INFLUENZA AND THE INFECTIOUS DISEASES OF THE HOKSE. 303 
porary disease in the horse, under the name of “ febricula,” or 
“ febris irritativa.” 
As with ephemeral pneumonia, this new affection was con¬ 
tagious in its nature, and seemed to propagate itself by the absorp¬ 
tion of an unknown miasma. It may be possible that the eerms 
of brustseuche, by successive modification, may lose a portion of 
their pathogenic activity, and give rise to other infectious dis¬ 
eases, much less dangerous. 
SCALMA. 
Besides brustseuche and pferdestaupe, influenza comprehends 
another form of infectious disease in horses, whose mode of origin 
and progress or march presents peculiar characters. This dis¬ 
ease does not affect, in a given time, all the horses of a country, 
as pferdestaupe, nor those of a given locality, as brustseuche. It 
shows iteslf in one stable, then in another, more or less remote, 
where special conditions for its development exist. 
To this day this disease, as with many others, has been known 
in Germany as influenza. Considering its march and its pathog¬ 
nomonic symptoms, Dieckerhoff proposes to call it “ scalma.” 
In the Middle Ages, “ scalma,” (from an old word scalmo or 
scelmo) meant a series of very serious and insidious affections of 
domestic animals. Thus in the eighteenth century, an animal 
was said to have died of yellow schelm, when at the post-mortem 
yellowish liquids were found infiltrated in the various regions of 
the body; in other words, when the animal had succumbed to 
some carbuncular disease. 
Hippiatic Kuffus, in 1250, said that a horse was scalmatus 
when, after recovering from a very serious disease, he was reduced 
to an extremely lean condition. 
In the fourteenth century, Laurentius Kusius named the same 
disease scalmatura, a name kept up in Italian veterinary medi¬ 
cine up to the last century. 
The word scalma (equorum) has no special signification, it is 
true, not being like other names, taken from the necroscopical 
lesions found on the autopsy of animals, or from the causes, im¬ 
perfectly known, which give rise to it. 
