Onésime Delafond (1805-1861) and the doctrines of pathology 1.

Part 1. Humorism

Henri Mamert Onésime Delafond was one of the more important veterinarians of 19^th century France. He obtained within a few years after his graduation as a vet a chair in pathology and therapeutics at Alfort and during almost his whole professional life he was a member of the board of the Receuil de Médecine Vétérinaire, in which he frequently published. In 1860 he was appointed director of the Veterinary School of Alfort, but he died, too early, soon after.(1)

In this blogpost and the next I want to present an overview of his ideas about the doctrines of pathology, taken from his book Traité de Pathologie Vétérinaire, published in 1838. (2) For several reasons this is an interesting chapter in his book. First, it is a description of the principles of pathology by an expert who himself made active use of these principles in his teachings and veterinary practice; the knowledge we have been taught of these doctrines is most of the time presented by historians of medicine who have never lived in the middele of them. Second, Delafond presents a short history of the way these doctrines have been modified, adapted and received, and gives comments on them, as a person who has contributed to their use in veterinary practice.

Paragraph 5 of the first chapter of this book (p 24-24) then is devoted to the nature and seat of disease and the doctrines of pathology. The discussion concerns of course the doctrines that were current in his time. The principles of pathology as given by Hippocrates and Galen were slowly mingled with, or replaced by, new ideas. Delafond treats them in a clear way, indicating their strenght and weakness, and suggests how a veterinarian in the third decennium of the 19^th century may use them for his own benefit.

Delafond states that ever since learned men have tried to find what constitutes the essence, or the inner nature (nature intime) of diseases, that is, whether it is the liquids or the solids that are altered. Those who adhered to the principle that the humors (the liquids) were the first seat of disease have only tried to remedy the alterations of the liquids. The others have only seen alterations of the solids and have tried to cure accordingly. These opinions, collected in systems, have received the name of medical doctrines. Delafond promises us that we are going to learn which of the current doctrines are in vogue and which has the most adherents. Not unexpectedly, he distinguishes two categories of doctrines, the humorism, or doctrine humoral, and solidism and vitalism.

Here I want to summarize Delafond's description of humorism; I will write about his solidism and vitalism in a subsequent blogpost.

Humorism is the Hippocratic doctrine that attributes all diseases to something that is wrong in the body fluids. Delafond is rather short about it. The body fluids, the humors, are the well known blood, phlegm (slime), yellow bile and black bile. Diseases are related to a deficiency, overabundance or a disproportion of these humors. The repair of the equilibrium of humors that reigned between them is the recovery of health. The other main theme in the doctrines of Hippocrates is, according to Delafond, the idea of the three periods in the diseases of the humors. They are: crudity, coction and crisis. In the period of crudity the morbific element is present in its most forceful form; in the period of coction this element either causes death or it recedes under the influence of nature; in the period of crisis it is driven out of the economy of the body. Therapy consists of observing the progress of disease and modify it in a way that accords with each of the three periods.  Observation is the main characteristic of Hippocratism.

Next Delafond gives a short overview of all kinds of different doctrines that grew out of the Hippocratic doctrine; dogmatic and ecletic theories giving rise to ideas that lost sight of the old Hippocratic tradition until the latter was restored more or less by the empirism that rested on observation, history and analogy. But other theoreticians appeared on the stage who were trained in chemistry and physics and added their expertise to the humoral doctrine. They were interested in the chemical and physical properties of fluids; these could be more condense or more fluid, acid or alkaline or acrimonious which were properties that could be treated therapeutically. A humoral physiological pathology developed, in which symptoms like a violent pulse and the force of the heartbeat were due to tension of the humors and in which changes in the color of the urine and its consistency such as sediments and stones were the consequence of the expulsion of altered urine.

Delafond enumerates many examples of changes in properties of blood or lymph and accumulations of liquids that the body cannot get rid of, or, in Hippocratic terms, that the crisis could not expulsate. All changes are due to liquids that are modified by heat, cold, bad digestions, influence of poisons and morbific elements in the air. All therapies are aiming at restoring the old situation of balance in each of the three periods of disease progress.

In the end of his overview of the Hippocratic doctrine Delafond sums up the Greek, Roman and French hippiatrics (horse vets) and founders of the French veterinary school "who adopted the doctrines brought forward by the humorists thereby making a bizar mixture of the Hippocratic doctrine and the explications of the great humorists Galen and Boerrhave [sic]". But yet, he states (relieved, it seems), one may find in the later writings of Bourgelat and in all the works of Chabert an autocracy (unlimited reign) of nature united with vitalism and the strictum and laxum of the solidists.

1. Source of biographical details and portrait:  Neumann, Louis George. Biographies vétérinaires, avec 42 portraits dessinés par l'auteur. Paris, 1896. p 86

2. O.Delafond, Traité de Pathologie et de Thérapeutique Générales Vétérinaires, Bruxelles, 1838.

The Langreuter project: a summary

It is more than a year ago that I posted the last blog message on PHOAS. The main reason was my involvement in the Langreuter project, the reconstruction of a milking machine, working according to a long forgotten principle. I wrote about it in a blog message posted in June 2015. Since then, my colleague and I did a lot of research, mainly historical, and presented nine blog messages in Dutch about the progress of the project; see https://Langreuterproject.wordpress.com.  This has many more pictures of objects and details of patents than can be given here. Below I will present a summary of the project which came to an end recently. I have omitted the literature references; these may be delivered on request.

