On the cattle plague Part 12

This allowance having been made for the most pressing dangers, attention should next have been directed to a matter no less important--we mean the treatment and cure of this distemper; for we will never admit that England can have fallen back a century, and that whilst those enlightened men--Malcolm Flemming and Layard--proposed and tried to cure and prevent ox-typhus in 1757, we, in 1865, shall have been reduced to the horrible alternative, the repugnant barbarity, of the general and indiscriminate extermination of the tainted cattle.

Whilst, therefore, the treatment of the typhus would have been studied on the spot, and the most urgent measures would have been taken to withstand the propagation of the evil, they would have established, a few miles from London and on the northern side, in the direction of the great cattle market, a number of hospitals or sanitariums, and, as far as possible, within a park. These hospitals, constructed of wood, containing, besides stables and sheds, a slaughter-house, a dwelling-house for the staff of employes, a laboratory stocked with all the physical and chemical instruments required, &c., would in two or three weeks have been sufficiently prepared to receive a certain number of cattle.

Provided with these advantages and opportunities, a permanent stage of operation would have been raised on which trials and experiments might have been made with every chance of fruitful results. In these sanitariums, for instance, the most practical physicians and veterinarians might have entered upon a systematic course of treatment, dividing the bovine patients into cla.s.ses, according to their periods of disease, their age, &c.; and trying some particular mode of treatment, some remedy considered as effectual, alternately, upon each of these cla.s.ses of tainted cattle. These experiments, having been made under circ.u.mstances so favourable, would have enabled the faculty to establish a medical basis, which, if not infallible, would have been relatively efficacious, and might have saved a large number of the infected animals.

Whilst thus fixing their attention on the cure of the sick animals, these experimentalists would have carefully studied and practised the preventive treatment by inoculation, availing themselves both of Layard's hints and recommendations and of the practical knowledge acquired by the medical expedition to the steppes, which would by that time have returned from their mission. They would have selected animals smitten with the genuine typhus, of the typhoid and intestinal form, in _the third period_, whilst the depurative and critical secretions are running from the mucous membranes; they would have gathered the virus from its springs of infection or from its purulent subcutaneous deposits or from the serum of the blood.

On the other hand, they might have chosen four heifers, of good const.i.tutions and healthy, and these they might have prepared, according to Layard's advice, for inoculation, by a special treatment, and by hygienic and medical cares. On some of these the inoculation would have been made near the tail, according to the subcutaneous process, with a lancet charged with typhic virus; on others, a crucial incision, or cross-cut, would have been made on the crupper. But, to speak truth, we cannot do better than Layard, whose ingenious treatment, with all due deference to a certain veterinarian of our day, deserves a very different epithet than that of being amusing.[T] Layard says:--

"That nothing may be omitted which in any shape can contribute to the success of inoculation, due attention should be paid to the const.i.tution and state of the beast, no less in this practice on the cattle than on the human species. Undoubtedly the young, healthy, and strong bid fairer for a good issue than the old, sickly, and feeble; each of these different const.i.tutions demand a particular treatment, even in the method of preparation; and however trifling it may seem to many--the urging a necessity of preparation--I will venture to affirm that I have seen excellent effects arising from a rational preparation, and fatal events from want of preparation. I have likewise been witness of unfavourable turns, merely from an injudicious preparation.

"The beasts which are sanguine require moderate bleeding; those that have but a small share of blood must have none drawn. The strong must, besides moderate bleeding and purging, be kept on light diet and their body kept open.

Thus, scalded bran, mixed with their hay and chaff; will cool them. The weakly, and such as are inclined to scour, must be kept on dry fodder, and have peas and beans given them to strengthen them. A mess of malt, or a quart of warm ale, with a few spices, will be very suitable for them.

"Whatever diseases the cattle be affected with, if time will permit, they are first to be removed.

"The cattle to be inoculated are first to be well washed, rubbed dry, and then curried, to remove all the filth from the hair and skin. Then they are to be placed in a s.p.a.cious barn or stable, where the air is temperate and no cold can come to them. There they are to be prepared according to the direction already given, foddered with good sweet hay, and watered with clear spring water; and if the distemper be not near they may be turned out into the air, near the barn or stable, and may stay there a few hours in the middle of the day.

