120 
A CASE OF ANEURISM. 
found that the trunk of the aorta, prodigiously distended, deviated 
from its natural situation in a manner which the lying down 
and the weight of the animal had favoured. The heart was so 
much enlarged, that its exterior diameter, taken at the summit of 
the ventricles, was ten inches, and its height from the summit to 
the base, a foot. The walls, considerably reddened, were friable— 
the interior of the cavities was filled by a coagulum of perfectly 
black blood; the mitral and tricuspid valves were completely 
relaxed, and many of the fleshy columns were broken. 
The left lung presented only a red infiltration, common to all the 
organs of a dead animal. The aorta had acquired, from its origin 
to its division, and thence to its exit from the thorax, a volume 
proportional to that of the heart, and its walls, ordinarily strong 
and thick, were soft and thin, scarcely exceeding in some places 
a line in thickness. 
After having examined the principal arterial ramifications I 
proceeded to open the abdomen: all the viscera were perfectly 
sound, except that they presented a little increased vascularity, 
common to the whole frame. 
Curious to ascertain the cause of this anomalous disease, which 
had in seven hours destroyed this animal, I inquired into her 
previous history: — 
Received at Douai in the course of the preceding February, in 
a state of poor condition: she had for a long time wavered between 
sickness and health ; but that at the beginning of May, the 
green food produced a new sera in her existence, for she began 
immediately to acquire that excessive fatness which she retained 
until her death. She had been exposed to no kind of work 
which could have injured her constitution; nor was there any 
reason to suspect that she carried within her the germ of so 
serious a disease. Thus the immediate causes of her death could 
only be conjectural, unless we attribute it to the excessive quan¬ 
tity of fatty substance which covered the pericardium, the in¬ 
testines, the mesentery, the kidneys, and every part where the 
cellular tissue is abundant; but I apprehend that we cannot 
in this way account for the suddenness of the death. 
The Editor adds, that he thinks M. Vezelisse might, without 
danger of error, consider the death of the mare as the immediate 
effect of the retarding of the arterial circulation, partly from the 
thinness of the walls of the heart and the arterial trunks, and 
partly from excessive fatness. 
(Journal de Med. Vet. Theor . et Pratique , Nov. 1831 .) 
