342 
M. STALKER. 
CROTAUSM. 
A NEW DISEASE AMONG HORSES—RESULTS OF INVESTIGATION 
MADE AT THE VETERINARY COLLEGE AT AMES. 
By Peof. M. Stalker, M.D., V.S. 
Ames, Sept. 24th. — Special to the State Register .—Some two 
months since repeated calls began to be made on my office through 
letters from various localities between Council Bluffs and Sioux 
City, for information concerning a highly fatal form of disease 
prevailing among the horses. These letters came from towns in 
Iowa, Nebraska and Dakota, but in every instance from locations 
in the Missouri valley. I went out in answer to these calls and 
soon learned that the situation was one of sufficient gravity to 
justify alarm. After visiting a number of towns along the line of 
the Sioux City & Pacific Railway, and making long excursions into 
the country, I gathered sufficient history to justify the estimate 
of fatal cases at several hundred. 
The disease had been known in this region for three or four 
years, but had not until the present summer prevailed to such an 
extent as to attract general public attention. But now the loss in 
horse stock on some farms was not to be counted by hundreds, 
but by thousands of dollars. The disease proved to be one that 
had not hitherto come within the range of my experience nor had 
I any information of anything exactly identical with it. I spent 
several days among the farmers on the Iowa side of the Missouri 
river, taking careful notes of the sjunptoms, and gathering the 
history of the progress of the disease. On some farms I found 
almost all the horses affected, and on others but a few individuals. 
Deaths were an almost daily occurrence, and the farmer who 
owned a large stock of horses did not .know to-day whether he 
would have teams for his farm work a w r eek later. The disease 
in most cases is very slow in its progress, but proving almost uni¬ 
formly fatal after a number of weeks or months. There is a 
general decline of bodily vigor throughout this period, and the 
only abnormal symptom in many cases is that of marked emacia¬ 
tion and consequent weakness. Horses that have been kept at 
pasture through the summer, without work, and where the 