"When it appears that the cattle are in perfect health, free from any infection or other disease, brisk and lively, neither costive nor scouring, and chewing their cud, then the operation may be safely undertaken, and henceforth they must be confined to the barn.

"Since there is observed to follow the greatest flow of the contagious and putrid particles separated from the blood, wherever the infectious matter makes an impression at first, particular care must be taken not to inoculate near such vital parts as the heart and lungs, nor near the womb, if a cow with calf be inoculated; for, though rowels are properly applied in the dewlaps, to draw off the pestilential humour from the breast, and in other cases beasts are frequently rowelled in the flanks,--yet in this operation, as matter is inserted by these channels into the neighbouring vessels, those vital parts, or the womb, might become the chief seat of the disease, and the event prove fatal.

"To prevent such accidents, human beings have been inoculated on the arms and legs, and now-a-days the arms are found sufficient. I would recommend that the cattle should be inoculated about the middle of the shoulders or b.u.t.tocks, on both sides, to have the benefit of two drains. The skin is to be cut lengthways two inches, deep enough for the blood to start, but not to bleed much. In this incision is to be put a dossil or pledget of tow, dipped in the matter of a boil full ripe, opened in the back of a young calf recovering from the distemper. It may not be amiss to st.i.tch up the wound, to keep the tow in, and let it remain forty-eight hours. Then the st.i.tches are to be cut, the tow taken out, and the wound dressed with yellow basilicon ointment, or one made with turpentine and yolk of egg, spread on pledgets of tow. These dressings are to be continued during the whole illness, and till after the recovery of the beast, to promote the discharge; and then the wound may be healed with the cerate of lapis calaminaris, or any other.

"On the third day after inoculation, the discolouring of the wound, whose lips appear grey and swollen, will be a sign that the inoculation has succeeded; but the beasts, as Professor Swenke informs us, did not fall ill till the sixth day, which answers exactly to the observations daily made in the inoculating of children. Yet the Professor adds that on the third day a costiveness came on, which was removed by giving each calf three ounces of Epsom salts.

"No sooner do the symptoms of heaviness and stupidity appear than the beasts must have a light covering thrown over them, and at night fastened loosely. They must be rubbed morning and evening, and curried, till the boils begin to rise; warm hay-water and vinegar-whey must be given plentifully. Should the beasts require more nourishment, dry meat, such as hay, with a little bran, may be offered. I should be very cautious in giving milk-pottage, even after the boils and pimples had all come out, for fear of bringing on a scouring. However, this caution is proper, that whenever milk-pottage be given the vinegar-whey is to be omitted for obvious reasons. In cases of accident, the same attention is to be observed in the disease by inoculation as in the natural way, and the medicines recommended are the same I would use; but by inoculation there seldom is a call for any, so favourably does the distemper proceed through its several stages.

"The crisis being over, it will be proper to purge the cattle, to air them by degrees, and to have the same regard in the management of them as is laid down in the chapter on the method of cure."

The typhic virus is so highly infectious and poisonous that the first animals inoculated would have all died; it would have been necessary to inoculate successively a number of animals with the virus derived from the first inoculation, and transmitted from an inoculated animal to a healthy one, by which means they would have acquired a virus of the first, second, third generation, and so on. These inoculations having always been made on four animals at a time; on two of them, the disease would have been left to take its own course, in order that the experimentalists might watch its progress and development, and the two others would have supplied the virus for inoculation.

At the third or fourth generation, the virus, modified and attenuated in its infectious principles, would no longer have been mortal in its effects, as experience has proved in Russia. Then the inoculated animals, placed under the control of hygienic cares and a few purgative and tonic medications, would have pa.s.sed from convalescence to health.

The virus thus attenuated would have supplied the means of a practical inoculation on a large scale to all healthy animals.

Proceeding thus, they would, moreover, but have followed the method adopted in those times of epidemic and epizootia when the small-pox is raging. On those occasions, we subject our sick patients to vaccination or revaccination; we inoculate the variola in our sheep threatened with the contagion; we pursue the same course in cases of epizootia, of peripneumonia. And truly, that which it is reasonable to do in one case may be generalized and applied to a greater number.

