528 
J. SCHMIDT. 
changes in the nervous system, that, as is seen in h£emoglobin- 
una, there remains a paralysis extending to several muscular 
groups, after the other symptoms have disappeared. 
The treatment of ealf fever, as praeticed up to the present 
time, has produced nothing which exerts the least influence 
upon the course of the affection. If one attended a milk fever 
patient before the disease had reached an advanced stage he 
must still give the opinion, regardless of the early treatment, 
that the patient would become worse before improvement could 
be expected. It has consequently been necessary to constantly 
seek for new, and if possible, better therapeutic agents and an 
extraordinarily large number of drugs have been tried against 
this affection. For a time this or that remedy has given ap¬ 
parently favorable results, but later has failed to prove its value. 
We may therefore conclude that it was the character of the 
malady, was its benign or malignant course, which has differed 
at different times, and has led to the recovery of a greater or 
less number of affected animals, but clearly expressed, one must 
say, that the amount of toxins which developed in the udder, 
as well as their chemical constitution was different. These 
periodical variations can be attributed in a measure, to the 
greater or less nutritive value of the food supplied and by its 
power to stimulate the milk secretion ; and the quality is very 
-probably dependent upon various atmospheric influences on the 
thermal variations, of low barometric pressure * and on all that 
can contribute to influence unfavorably the constitution of the 
blood and through it the lacteal cells. 
During the course of calf fever there comes, as is known in 
almost all cases, a shorter or longer period where life and death 
hangs in the balance ; the scale sinking or rising now on this, 
now on that side, so that even the experienced veterinarian can 
only with difficulty give a merely tentative prognosis. It is 
also generally recognized that the usually imperceptible action 
of the many medicinal agents, which have been used for milk 
fever, hav e made most veterinarians very skeptical, so that 
* L. Andersen, Tidsskrift for Veter. Bd., 23, S. 177. 
