575 
A POPULAR LECTURE ON THE PREVAILING EPIZOOTIC 
AMONG CATTLE IN IRELAND IN 1842: 
DELIVERED IN DUBLIN. 
By Hugh Furguson, Esq. 
Gentlemen, — A period of nearly three years lias elapsed 
since the first appearance in this country of a peculiar epizootic 
among homed cattle, the chief characteristic of which was a pus- 
tular affection of the mouth, nose, and feet. Previous to being 
observed in Ireland, it had existed for some short time in the 
sister island, England, to which, like many epidemic diseases 
of the human species, it had travelled from the far east by a 
rather circuitous route, traversing both shores of the Mediter- 
ranean, and then committing sad devastations among the herds 
of caitle in Spain, France, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Bo- 
hemia, Hungary, and Prussia, before it became the unwelcome 
visitor of the British islands. Fortunately, this disease was short 
in its sojourn, mild in its effects, and extremely easy of treat- 
ment, especially in cattle, yielding to the simplest remedies, and 
often to the unassisted efforts of nature. The property of its 
being capable of being imparted in a mild form to sound ani- 
mals, by inoculation, was a fact which I discovered while at- 
tached to one of the continental veterinary schools. It proved 
a means — where the expedient was had recourse to — of guard- 
ing against those immense losses which invariably befel sheep 
farmers, where it attacked their flocks during the lambing season. 
Like the small-pox in the human subject, ruminants were 
scarcely ever attacked a second time with the pustular distem- 
per. Therefore, by inoculating the ewes some time before the 
lambing season, the disease was favourably passed over before 
that period arrived when any infectious derangement in the 
mother generally proved fatal to her offspring. Unfortunately, 
although the pustular disease was so mild in its effects on every 
description of animal which it attacked, lambs excepted, it was, 
in all countries which it visited merely the precursor of one of the 
most fatal forms of distemper that has been known to exist within 
the present memory of man. The distemper to which I allude is 
that which at present reigns with sad mortality through almost 
every county in Ireland. It has now been in this island nearly 
eighteen months, during which time the fatality among neat 
cattle has been, in a proportion of twenty to one, greater than at 
any former period. 
