704 
REPORTS OF CASES. 
ditis. Autopsy revealed tubercular deposits through the 
entirety of the muscular substance of the heart, breaking 
down of some of these nodules gave rise to peri and endocar¬ 
ditis. 
t # 
Case 8.— Cow gave seven quarts of milk at night, eat her 
feed, and was found dead in the morning. 
History, about three months previously had an attack of 
what his owner described as “ difficult breathing like a horse 
with lung fever;” this passed off and was succeeded in a few 
weeks by a marked rigor ; after this the cow returned to an 
apparently normal condition, and so continued until her sud¬ 
den death. Autopsy revealed a large heart, bound down so 
firmly to the sternal pleura that in order to remove the viscera 
intact it was necessary to resect a portion of the sternum. 
The left ventricle was pierced near its apex by a very sharp, 
imperfect (headless) eightpenny nail, the pericardial fluid was 
small in amount, free from flakes of fibrin or pus, and while at 
a few points the sac was adherent to the heart, the adhesions 
were not many or formidable. The canal traversed by the 
nail evidently closed immediately after it, preventing access 
of air, and consequent decomposition of the wound secretions ; 
the auricles and ventricles were all filled with large, soft, post¬ 
mortem clots, extending some distance with the real ves¬ 
sels; there were small, recent extravasations with the newly 
formed tissue at the apex of the ventricle, and on cutting into 
the neoplasm about two tablespoonfuls of thick, creamy, odor¬ 
less pus, looking much like the pus of a strangles abscess, 
was evacuated, no endocarditis, valves clean, muscular sub¬ 
stance hypertrophied, though Professor Harger thought 
there was some thinning of the wall in the neighbourhood of 
the injury. This is a very instructive case. The passage of 
the foreign body from the stomach to the heart was marked 
by the period of difficulty of breathing, the rigor heralded the 
formation *of pus, yet for weeks this cow kept in good form, 
eat her rations and gave her quantum of milk with this nail 
in her heart; the absence of symptoms in this case and the 
progressive aggravation of symptoms as the traumatism ap¬ 
proaches the base of the heart, and especially as the right 
