FRACTURES. 
133 
It has been proven recently that as microbes increase in 
an animal body they elaborate chemical substances that, 
coursing through the blood and tissues, cause the symptoms 
of the disease. This toxic substance has been isolated and 
injected, and has been found to produce the same symptoms 
as those produced by the microbe, but in a less degree, and 
the intensity of these symptoms can be regulated by the 
amount of the substance injected, and I do not think we can 
say that animal tissues containing these toxic materials are 
entirely harmless when used for human food, although that 
infectious disease may not have been found to be transmissi¬ 
ble to man. 
This, gentlemen, ends my paper. Hoping it may lead to 
some instructive and profitable remarks, I thank you for 
your kind attention. 
FRACTURES. 
By H. Thompson, D.V.S., Paxton, Ill. 
(A Paper read before the Illinois State Veterinary Medical Association). 
Not knowing what other subject to present to you to-day, 
I have concluded to give you a report of several cases of 
fractures that have occurred in my experience. 
They tend to show to what extent nature will repair 
damage with a little help from man, and also that we should 
not be too hasty in ordering the destruction of poor dumb 
brutes. Their lives are as dear to them as ours are to us, 
and not only that, but their too frequent destruction places 
us in a bad light before the public, who are only too ready to 
call us butchers, instead of thinking us humanitarians. 
Case I. The first case was a black mare six years old, 
with a comminuted fracture of the os suffraginis. She had 
been staked out with 75 or 100 feet of rope, and about a week 
before I saw her, had pulled the stake up and run across the 
held. The rope became twisted around the fetlock and 
threw her, and after that when she walked the foot would 
swing around and the animal could not put her weight on it. 
