ETIOLOGY OF THE GERMAN SWINE PLAGUE. 
559 
fecting organism in the earth, mud, water or dust of their grazing 
places. It is a fact that this exanthematous or cutaneous form 
occurs as a purely contagious disease and is transmitted from 
animal to animal.”* 
“ This infection, by means of cutaneous wounds, leads to a 
direct infection of the blood and to a rapidly fatal septicaemia.”f 
* I doubt that statement. There is no evidence that the disease in question is 
a contagious disease, in the strict sense of the term, in any of the descriptions of 
its clinical course, while there is every evidence that it is a purely infectious 
disease. Its attacking a very large number of animals in the same herd at 
the same time does not make it a contagious disease, but rather points to the 
presence of a common cause, and similar susceptible conditions in the animals, 
(wounds, etc.), nor does it exclude the possibility of flies, etc., playing an active 
role in its extension, as in anthrax. It is time that investigators began to have 
some idea of the philosophical-pathological use of medical technology. 
The disease discussed by Hueppe is one bound on locality, and peculiar tell¬ 
uric and climatic conditions in said localities. It never develops primarily in an 
animal organism, but such animals become infected when in infected localities. 
This is certainly not the essential nature of a contagious disease, which is one in 
which the contagious or infecting principle, so far as we now know, invariably 
has its proto-origin in the organism of some given species of animal life, and never 
outside of it. Etiologically speaking a contagious disease is one in which the de¬ 
velopment of the infecion is invariably intro-organismal and never extra-organ - 
ismal; though it may retain its vitality, or perhaps proliferate under favorable 
conditions, outside of any animal organism, but it never originates there. 
This “ Wildseuche,” like anthrax, is in reality an extra organismal disease 
with regard to its etiology. That infected animals can and do offer a favorable 
locality for the intro-organismal development of the germs, or that by means of 
some object, such as flies or their offal, can and do cause other animals to become 
infected, does not constitute such diseases as contagious. Animals with no 
abrasions, with every possibility avoided of the conveyance of the disease from a 
diseased one by flies, insects, etc., can stand side by side in the same stable with 
diseased ones and breathe the same air and have very much contact, with due 
precaution as to feed troughs, water buckets, etc., on the part of the attendants, 
and never be exposed to the least danger of infection. 
Susceptible animals cannot do this in glanders, pleuro-pneumonia, rinderpest 
and such diseases; nor would healthy dogs be endangered, under due precaution, 
were any number of rabid dogs caged in a kennel so that they could not possibly 
come in contact with them.—B. 
f Swine plague is not so rapidly fatal by any means. Detm'er’s places the 
average period at about seven days, while I am at present inclined to extend it to 
from ten to fourteen days. The question is not so simple, as the virulent activity 
of the same germ undoubtedly varies in different years and in different localities. 
—B. 
