this to have recourse to 
it, and they did so with impunity. It was cheap enough, for 
they purchased it at two sous per pound. I ate it myself many 
times, and without inconvenience. It was as good as the meat 
from the inferior joints of cattle. I generally had it stewed. The 
bouillon acquired somewhat of the taste of fat pork, and did not 
yield that rich odour which good meat thus treated acquires. 
That this food is not of a good quality, that it may injure 
weak and sickly individuals, and that it, consequently, ought to 
be excluded from the market, is perfectly true ; but that it is es- 
sentially unwholesome, and, more especially, that it can introduce 
a tendency to typhus in those who eat it, I cannot believe. 
Was it the Austrian, or, more properly, the Hungarian cattle 
that, in 1814, introduced this disease into France ? or was this 
malady the inevitable consequence of the excessive fatigue, the 
multiplied excesses, the insufficient and unwholesome food, the 
inevitable crowding into small and ill-ventilated places, and other 
causes of disease inseparable from the movements of large armies 1 
This is a question which, at present, I will not undertake to re- 
solve; but Buneva was so convinced of the origin of the malady, 
that he called it “ the Hungarian epizootic. ” Huzard maintain- 
ed that it had the same origin : but he accounted for it in a sin- 
gular way. It does not, according to him, exist in Hungary ; but 
the cattle of that country, from which the supply for the troops 
was almost entirely composed, contracted it in their route, in con- 
sequence of the numerous sources of insalubrity to which they 
were exposed, and, once being infected, they communicated the 
disease with frightful rapidity. 
My attention was, of course, much occupied in comparing the 
various modes of treatment adopted in order to restrain the ra- 
vages of this disease, for it was an evident fact that not more 
than one out of ten attacked by the disease survived. The result 
was the same whether I had recourse to bleeding or tonics, acids, 
mucilages, or cordials. 
Many recipes were much in vogue, and, with some difficulty, I 
obtained an account of the composition of several of them. At the 
head of them, was one introduced by the Viscount de Bussy, and 
which he had seen a thousand times used successfully in Ger- 
many, even when the animal was so reduced that all hope of re- 
covery was abandoned. It was as follows : — “ Take of yeast one 
ounce, and of ordinary beer a quart. Give half a pint of this 
three times in twenty-four hours, diminishing the dose as the ani- 
mal gets better.” A half-pint of ale with a little yeast, or a cup 
of coffee, or a cup of water, would have done as much good. 
