This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
125
EPIDEMICS.

to drink and to bathe themselves in. In cold and rainy weather they should be kept in their styes; and during the heat of summer their drink should be slightly nitrated, acidulated, or salted. Whey is an excellent thing for those that are weakly. Small doses of camphor and nitre, with the addition of a few grains of calomel, administered in some cooling vegetable decoction, is a useful preventive. If one pig is attacked he should be removed, and the others taken out while the sty is well fumigated.

In 1838 we have accounts of an inflammatory epizoötic among pigs, rapid and fatal in its course, and attacking by preference store pigs rather than those put up to fatten.

Symptoms.—Prostration of strength, difficulty of breathing, discharge from the mouth and nostrils, constant cough, and reddish hue of the skin. These went on increasing in intensity until death put a period to them, which usually occurred in from three days to three days and a-half after the commencement of the attack.

Treatment.—Bleeding and laxative medicines, stimulating frictions of the trachea and parietes of the thorax, seemed to be the most efficient remedies. Doses of tartarized antimony and Hydrarg. Sub. Mur. in three grains of each, administered every twelfth hour, produced vomiting, and appeared to give ease. Sulphate of magnesia relieved those cases in which there was constipation. The causes seemed obscure. The epidemic prevailed in the summer; but whether it arose from the warmth of the weather, from want of a sufficient supply of water, or from dry and heating food, was not at all evident.

Paulet has described a very similar epidemic among swine, which frequently prevails in one or the other of the arrondissements of the south of France. He describes it as highly inflammatory, rapidly going on to gangrene, and exceedingly contagious, but is at a loss to what cause to attribute it.

The precursory symptoms are, according to him, restlessness, cough, loss of appetite, dullness, and a weak tottering gait. These gradually go on increasing in intensity until the seventh or eighth day, when they have become very marked. Then alternations of heat and coldness of the body come on; the ears droop and are cold, the head is heavy, and the tongue becomes discolored; the breath is fetid, and there is a copious discharge of mucus from the nostrils. The skin is tinged with red, but the hue is not very evident excepting under the belly: the animal appears to be in great suffering, and cries out pitifully. This general inflammation of the integuments rapidly goes on to gangrene, which alteration is evidenced by the livid violet hue of the diseased surfaces. Death then rapidly follows.

He, too, prescribes bleeding, and from the ears and veins of the belly, while many authors condemn it as debilitating. The only