The experiment we have suggested might, perhaps, have been long and difficult, nay, even costly, but we should have established, after a certain time, the rational method of this preventive treatment, and have distributed the same throughout the country. Veterinarians would have formed in particular districts their centre of operation, in which the preventive virus might have been produced, and they might have gone from farm-house to farm-house to inoculate all the cattle within them.

From these facts and observations made by the physicians, precious doc.u.ments would have been derived; and if, contrary to all expectation, success had not justified every hope, we should have bequeathed to future generations facts and experiences which would have been of the most useful character to them and full of instruction. Thus it is that science advances and progress is accomplished.

If all that we have just indicated as a realizable matter had been done, in effect, England would have afforded in this, as she has so often done in other cases, a n.o.ble example to be followed, and would have acquired a new t.i.tle to the admiration of other nations.

But, unfortunately it has not been so: silence has succeeded to eloquence at Guildhall, and the meetings at the Mansion-house have flickered away. That which was held on the 27th of September, seems likely to be the last of them.[U]

The subscriptions which, in spite of all the praiseworthy efforts and earnestness of the Lord Mayor, did not reach 2000_l._, were returned to the subscribers, so that all the attempts which have been made to centralize the direction to be given to the various measures have proved abortive. The plan of forming sanitariums, as well as that of compensating the owners of cattle, have both fallen to the ground.

What can we think of such a state of things when we see the ox-typhus extending its ravages to sheep, and have to fear that the disease will spread to other animal species? What serious reflections it creates in our minds, and what awful consequences we might deduce therefrom! But what would be the use of them?

Let us add, however, that France, save on the recognised principle of indemnification, and a more speedy extermination of her tainted cattle, has shown the same deficiency as to the means of treatment as England; whilst we have the consolation of attributing this impotence on the part of this country to the fact that the outbreak of the epizootia has occurred during the Parliamentary recess.

It is, therefore, to inst.i.tutions rather than to individuals that we must ascribe the impossibility of conquering the difficulties which have been met, and which at any other time might not have obstructed the course of things. Far be it from us therefore to accuse of indifference a great people renowned for their zealous promotion of public interests, for their charity and inexhaustible philanthropy, whose innumerable asylums have been opened to every misfortune, who support so many hospitals and public charities by their voluntary contributions, and who, in so many calamities, have seen some devoted heroine issue from her retirement to a.s.suage them. For if the Crimean war produced its lady beneficent in the person of Florence Nightingale, all of us must allow that if others had followed the example of Miss Burdett Coutts, who, in a manner, has stood alone against the storm, by the facilities she has afforded for treating and experimentalizing on the cattle smitten with typhus, the formidable scourge might have been arrested in its focus.

III.

_Curative Medication._

We might acquire the means of resisting the general causes which develop the typhus; we might stop its diffusion, we might even prevent it, by inoculating the sound and healthy animals, and yet it would be necessary, none the less, to search for the means of curing it; for, as in the small-pox, the preventive treatment of which we know, certain circ.u.mstances would arise in the disease which would oblige us to treat it. And as we are far from being able to resist the generation and dissemination of this scourge, which reckons almost as many victims as sufferers, it is important to make known what treatment we can oppose to the functional derangements to which it gives rise.

As we have already said, this typhus, when the organism has absorbed its peccant and infectious miasma, produces a succession of disorders which become in a manner temporary functions; it pursues its phases, its periods; and as the functional derangements differ at these several epochs from the development of the morbid phenomena, the course of medicine which is employed to check them cannot always be the same.

Starting, therefore, from practical data, we will attend the disease in its gradual advance--that is to say, in its distinct periods--and will afterwards explain certain predominant symptoms, which, owing to their importance, must likewise fix the attention of the careful therapeutist.

It will be remembered that we have recognised four periods in the regular course of typhus:--

1st, a period of incubation; 2nd, a period of initiation; 3rd, a period of duration; 4th, a period of decline.

But, in the first place, before beginning the treatment, every farmer or grazier, or cattle-owner, who keeps a certain number of cattle, should divide his herd into several cla.s.ses, in order to regulate and methodize the cares to be given to the sick.

