608 TRANSLATIONS THOM CONTINENTAL JOURNALS. 
ferent results prevented him from adopting any of the above 
opinions, and, in conjunction with a great many practical 
facts, led him to view vitularv fever as a malady of the blood, 
which becomes infected during gestation, and the evolution 
of which takes place during the act of parturition in a great 
number of cases, but not in all. The author, having seen 
two cases in which the disease occurred before calving, con¬ 
siders this malady as an alteration of the blood; the great 
derangement of the different functions, the nervous dis¬ 
turbance, and, in a word, the whole of the alarming symptoms 
which are developed, seem to be the result of a reactionary 
movement of the animal economy, and to betray the pre¬ 
sence of a morbid element in the circulating fluid. He 
says 3 the different terminations, or rather the metastatic 
phenomena, which I have observed in the course of this 
malady, are in favour of this opinion. I have several times 
seen the symptoms disappear and the malady give way to a 
secondary affection altogether different, which carried the 
animal off in a few days, just when there had been great 
hope of saving it. At other times the crisis has been an 
abundant secretion of urine, and it is the same when purging 
sets in. It is generally in the thorax where the metastasis 
takes place, involving the pleurae, the lungs, and the peri¬ 
cardium. Sometimes all three become affected at once. 
Once only I have seen a case succumb to consecutive 
gastro-enteritis. These secondary affections always present 
themselves in a peculiar way. The invasion is occult, the 
progress slow, and they obstinately resist, as it were, all the 
curative means employed; the whole animal economy seem¬ 
ingly becoming undermined before one suspects it. The 
autopsy reveals in these cases profound alterations, such as 
vomica, 'false membranes, &c. But in many cases, where a 
cure has not been effected, the duration of the malady is too 
short to allow 7 of this metastasis to take place, and the 
patient is carried off by the fever before there has been time 
for the morbid poison to fix itself on one particular organ. 
In such a case the autopsy reveals few or no lesions; this 
often happens. It is to be further observed that when the 
fever of reaction is not well defined, which is ascertained by 
a small, feeble, and but slightly accelerated pulse, the malady 
always terminates in death, the efforts of the animal economy 
being too weak to throw off the poison. If parturition is 
difficult, or the expulsion of the foetal membranes does not 
take place, the malady is not much to be dreaded; and if by 
exception it declares itself, the manifestation of the symptoms 
is not so grave, and a cure is generally effected. Can this 
