Cattle 1853 - Lewis Family Farm

CATTLE.
—the pupil of the eye becomes dilated—ah offensive secretion proceeds
from the lids, and the animal is evidently becoming blind—the
prostration of strength still goes on—the beast falls—he perhaps
rises again for a little while—and then falls and dies.
The disease is sometimes rapid in its progress, and tl\e animal is
destroyed in twenty-four or eight-and-forty hours after the first
attack. This is particularly the case with young cattle, and those
that are in good condition. At other times, the beast lingers on six
or seven days.
On examination after death, the lungs are gorged and black with
blood ; they are softened, and easHy torn ; they, however, contain
some spots of hepatization, or condensed substances, and often
abscesses filled with pus. In many parts gangrene has begun, and
chiefly about the anterior portion of the lung. The pleura, the pericardium,
and the diaphragm are black, thickened, and disposed to
gangrene. Traces of inflammation are found in the abdomen, but
not of so intense a character. The rumen is filled with diy food
the contents of the manyplus are so hardened that they may be
broken and reduced to powder ; the fourth stomach is more or less
inflamed ; the liver is enlarged, and of a yellow color, and the bile is
thickened.
It is evidently inflammation of the lungs, associated, more or less,
with that typhoid form of disease to which cattle are so subject.
Solitary cases of "it are seen ; but it often appears as a kind of epidemic.
It used to be called gangrenous inflammation of the lungs,
from the supposed gangrenous state in which' the lungs were found ;
but these appearances are produced more by congestion, and indicate
the violence with which the blood has been driven through the vessels
of the air-cells, and by which those vessels have been ruptured, and
the cells filled with blood. The blood, once effused, soon coagulates
in the cells, and' gives that black, softened, pulpy kind of appearance
which the cow-leech and the herdsman used to think was proof positive
of rottenness. It is true that this effused blood soon begins to be
decomposed, and the fetid smell of corruption ensues ; but this is
very different from gangrene of a living part. These congested lungs
show that the inflammation was of the intensest charaoter, and had
not been long in destroying the animal.
A contagious character of the disease is far from being established.
No other variety of pneumonia with which we are acquainted is contagious,
at least under ordinary circumstances ; yet the farmer should
take the most prudent course, and avoid, as much as he can, the
possibility of contagion.
Few years pass in which this acute pneumonia does not visit some
districts. The symptoms vary, but it is decidedly a disease of the
respiratory system primarily, and the danger depends on the intensity
of the inflammatory action in the early stage, and the degree in
;