Talk:Blain (animal disease)

Blain
If a chilblain is a blister caused by a chill, then maybe this 'blain' is also a blister? It makes me think of the story in one of the James Herriot books, where he had to lance an abscess at the back of a cow's throat that was threatening to cut off its airway. In the book he stated that at the time it happened (the 1930s), they didn't know what caused these frequent abscesses in cattle, but modern (post-antibiotics) medicine decreed that they were probably caused by tuburculosis. He concluded by saying (IIRC) that this malady is almost never seen nowadays.--Anchoress 02:13, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Article trimmed down to stub
I've trimmed this article right down to the 1728 definition: the rest of the article seems to have been a work of synthesis from multiple non-authoritative Internet sources. There is, as far as I can see, no link at all between Chamber's use of the word "distemper", and the viral disease we now call distemper, but the older version of this article seems to have taken this idea and ran with it, generating an synthesis that conflated the two and was authoritative about neither. We need authoritative sources such as published books by experts in the field or academic papers. As Anchoress says above, it might well have been tuberculosis, or some other disease. To the best of my knowledge, we currently don't know what that might have been. -- The Anome (talk) 11:26, 5 October 2013 (UTC)


 * OK: now I've got a nineteenth-century source that describes "blain" as being the same as "gloss-anthrax": http://archive.org/stream/cattletheirbreed00youa#page/326/mode/2up . See also glossanthrax. No indication yet as to whether this is the same as any condition known to modern medical science... -- The Anome (talk) 11:41, 5 October 2013 (UTC)


 * OK, I've got a modern ref that describes gloss-anthrax as not being real anthrax on page 22; there's also a mention of blain/black-blain on page 27, but Google Books preview exposes only a line or so of text, so I can't follow it up. -- The Anome (talk) 12:31, 5 October 2013 (UTC)


 * OK -- I was eventually able to expand both of those. I'm wrapping the article up for the time being. -- The Anome (talk) 13:00, 5 October 2013 (UTC)