The plague of 212 swept away all the inhabitants of Sicily, cattle as well as men; that of 178 destroyed all the priests, who sought in vain for victims free from the contagion, to offer them up as sacrifices to the offended Gods.
Cecilius Severus gives a most striking description of a pestilential disease which, in 376 A.D., swept away all the cattle in Europe. Judging from his account of that scourge, we may fairly believe that the distemper he has described was identically the same as the one which has just broken out in England. "A universal distaste, sudden dejection, vertigoes, spasmodic tension in the limbs, _a painful_ _swelling of the lower belly_, violent affections of the nerves, sudden death--everything shows the presence of a pestilential ferment, which irritates the solids, infects and vitiates the fluids, which is the cause of the putrefaction of the humours, manifested by the swelling of the lower belly, which in that case depends on a putrid fermentation so as to disengage air."
A piece of iron, representing the sign of the Cross, was heated in the fire, and when red-hot was applied to the forehead of the sick animals; and this remedy was looked upon at that time as the most effectual they could apply.
Grégoire de Tours makes mention of an epidemic, the result of a long dry summer, which, in 592, was very fatal in its havoc, sparing no living creature whatever.
André Duchesne, in his "History of England," speaks of an epidemic which, in 1316, during the reign of Edward II., owed its origin, on the contrary, to a long season of rains.
The celebrated physicians Ramazzini and Lancisi relate that in 1711, an ox which had been imported from Hungary, that constant focus of typhus, displayed the most deadly form of the cattle disease, in the Venetian territory, although no alteration in the air or waters had been observed in Italy, and the seasons had been regular and the pastures abundant. The contagion spread into Piedmont, where it carried of 70,000 head of cattle; thence it extended to France and Holland, each of which countries lost 200,000 of these animals. The trade in hides introduced the distemper into England, where it proved no less fatal. It was the same in the other countries of Europe.