Treatment consists in scrupulous cleanliness and dryness, with the use of healing lotions weak enough to be non-irritating— alum, borax, copperas, blue stone, aniline blue, forma lin, hypochlorite of lime (bleaching powder), or, better still and cheaper, the Carell-Dakin's combination of lime hypochlorite (30 per cent chlorine), 4% ounces put in a bottle with 5 quarts water and shaken often for 6 hours; 2 ounces dried soda carbonate and i/ ounces bicarbonate of soda in 5 quarts water put in a separate bottle, well shaken and set aside for 6 hours; add the two liquids together, shake well for some minutes; set aside for one-half hour; siphon off the surface water without dis turbing the precipitate; filter through paper and use.
Immunity.— Viewed broadly, this consists in invulnerability of a living body to the attack of a microbe. Such resistance may apply to a particular microbe or many. Every race of animals shows a susceptibility to its own mi crobian enemies and insusceptibility to others, and where the latter is very pronounced the blood or other serums may often be used on other susceptible races to confer a measure of immunity. But this is not an invariable result; one animal, with a strong vulnerability to a given microbian affection, when it has once passed through that disease and recovered, shows an equally potent acquired immunity when again exposed to it. Another animal which naturally shows a strong tendency to suffer from a microbian or other protein poison when once it succumbs to it will show a far greater and more dangerous proclivity when exposed to it again (anaphylactic). This is the exact op posite of immunization. Observation and ex perience must guide as to the result to be ex pected from the use of any microbian or protein poison on an animal of a given race and in given conditions. The tolerance or intolerance of a given race, or animal, to a microbian poison cannot be asserted until one knows the action of that poison on that race and the his tory of that particular animal as regards pre vious infection, immunization and exposure. Vulnerability is also liable to be affected by age, by food and by other proteins generated in the body or outside of it. Rats confined to an exclusively animal diet become highly resist ant to anthrax. Algerian sheep bred for long ages in a highly anthrax district now retain a surviving race immune from this disease, whereas elsewhere flocks are quickly cut off in an anthrax environment. Pigs, dogs and fowls (meat eaters) are highly resistant to anthrax, but subjected to a low temperature they succumb readily. The animal food of sucklings
largely protects them from diseases to which they are obnoxious when put on a weaned diet. Some proteins which are highly injurious to man and animals when injected directly into the veins are habitually eaten by the same and prove harmless, once they have been digested by the stomach secretions and absorbed through the gastric mucous membrane. As examples of other poisons which greatly increase sus ceptibility to disease we have the effect of lactic acid, of the sarco-lactic acid developed in the muscles of an animal subjected to hard work and of phloridzin, which greatly increase the virulence and mortality of anthrax. These must serve to illustrate the many loopholes (known and still unknown) which interfere with disease-products in dealing with contagion and in immunization. And yet, where appli cable, such agents act with a success that may be considered almost magical. No known resort is more reliable in appropriate cases, and with care many of the pitfalls can be avoided, while if the protective or curative agent can be taken from the already infected herd and from no other, we safely escape any blunder in diag nosis and the far greater risk constantly present in using commercial products made in labora tories, where they may come from a far differ ent disease, with an utterly different microbe, therefore, which are useless for the disease in hand and even likely to introduce and disseminate the germs of a second malady to complicate the problem we have to meet and add perhaps materially to the mortality. Our repeated unhappy experiences in the importa tion in cowpox germs of an admixture of those of foot and mouth disease should settle for all time the safety of autotherapy from the herd itself and make it first choice over the uncer tain and dangerous commercial laboratory products. If taken from the infected herd Itself and applied to it, it cannot introduce any new and redoubtable infection, and if the ex isting infection is that of a contagious and self-limiting disease there is every reason to expect that the attack will be shortened and quickly ended. In the case of foot and mouth disease, or any other mild, non-fatal and short lived affection, every animal would be at once put under the sway of the poison, all would recover simultaneously, the herd would be released at an earlier date and any danger to other herds would be at an end.