Читать книгу On the cattle plague: or, Contagious typhus in horned cattle. Its history, origin, description, and treatment - Bourguignon Honoré - Страница 3

Everyone is talking of the Cattle Plague! But why should we borrow this sinister and gloomy denomination from the middle ages and from the people's vocabulary? Is this, then, an unknown and incurable disease? Is this the first time that it has made its appearance on the soil of Great Britain? To judge by the manner in which the diffusion of this complaint has been met, accounted for, explained, and discussed, one might imagine it was so; and yet the mere observation of its causes, its symptoms, and its signs and effects on the bodies of the diseased animals, besides a few references to the medical library, would easily have testified that nature did not wait until the second half of the 19th century to generate a new distemper. No! Nothing new has appeared for a long time in the worlds of space. The cosmic phenomena pursue their perpetual course, and the organic phenomena, à fortiori, do the same. Life, throughout the whole range of the animal kingdom, whatever may be its changes and fluctuations, submits to the fixed and invariable laws which hold dominion over health and disease. Our presumption and ignorance alone can account for the astonishment we manifest, not only when we witness great general calamities, but even when we look upon those simple morbid derangements which organic matter, both animal and vegetable, is continually undergoing on the globe, in the natural progress of destruction and dissolution.

The habit we most of us have contracted of confining our observations to the phenomena which strike our eyes, instead of fixing them on the general causes by which these phenomena have been produced; the forgetfulness of some, in others the want of acquaintance with general and comparative pathology, have in this instance led many conscientious inquirers to misapprehend both the nature and the treatment of the cattle complaint. It is in vain that we have subdivided and classed medical science – in vain that we have arbitrarily instituted a veterinary medicine and a human medicine; nature, in her acts, has no such subtleties. With nature, organic matter is organic matter, life is life; and although it may be true that both organic matter and life become more complex, and continue to rise in perfection till they reach man, it is quite as true that the laws of pathology and physiology are the same in all, and that it is just as difficult to cure the typhus of the ox as that of man. As, therefore, it is because we overlooked these fundamental truths, that the outbreak of the cattle distemper found us unprepared, we must treat the subject with all the gravity which is its due.

Let it not, however, be feared that the special fact of the so-called Cattle Plague will be lost sight of amidst a crowd of scientific generalities. No; collateral reflections, seemingly foreign to the main argument, will concur to elucidate it; and all these rays of light will converge to a common centre, reflecting, we flatter ourselves, some evident facts and practical truths.

This work on the contagious typhus of the ox is divided into four principal parts.

The first part contains the history of this typhus from the remotest times down to the present day. It is divided into several sections.

The second part, which gives the description of the disease, is subdivided into four chapters.

The first chapter treats of general typhus, in order that a perfect understanding may be arrived at as to the name and definition of the particular distemper which affects the ox.

The second relates to the causes and origin of the disease.

The third treats of its symptoms, its progress, &c.

The fourth contains its mode of treatment.

The third part gives some plain instructions for the benefit of farmers, cattle-dealers, and dairymen.

The fourth part gives a development of the scientific means and safeguards to be adopted, in order that this country shall never relapse into that state of helpless panic to which a want of preparation exposed it when the present epizootia began its ravages.