554 SYNOPSIS OF CONTINENTAL VETERINARY JOURNALS.- 
Meat ”—In Switzerland has recently been decided an action 
which raises an important hygienic question, and a question 
of medical doctrine which is very obscured and very much 
debated. The intimate cause of typhoid fever is not exactly 
determined; we know that bad hygienic conditions, insuf¬ 
ficient nourishment and crowding favour its extension, and, 
under certain conditions, cause development of true epi¬ 
demics. The question was presented from another point of 
view before the Zurich Tribunal as follows:—On the 
80th May, 1878, a certain number of young people, male 
and female, met together at Klosen for a competition. There 
were assembled there nearly seven hundred singers, who 
partook of a luncheon, and of a dinner officially served by a 
neighbouring innkeeper. At that simple dinner were served 
soup, bouilli, roast veal, and sausages. Five or six days after 
that fete more than half of those who took part in it fell 
sick; also in the village of Klosen a number of families had sick 
children and adults. The outbreak of a disease affecting a great 
number of the partakers of the banquet gave rise to suspicions 
of poisoning. It was thought the disease resulted from the use 
of damaged meat or from poisoning by sausages, which have 
often given rise to affections sufficiently serious to render 
such foods suspicious. But soon the doctors of the place and 
Professor Huguenin, of Zurich, recognised that they were 
suffering from an epidemic of typhoid fever of so severe a 
character that about five hundred people were affected, and 
of them about one hundred died. The details left no doubt 
of this—symptoms, progress, post-mortem lesions all being of 
the ordinary typhoid character. This event gave rise to con¬ 
siderable disquietude, many inquiries were ordered by the 
cantonal council, and all tended to attribute the outbreak to 
the banquet. On their part M. Huguenin and his assistant, 
M. Walder, studied the various cases attentively, and 
endeavoured to ascertain the relations between the outbreak 
and ingestion of damaged meat. Things thus happened: 
The innkeeper who provided the banquet is also a butcher 
and sausage-maker. Two days before the fete he had 
received meat passed as healthy by the veterinary inspectors, 
but at the same time a butcher of the neighbourhood had 
handed over to him a quantity of meat from a beast slaughtered 
out of the town, which had been sick for some time. This 
had not been inspected. It is probable that that meat, either 
itself or in consequence of the alteration which it brought 
about in the healthy meat with which it was brought in 
contact originated the disease in all these wassailers. A 
dog, they say, who had eaten the bones of the calf was sick 
