EASTERN COUNTIES VETERINARY MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. 489 
poured into the cow’s mouth; but as she was no better at the ex¬ 
piration of two days he had her destroyed. 
My seventh and last was a traumatic case, and occurred in a 
ram which I had castrated with some others about a fortnight 
previously. They did well, and appeared to be quite recovered, 
when they were taken to a meadow to grass, but previous to being 
turned off one was caught, and some fly mixture poqred along the 
course of the spine, when, singular to relate, the sheep was struck 
with tetanus as with an electric shock —so sudden, indeed, that it 
appeared instantaneous, and so marked that the sheep was utterly 
unable to walk, but stood as if fixed to the ground. No medicine 
was given in this case, but the butcher was called in, and he soon 
put an end to the poor thing’s sufferings. 
I do not propose to offer any comments on the above case, as I 
have already exceeded the limits that I had fixed for this paper; but 
in the discussion which may follow I shall be happy to render 
every information which it is in my power to afford, with a view to 
furtlier elucidate such of them as may prove interesting to you. 
The 'post-mortem appearances which present themselves are by no 
means uniform, nor sufficiently constant to enable us to arrive at 
a satisfactory conclusion as to the pathology of tetanus. This, 
however, will not excite much surprise wdien we remember that it is 
a disease of perverted function, of which we can learn more from 
the symptoms exhibited during life tlian from post-mortem investi¬ 
gations, which are generally so instructive to the pathologist. 
Probably the morbid appearances most frequently observed are 
as follows; — Increased vascularity of the spinal cord and its 
meninges, also of the nerves in the vicinity of the injury, congestion 
of the lungs and mucous membrane of the alimentary canal, ecchy- 
mosis and rupture of muscular fibre, and the blood is generally 
uncoagulated. Softening of the structure of the spinal cord is also 
not unfrequently witnessed, with or without effusion of serum into 
the theca-vertebralis. 
The reading of the paper was followed by an animated discussion, 
in which most of the gentlemen present took part. Interesting 
cases of tetanus were related by the President and by Messrs. 
Shipley, Low, and Cleveland, in some of which prussic acid had 
been used Muth success, but the greater number of cases were stated 
to have terminated fatally under every system of treatment. 
Mr. Shipley thought the cases related by the essayist as occurring 
in the bovine animals remarkable, and remembered being told by 
Professor Varnell that a case of idiopathic tetanus in a cow, which 
occurred in his (Mr. S.’s) practice some eight or ten years since, 
was almost if not quite unique; but with sheep the case was far 
different, and Mr. Shipley’s experience induced him to believe that 
the sheep was far more subject to tetanus than any other animal; 
he remembered castrating seventeen rams, some with the screw 
clam over the scrotum, and others with the knife and ligature ; some 
were found to be tetanic in twenty-four hours after the operation. 
