REPORTS OF CASES. 
19 
its presence is such an alarming symptom to the physician, 
and so materially jeopardizes the capacity of his patient’s 
organism to withstand the complications or lesions that may 
ensue, that he searches diligently for a drug that will lower 
the abnormal amount of animal heat that is being generated, 
without lowering any vital function. Within the memory of 
most existing practitioners there have been introduced to the 
medical and veterinary professions many new antipyretic 
medicines, such as antipyrin, antifebrin, antikanmia, etc., but 
I believe it is becoming popular now to decry these prepara¬ 
tions, by ascribing to them mysterious deleterious influences 
upon the heart. I have recently had such good experience 
with one of this group, that it can do no harm to make 
a plain recital of the action of acetanilid in two cases from 
which I have just emerged with a great deal of satisfac¬ 
tion, especially as they follow immediately in the wake of 
two other cases with a fatal termination, which were treated 
by what we like to call our “good old reliable treatment,” 
quinine and whiskey. 
The disease specifically we will term influenza, though that 
designation really conveys to the mind nothing. We have a 
number of fevers of a typhoid nature grouped under this 
heading which are as different as though they possessed no 
symptoms in common. What we commonly designate pink¬ 
eye is a febrile disease having local lesions in the conjunctiva, 
and lids of the eye, along with swelling of the extremities. 
Influenza will include this class of disease, and yet the specific 
fever of which I now speak has none of these lesions nor 
symptoms; neither is it accompanied by catarrhal conditions of 
the air passages, but expends itself at first in extreme hyper¬ 
pyrexia, and whatever lesions may subsequently make their 
appearance are depended upon, and not occurring as an 
accompaniment of fever. After a careful study of this 
disease I have found more resemblance between it and that 
disease occurring in the human patient euphoneously termed 
“ La Grippe,” than exists between it and any other affection to 
which horses are subject; the same cyretic state, the muscular 
weakness, and the expenditure of the attack upon the heart. 