Thus, he will form a first cla.s.s, comprising the animals in a sound and healthy state, having had no intercourse, either direct or indirect, with the tainted cattle, and which he will be careful immediately to isolate and keep apart.

A second cla.s.s must be formed of those beasts, which, though as yet unaffected with the distemper, have, nevertheless, been exposed more or less directly to its contagion, by living and consorting with them, or by their contact with other animals, either at fairs or markets, or in the s.h.i.+ps and cattle-trucks on the railway during their transit from one place to another. The horned cattle composing this latter cla.s.s must be carefully watched, and be made the subject of the preventive treatment, the moment the first sign appears of the working of the incubation.

A third cla.s.s must be formed, consisting of cattle actually smitten with the distemper.

These divisions of animals being thus settled and separated, will diminish the labour and the cost of treatment and the liability to diffuse the complaint, especially when the epizootia begins to lose its virulence.

_First Period--of Incubation._

We have said that infectious diseases, when once the frame had suffered the effects of the poisonous miasma, pursued their fatal course, and that, generally speaking, it was impossible after such infection to arrest its development. We say generally, for the typhus at the outbreak of its appearance on a virgin soil sometimes manifests itself in a benignant manner, then it becomes more destructive, by-and-bye its pernicious properties decline, and it in some sort goes out of itself.

One would say that the epizootia, like those it smites, has likewise its peculiarities, its period of initiation, of duration, and of decline.

There are in consequence fixed times or epochs during which the sufferers afford better scope for our means of action; at a given moment the attenuated virus, having lost much of its deadly effects, ceases to produce death, which decline is the real source of the marvellous successes obtained by certain remedies against the epizootia.

If it be true that the distemper at its period of duration, and at its most critical moment, cannot be fettered, we should not be justified in a.s.serting positively the same, as respects the period of incubation.

Indeed, we are convinced ourselves, that if ever this disease shall be clogged in the wheel, _if ever its specific remedy shall be discovered, it will be within the period of incubation_, when the economy begins to struggle with the first phenomena of the poisoning. Be that as it may, we cannot, in epizootic times, too earnestly enjoin the owners of cattle to submit their animals to a strict and close inspection, in order that, when the first signs of incubation appear, they may modify the animal's usual diet, and attack the disease at its birth, so as to render it abortive, if the thing can be done.

At this period we must endeavour to come to Nature's a.s.sistance, we must shake and stir up the economy, we must unseat the morbid functions which seek to master us, and then the vital force, thus solicited and stimulated, may sometimes struggle with advantage. To do this effectually, if the animal is atonic and predisposed to adynamia, if his internal organs are relaxed, we will strengthen him by administering every day a stimulating beverage. If he is confined to the stall we will give him the open air, and let him graze the fields; which is a treatment by itself for the invalid animal, so vivifying is the pure air of the common, and so thoroughly different from the atmosphere which is pent up within his stall. If the animal is strong, l.u.s.ty, exuberant with health, let him be purged once or twice, the purgative to be given at intervals of twenty-four hours. (We shall give the medical formula in the chapter addressed to farmers, graziers, &c.)

This purgation, moreover, will correspond with the theory of those authors who consider the evacuations as the proper means of delivering the economy from the infectious miasms which have been absorbed.

If the beast is plethoric, recourse should sometimes be had to bleeding, especially in hot and dry seasons, like the one we have recently pa.s.sed through.

These stimulative and depletive medications cannot but be favourable to the animal, since it will antic.i.p.ate the treatment to which he must be submitted a few days later, when the disease shall have declared itself.

To this treatment, in some sort preventive, must be annexed an _antimiasmatic_ beverage, either a _permanganate of potash_, or a solution of _chlorate of potash_, or of _a.r.s.enic acid_ in powder, mixed with some aromatized beverage, or solution of _a.r.s.eniate of soda_. These anti-typhic drinks must be discontinued on those days when the sick cattle are purged.

It need hardly be said, that during this period of incubation the feeding of the cattle must be strictly attended to, and that the animal must receive unusual hygienic care.