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BRAXY: A SHEEP DISEASE AND SOME GENERALITIES. 
Now let us look a little more closely at this disease known as braxy. 
It appears to be something entirely confined to the sheep, and was named 
and studied first in Northern Europe. In Germany, Denmark, Norway, 
and Iceland the disease is called bradsot. A study of the derivation of 
these words would be interesting, but out of place here. Bradsot appears 
to mean “sudden sickness.” ‘The disease seems to have been known in 
very early times, but it is difficult to place much reliance on the rather 
general descriptions referring to it. It is supposed, however, to have 
been first established and entailing severe losses in Scotland at the end 
of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, when sheep- 
farming practically only began in certain districts. The first scientific 
work on the disease in question was that of a Norwegian Government 
veterinary officer, Ivan Nielsen, in 1888, and he is supposed to have 
discovered a bacterium which was the cause of the disease. Further 
work has been carried out since by the Norwegian Government and by 
others, but we will confine our attention to that of a Royal Commission 
appointed by the British Government in 1901 to look into the matter. A 
voluminous report of the work of this Committee was published in 1906, 
and, reading it, one would almost take it for granted that this was the last 
word on braxy. Most veterinary text-books seem to have regarded it in 
this light. Yet the disease still comes up for discussion every now and 
again in Hurope. (Meissner, Mitt. d. Inst. f. Landw. in Bromberg, 1909; 
Titze and Weichel, Jour. Comp. Path., 1911; and others.) The posi- 
tion of affairs seems to me to be somewhat as follows:—Sheep die under 
certain circumstances, the symptoms and post-mortem conditions being 
very like or almost exactly the same as those enumerated by Hamilton 
in his Royal Commission Report. The disease is apparently braxy, 
but, there is another feature which should be present, and is of the 
greatest importance, 7.e., the cause. 
In the report of the Royal Commission occurs the statement :— 
“Putrefaction appears to set in the moment the animal dies, and is 
caused by the bravy bacillus. . . . Even days after the death of the 
animal, the peritoneal liqud may be found to contain an aimost pure 
culture of the braxy organism.” 
Now, if an investigator finds that he cannot isolate the above-men- 
tioned bacterium, he doubts either (1) that he has a case of braxy before 
him, or (2) that the cause of braxy is really a bacterium at all. Never 
having seen a case of braxy in Hurope, I am unable to add anything 
as to the cause of the typical disease. I do doubt, however, a great 
deal of the so-called braxy in Australia, and its reputed cause. I have 
also two criticisms to urge against the Royal Commission’s report, a 
report which, to some extent, seems to have stayed further investigation. 
The first is that it does not seem the proper thing to conclude that a 
bacterium taken from a putrefying sheep is the cause of its death, 
because, inoculated into another sheep, it produces a like result. Tt 
seems rather natural that a bacterium isolated at a post-mortem examina- 
tion some hours after death should kill other sheep when inoculated 
subcutaneously. The second criticism is that little or no attention seems 
to have been paid to the possibility of other than bacterial causes of 
raxy. 
Braxy is, to my mind, little more than a name for a group of clinical 
and post-mortem features, and more than one actual cause may provoke 
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