TRANSLATIONS FROM CONTINENTAL JOURNALS. 
755 
are easily applied, and are almost always efficacious when 
the malady pursues a regular course, and is without com¬ 
plication. The prophylactic treatment consists in isolat¬ 
ing the sick, and in preventing all contact by every possible 
means, and inoculation of unaffected animals. 
Some analogy has been supposed to exist between small¬ 
pox in man and that of sheep, but this is only apparent in 
the progress of the disease and in some of the symptoms, 
but not in its essential characters. On the other hand, the 
experiment of MM. Campe and Yoisin, and those made at 
the Ecole de Medecine of Paris, and those of the various 
establishments close to it, have removed all doubts on this 
point. The results of these experiments were that all the 
attempts made to inoculate the smallpox from the human 
subject, and vice versa completely failed, and that sheep which 
had apparently been successfully inoculated have, notwith¬ 
standing, taken the sheep-pox by simple cohabitation with 
infected individuals. Thus vaccination, the preservative from 
smallpox in man, does not prove efficacious in that of sheep. 
Inoculation .—The object of inoculation is to produce a 
similar affection to the original disease, but in a milder and 
more benignant form, and thereby give immunity to and so 
preserve the flock from the more severe and fatal form of the 
malad} r . It consists in introducing the virus of the sheep- 
pox under the epidermis by a sharp-pointed instrument. It 
is, without contradiction, the surest and safest means of 
moderating and lessening the enormous losses caused by 
this fatal malady. We have no knowledge of the exact time 
at which inoculation was first practised, but it is not of 
recent date, and we are indebted for it to the resemblance be¬ 
tween smallpox in sheep and smallpox in the human subject. 
Chalette proposed it in 1762, Bourgelat in 1765, and Coste 
in 1797. It has been practised in Saxony, Italy, Austria, 
Hungary, England, and France, at first bv Venel, afterwards 
by Tessier, and by a great number of veterinary surgeons and 
agriculturists. It has been sometimes favorably spoken of, 
at others condemned. It excited at first but little attention, 
and was even abandoned for a time, and it is probable that 
it would have been entirely forgotten had it not been for the 
discovery of vaccination, when its effects were more closely 
observed. It is true that it has not always produced the 
good effects which were expected; but it must also be con¬ 
fessed that the unfavorable results have been greatly exag¬ 
gerated, and that often accidents which depended on peculiar 
circumstances foreign to the insertion of the virus have been 
attributed to it. Inoculation has had and still has a great 
