174 
W. L. WILLIAMS. 
history of azoluria will, if their correctness be admitted, serve 
as a valued guide. 
Prof. Williams (Prin. Prac. Vet. Med.) says; “ The path¬ 
ology of the disease is, in my opinion, a hypernitrogenous 
condition of the blood and system generally, due to over-feed¬ 
ing and want of exercise.It seems necessary that 
some degree of muscular exertion be performed, and the only 
way in which I can account for this is, that the blood, before 
exercise, contains a superabundant quantity of albumen, unap¬ 
propriated by the tissues, and that the exercise, by increasing 
the rapidity of circulation and the respiratory movements, 
induces a rapid oxidation of such superabundant albumen, 
whereby it is transformed into urea, hippuric acid, etc., with 
which the blood becomes overloaded, and the kidneys stimu¬ 
lated to excrete what is proving deleterious.” 
This theory of origin, as we shall later have occasion to , 
repeat, seems to us the most consistent of all, in so far as it 
goes, but it stops short of completion and fails to explain or 
suggest why the disease occurs uniformly very early in exer¬ 
cise, when, if the animal is severely worked, there is probably 
as much of these “ oxidized albuminoids’’ in the blood after 
one or two hours of labor as before ; nor does it make clear 
to us why an animal which has regularly been allowed an 
apparently trivial amount of regular exercise, which would in 
no way diminish the hyperalbuminosis, will not contract the 
disease, neither does it explain why in the early stage of the 
disease prompt quietude aborts the attack. 
The late Prof. Robertson (Equine Med.) subscribed to the 
doctrine of hyperalbuminosis, and believed also that the path¬ 
ological products of albuminoid decomposition begin to accu¬ 
mulate in the blood prior to exercise, so that, to his thinking, 
the pathological state antedates the muscular exertion. 
Beyond this he does not attempt to go, admitting that many 
phenomena of the disease are, as yet, unexplained. 
His belief that the pathological changes exist prior to 
exercise is strongly denied by clinical experience, since mus¬ 
cular exertion is uniformly an essential factor in the origin of 
the disease. 
