610 TRANSLATIONS FROM CONTINENTAL JOURNALS. 
submitted to the same treatment. The great increase in the 
number of cases this year, as well as the greater number of 
fatal terminations, and the different results obtained in 1859 
by the same curative agents in two different parts of the year— 
is all this to be attributed to the influence of general causes, 
or simply to chance? This question the author does not 
solve, but he leaves it to the consideration of other observers ; 
he has merely given the particulars, in the hope that it may 
be more fully elucidated. In his opinion, abundant nutrition 
and a plethoric state of the animal favour, perhaps, the 
development of the disease; but these alone would not cause 
its development without some peculiar disposition existing in 
the animal economy, and its occurrence is for a certainty not 
indispensable, as we see some animals contract the disease 
when in middling and even bad condition. 
Gestation is an indispensable condition to the genesis of 
the malady; parturition, in the majority of cases, is the 
determining cause. Finally, it is necessary that the animals 
should have attained a certain age to render them impressible 
to the disease. 
The therapeutic agents recommended for this affection are 
numberless. This is a necessary consequence where the 
nature of a disease is so differently viewed. The failure of 
the greater number has led to the employment of other 
remedies, which has increased the number of prescriptions 
against this malady. I will not take the trouble to pass in 
review all that has been extolled in this respect, but confine 
myself to the purgative agent, sulphate of soda; the diuretic 
agent, nitre; and to emetic tartar, as being those agents 
from the use of which I have had the fewest failures, not 
forgetting venesection, whenever indicated. When, however, 
there is no fear of reaction, or very little, I have dispensed 
with it altogether. But this treatment is far from giving 
satisfactory results, as the malady, in spite of it, carries off 
every year great numbers of the best milch cows. The 
duration of the disease is generally too short for the thera¬ 
peutic agents satisfactorily to act, besides which must be 
considered the complicated system of the organs of digestion 
in the ruminant, the general torpor and state of coma of the 
whole animal economy, and the cessation of the function of 
the digestive and the state of the urinary organs during the 
malady; so that one may easily conceive the reason why 
therapeutic agents, however powerful, are frequently without 
any beneficial effect. 
The most efficacious treatment against this affection would 
perhaps be the preventive. Purgatives before parturition 
