424 TRANSLATIONS PROM CONTINENTAL JOURNALS. 
to affections which have nothing in common with each other, 
except their epizootic character. The name has not been 
much used in France, but in Germany, Holland, Belgium, 
and England, it has been so much employed and abused, that 
few maladies attacking several horses in a stable are not desig¬ 
nated influenza. 
In briefly retracing how a confusion of words has brought 
about a confusion of ideas, in the decennial period of from 1820 
to 1830, a new form of disease sprang up, which principally 
consisted of pleuro-pneumonia, complicated with hepatitis. 
This affection became persistent, and attacked in preference 
those horses that were congregated in large numbers. It also 
took on the epizootic form. Sometimes its range was limited, at 
others it spread over all the countiy. Barracks and post stables 
suffered most, but it did not spare either those of the rich or 
the agriculturist. This malady has appeared from time to 
time ever since, principally in the spring and autumn, but 
neither the summer nor the winter will arrest its progress. 
Prinz informs us that in 1832 the malady prevailed exten¬ 
sively in Prussia. In his summary of the medical constitution 
of Saxony, he says that, in October, the catarrhal rheumatical 
form predominated. In Dresden a great many horses were 
attacked with fever which had this character, but that it did 
not become epizootic. That in Prussia similar maladies had 
prevailed amongst the cavalry horses, and that they were 
sometimes designated influenza, at other times an affection 
of the lungs. Tegge, who practised in Pomerania, in giving 
a summary description of it, proposes to call it typhoid inflam¬ 
mation of the lungs and liver, or influenza. One at once sees 
that the term influenza has been taken hap-hazard, and been 
applied to almost any affection of the organism, in the same 
way as it might have been applied to any new disease in 
which the determining cause or influence was a mystery. 
Some persons, to add to this confusion, have proposed to give to 
influenza as many forms as there are complications ; hence 
we have, 1st, the rheumatic simple; 2d, the rheumatico- 
catarrhal; 3d., gastro-rheumatical. In this arrangement, pneu¬ 
monia, as if altogether insignificant, is completely overlooked. 
Others have improved on this by adding a fourth form, viz., 
bilioso-erysipelatous. In this confusion, worthy of the 
symptomatic school, some practitioners find their account. 
All acute diseases with them become influenza, and if thev 
* %f 
are unable to seize all the subtile means of the symptoms, 
they invent new ones. 
In a memoir recently published on typhoid fever in the 
horse, the author distinguishes three forms, viz., one mucous, 
