REPOBTS OF CASES. 
217 
few cases of abomasal engorgement, without discussing rupture; 
other authors that I have access to are completely silent, and a tol¬ 
erably extended search through the journals fails to' reveal a case 
report. 
On March 5 I was called on the telephone by the owner of 
the cow in question. He reported that she would neither eat nor 
drink and seemed uneasy. As she was his only cow and as he 
has a young child, he asked me to come and make a tuberculin 
test. I replied that the present symptoms were not likely to be 
due to tuberculosis, and explained that a tuberculin test on a 
single cow was both troublesome and expensive, offering to come 
and see what was wrong. He, however, did not think that she 
was ill enough to justify such a visit. I advised him to give i 1 /* 
pounds of salt. 
On March 12 he called me to his farm. He informed me 
that he had had a tuberculin test made by another practitioner 
without reaction. 
Since March 4 she had practically eaten nothing and drunk 
very little. She had received 3T2 pounds epsom salts and one 
quart of linseed oif. Constipation had been complete till the 
night of March 11, when she had passed some hard horse-like 
balls, followed by scanty liquid faeces. This morning he had 
found her down and was unable to get her up, hence the call. 
The. cow was a dark Jersey of about 1,000 pounds, well nour¬ 
ished, seven years old, in milk for about a year and not preg¬ 
nant. She was in a condition of collapse; lay on her chest, with¬ 
out much evidence of pain, and no power in the hindquarters; ex¬ 
tremities, nose, mouth, ears, anus and vulva were cold. I could 
get no reading from anus or vulva with the thermometer shaken 
down to its low limit. To listen to the heart I stretched her on 
her right side, which caused pain; heart almost indistinguishable, 
at about 86. A little fluid faecal matter oozed from the flacid 
anus. Rumen doughy, but not distended. 
Diagnosis very doubtful, the most probable being heart trau¬ 
matism from the reticulum. I gave stimulants and left, predict¬ 
ing earlv death. 
She died during the night of the 12th, and the autopsy, such 
as it was, took place at 9 a. m. on the 13th. 
The body was already skinned and was lying on a field of 
snow about 2V2 feet deep. The temperature was about 15 0 F., 
with snow falling freely and a considerable wind, so that physi¬ 
cal wretchedness must be my excuse for not exhaustively exam¬ 
ining this very interesting case. 
