NOTES ON VARIOLA EQUINA. 
17 
cow, and some have tried as many as forty times without suc¬ 
cess. In cases where lymph was obtained, it was used in the 
same way as ordinary vaccine lymph, and Ceely states that more 
than 2,000 subjects had been vaccinated with his variola vaccine 
lymph. But recent investigators have not been so fortunate, and 
in the experiments of the Commission appointed by the Society of 
the Medical Sciences at Lyons, although cows were successfully 
inoculated with small-pox, yet the lymph obtained from them 
produced in every case small-pox, sometimes of a violent type, 
and in one instance at least was fatal. Trousseau, in his lectures 
on clinical medicine, sums up the results of this Commission in 
the following words : “ The learned reporter ( Chauveau ) has first 
“ shown that small-pox can be perfectly well communicated to 
“ the bovine species by inoculation, to which species it stands in 
“ the same relation as vaccinia to mail; that is to say, that when 
“ an ox is inoculated with small-pox, it is thereby made proof 
u against cow-pox, just as vaccinated man is proof against small- 
“ pox. But a much more practical point is that small-pox in its 
“ passage through the system of a cow is not transformed into 
“ vaccinia; it remains small-pox, and returns to its original state 
“ of small-pox when re-introduced into the human species.” 
With such evidence as this adduced by Chauveau, the ques¬ 
tion might have been considered settled, but a recent conference 
on animal vaccination held in London, has re-opened the question, 
and Mr. Fleming, in an able article to the Lancet of January 31, 
on “ Human and Animal Variolas,” supports the view expressed 
by Chauveau that the domestic animals have each their peculiar 
variolae, that within certain limits these may be propagated from 
one species to another by inoculation, but that this is an abnormal 
and artificial mode of causing the disease. 
The limits of this paper do not allow me to enlarge upon this 
interesting branch of the subject, but if any of you desire to in¬ 
vestigate it further, I would refer you to Mr. Fleming’s article in 
the Lancet of January 31 and February 14, and also to a very 
exhaustive paper by Hr. Cory, on the “ Relation of Cow-pox and 
Horse-pox to Small-pox,” in St. Thomas’ Hospital Reports, Yol. 
IX., 1879. 
