Yorkshire veterinary medical society. 79 
supply of oxygen, or evolve its customary quantity of carbonic 
acid gas, and after a time it becomes more and more impure, poorer 
and poorer from this cause; but beyond this I contend we have no 
proof whatever that any poisonous ingredient has passed into the 
blood. I maintain that if the blood had received a deleterious ingre¬ 
dient sufficient to destroy life, it would leave a taint on every tissue 
of the body which it came in contact with, instead of which we 
have no evidence whatever of such being the case, whereas by 
adopting my theory that the deleterious ingredient does not pass 
the barrier, or become in any way commixed in the blood, but that 
it is stopped at the barrier, acts as a foreign body, at different 
centres in the lungs, at which precise spots we find the gray tuber¬ 
culous hepatization, disintegration, vomica; these are the evidences 
I rely upon as proving it to be a decidedly local disease at com¬ 
mencement. Do you tell me that the sympathetic fever which is set 
up is evidence that there is poison in the blood ? I say e nay,’ that is 
no evidence of it at all; have we not an equal amount of sympa¬ 
thetic fever when a man gets extensively scalded with pure steam, 
or when a horse runs a clean nail into his foot ? would any man be 
so infatuated as to contend there must be poison imported into the 
blood in such cases ? Surely not, and in my opinion the other case 
is precisely similar, although not so clear or easily understood. 
We will now presume the horse has been breathing this impure 
atmosphere for some time; the air passages have become abnor¬ 
mally excitable, when some sudden or accidental cause, perhaps a 
little harder work than usual, a sudden check of perspiration, or 
inhaling a larger dose of this vitiated air all at once develops the 
active stage, the progress of endosmosis and exosmosis becomes 
suspended at several centres ; if the progress is not arrested, hepa¬ 
tization, disintegration and vomica result; this putrefactive process 
is always evidenced by the intense putrefactive odour, and then it is 
that the aspiring and ambitious veterinary surgeon has to learn that 
hardest of all lessons, viz. the limits of possibility. 
I verily and firmly believe, as science advances in our profession 
so will reliance on the action of medicine and counter-irritation 
become less and less in these diseases, and at the same time the 
current of men’s thoughts will drift or be drawn by scientific 
investigation into another channel, and these diseases will be treated 
by atmospheric means, by causing such patients to inspire a purified 
air, possibly a medicated artificially prepared air, which will act 
directly upon the tissues, overcoming spasms or perverted action, and 
restoring normal action. I will give you an example of what I 
mean, by illustrating a case in point. I have been a great sufferer 
from infancy up to late years of violent attacks of acute asthma ; 
the attacks usually took a similar course, and required three or four 
weeks for me to recover. The first three days the irritation in my 
air passages was so great that I had the greatest possible difficulty 
to breathe at all. During this period the continual laborious action 
of the intercostal muscles was such that the pain and suffering 
from nervous exhaustion was always indescribable. About the third 
