SOME REMARKS ON ANTI-HOG CHOLERA SERUM. 
6?1 
ORIGINAL ARTICLES. 
SOME REMARKS ON ANTI-HOG CHOLERA SERUM. 
By Dr. C. P^isch, St. Louis, Mo. 
Notwithstanding- the eminent work done by men like Salmon, 
Theobald Smith, Billings, and others, the question of speeific 
causative micro-organisms in hog cholera, swine pest and swine 
fever, has not been cleared up to the point of allowing a success¬ 
ful attempt at establishing an etiologic therapy in these diseases. 
A part of the confusion reigning in this domain is no doubt due 
to the fact that in the laboratories a great number of bacteria 
have been cultivated and experimented upon under the name of 
hog cholera or swine pest bacilli, which in reality had no re¬ 
lation to these diseases whatsoever, ^his, especially, pertains 
to the work of Metschnikoff and of his disciples. Another 
group of observers has been misled by the protean nature of the 
epizootic in question, and by the phenomenon, that swine pest 
and hog cholera may be met with both of them in one and the 
same animal, either coordinated or the one grafted, as it were, 
upon the other. This fact has, among others, been the stum¬ 
bling block for Voges, * who in an otherwise eminently able 
discourse, has accumulated a valuable mass of material. 
Whenever we attempt to deal with swine plague (the word 
swine pest ” ought to be used only comprehensively for swine 
plague and hog cholera) and hog cholera, we must first of all 
remember that either one of them may appear in one of three 
principal types : as a mainly cutaneous, broncho-pulmonal, or 
intestinal disease, and that very often two of these types com¬ 
bine to form a picture of mixed symptoms. Omitting the cuta¬ 
neous type as the least frequent, the two others combine in such 
varying degrees, that practically no one case resembles the 
other. It is true that in true hog cholera the intestinal symp¬ 
toms largely predominate, while swine plague as a rule exhibits 
* Zeitschr. fiir Hygiene und Infectionskrankh. xxiii, p. 149 fl'. 
