PARTURIENT APOPLEXY. 
11 
PARTURIENT APOPLEXY. 
By A. Roux, Y.M., St. Louis, Mo. 
The opinion I had formed some years ago respecting this 
disease might have become settled and fixed, but that in the dis¬ 
cussion of so important a subject it becomes necessary to consider 
and review the various theories concerning it which have been 
entertained for the past century, and brought down to the present 
time; and as the result of long investigation it has been, at last, 
classified with curable diseases. 
The following seems to be a correct history of the affection 
which sometimes follows the parturition of our domestic animals. 
It was in 1718 that Strohler wrote respecting the puerperal 
fever of women, and that such veterinarians as Favre, Hering and 
Fuchs recognized it as inflammatory, on account of the collapses 
and the paraphlegic form which accompanied it. For more than a 
century, and almost without distinction, it was treated as metritis, 
metroperitonitis, and even septicaemia, whose starting point was 
in the genital apparatus, and which resulted from putrid infection 
following parturition. 
In 1817, C. Yiborg made another important study of this 
disease, of which the prognosis was almost so uniformly unfavor¬ 
able, and confirmed the opinions of his predecessors, who until 
that period had agreed to consign it to a prominent place among 
intractable disorders of which a fatal termination might be con- 
sidered the usual sequel. The true etiology of the disease had not 
then been mastered,and the modes of treatment recommended were 
various, and of course, with widely differing results. Some prac¬ 
titioners claimed a percentage of recovery from fifteen to twenty- 
five per cent., but this degree of success was quite offset by the 
unfavorable reports of others, which greatly reduced the average 
and quite neutralized the exceptional good fortune so claimed. 
Vitular fever has been well described by Heiss, Garreau, 
Carsten, Harms, Spinola, Hoell, etc., and was proved to be quite 
a distinct disease from puerperal fever in women, on account of 
the differential treatment employed in both varieties. 
