884 SOME ACCOUNT OF A SWINE PESTILENCE. 
1856, one hundred and three hogs were brought to the pens 
at Aurora, from Ripley County ; these hogs were unwell at 
the time, and some of them died the next day after they 
were brought in. The hogs in the “ pens,” up to this time, 
were healthy. After these diseased hogs had been put into 
the pens, they continued to die from one to five a day, until 
about one half died. In two weeks the disease appeared in 
the adjoining pens, and by the latter part of July the hogs 
were dying from about ten to twenty a day. Nearly every 
hog in these pens, about four thousand, took the disease, and 
thirty-three per cent. died. After the disease appeared in a 
pen (each pen contains about one hundred hogs), it generally 
was from six to eight weeks before the hogs that were left 
recovered. A gentleman who resides at Ripley County, on 
the second farm from where these hogs were brought, in- 
forms me that he lost eighty out of one hundred and fifty; 
that his neighbour, who lives on the adjoining farm, lost 
about thirty, and that the disease was prevailing in this 
neighbourhood before the hogs were taken to Aurora. On 
these farms, then, in this section of the country. Dr. Sutton 
considers as one of the places in which the disease originated. 
He could not ascertain how it was introduced into this 
neighbourhood. These farms are in the interior of Ripley 
County, away from the river, not near the railroad, or any 
other public thoroughfare, nor within twenty miles of a dis- 
tillery. He thinks that he has evidence also that it origi- 
nated in several places in Boon County, Kentucky. That it 
also, occasionally, originates within the pens at the distilleries, 
he thinks highly probable. There were four thousand old 
hogs that continued healthy in the pens at Aurora, while the 
malady was prevailing, which Dr. Sutton cannot account for, 
except by considering they might have been under the influ- 
ence of the disease at some previous period. The intro- 
duction of the disease into the distillery in Rising Sun, in 
Ohio County, was traced to hogs purchased of a farmer 
in Kentucky. This farmer was sued for damages. A gen- 
tleman who was fattening hogs at the distillery, at Patriot, in 
Switzerland County, states that when he saw the hogs were 
dying in the county, he refused to buy more, and his hogs 
continued healthy. Dr. Sutton mentions these facts, because 
it was stated in the public papers that this disease originated 
within the distilleries. He was himself at first inclined to 
this belief. He thought it was produced from the slop, and 
from crowding large numbers of hogs together. But he has 
since fully satisfied himself, that although the disease may, 
occasionally, arise within the pens at distilleries, it also origi- 
nates amongst hogs running at large on farms. 