1. Pictures of the Langreuter milking machine were shown in an earlier blogpost (June 2015). The machine has two parts, the driver and the milking unit. The driver is operated manually with a handle, that makes the two cables move the pressure plates in the milking unit. The plates are moved by the cables in such a way that they compress the teats in a manner imitating the hands of the milker: the upper side of the plates move inwards first and start pressing the teats, the lower side follow a little bit later. The inside of the milking unit (the walls of the box have been omitted) is schematically represented in fig 1.

Fig 1. Inside of the milking unit, showing the movable plates.

The cables enter the unit at the left side.

(Scheme by Marcel van Asselen)

How the unit works is shown in four short video movies, placed on YouTube: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqODuJ-RVfE  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwSEmRAv9pY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK6DssmKs-o  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU-asNGUIec

 

The original rubber teat protectors were gone or had lost their elasticity and have been replaced by (white) linings of polystyrene foam.

The milking unit is a box with a lid with four holes for the teats, and is connected to the cow with a strap going over the back. The milk is collected in a pail placed under the milking unit.

2. We could not find evidence for the origin of the Langreuter and how and why it  came into possession of the Veterinary School in Utrecht. The patent description that closely resembles the design of our Langreuter and that was found in the digital archive of the German Patent Office, dates from 1910; the archives of the Vetschool, in both the National Archives in The Hague and the Utrecht Archives, do not contain information about any acquired apparatus whatsoever in the period between 1910 and 1920. The Maihak Company in Hamburg is still producing things, that have nothing to do with milking machines (and in the past they produced a lot of things, e.g. radios, but no milking machines, except this one) and employees of the company were not able to help us.

However, the Experimental Dairy Station in Hoorn (NL) tested an electrically driven Heureka milking machine that looked similar to our Langreuter, except that it could serve 4 cows simultaneously. In the report, published in 1915, it was mentioned that the Heureka was provided by a Dutch trading company, giving the station the opportunity to test the machine. We think that the Langreuter was obtained by the Vetschool for the same reason, that is, as a test object.

So far we did not find indications that another Langreuter has ever been built.

3. The pressure type milking machine had to compete with the vacuum type machine that imitates the suckling of the calf. The latter type won the competition. But until 1910 half of all patents granted in the United States concerned pressure type machines. Many of the patents for this type of milking machine were granted to Jens Nielsen, a Danish technician from Copenhagen. His patents can be found in patent archives all over the world. His designs for those machines show a remarkable agreement in the principles of operation. An example is the drawing in the patent of 1910, as shown in Fig 2.

Fig 2. Drawings from Patent 54138, 17 september 1910, Schweizerisches Eidgenossisches Amt für Geistlichen Eigentum

Fig 4 and 5 show parts of the driver, fig 7 and 8 show cross sections through the milking unit.

Several of Nielsen's machines have actually been built, but never on a commercial scale. Our Langreuter seems to have been one of them. In Danmark some of the surviving Nielsen machines can be found in agricultural museums.

A remarkable coincidence appeared when Nielsen's address, as mentioned in one of his US patents, was used as a search item on the internet. In 1906 Jens Nielsen, bicycle merchant, Vester Voldgade 7, Copenhagen, lived opposite to mrs Mary Langreuter, who ran a boarding-house at Vester Voldgade 8, in the same year.

4. Historians of agriculture consider the pressure machine mostly as a footnote to the history of machine milking. In their opinion, this type of milking was not able to provide milk with the same quality as that of vacuum milking, because of an inferior hygiene: difficulties in cleaning the machine and increased risk of bacterial contamination of the milk and of mastitis. However, some reports have survived that describe the results of tests of milk quality and quantity in a comparison of pressure machine milking with hand milking and vacuum machines. In general, the pressure machines performed well with regard to speed, quantity and milk hygiene. Not everyone was positive, however; according to the test results obtained from the Hoorn Experimental Dairy Station, more milk remained in the udder with the Heureka. In addition, because of the way the milking unit is attached to the cow, air from the outside has access to the inside of the milking unit, thereby giving easy contamination of the milk; this could be overcome by washing the udder before milking, however.

But the pressure machines, and the Langreuter in particular, had three serious drawbacks. First, it took too much time to attach and secure the milking unit to the cow. Second, the cables of the Langreuter driver that move the plates were prone to rust and got easily broken. Third, and in our view the most important drawback, the milking unit does not fit to all cows. We have investigated this in more detail, by measuring the distance between the teats of the udders of six cows in a milking parlour and compared those with the distances of the holes of the milking unit. In all cases the unit could not have been fitted to the udders because of the differences in dimensions. The distances between teats were very variable, which is not a problem when milking is done with a vacuum machine with flexible teat cups. This is in accordance with a warning in the Hoorn test report, that two out of eight cows could not be milked with the Heureka because of non-fitting dimensions.

After 1915 the pressure machines passed into oblivion and nothing was heard or seen anymore of them, except in historical reviews and museums.

Blue milk: keeping the cows tied to a stake during the heat of the day

In the first half of the nineteenth century the cause of blue milk was a subject of much speculation.  Several authors supposed that the eating of plants that contain indigo-like compounds was the cause of this phenomenon, that was considered a disease by some and someething outside the cow by others. Chabert and Fromage in 1805, in a book that I discussed in the two preceding blogs, tried to connect the blue milk to abnormal digestion and metabolism of the cow.

In Gellé (1841) other theories were discussed. Gellé wrote a book (1), devoted to diseases of cattle. In a long paragraph (p.695-701) he discussed the alterations of the secretion of the milk, the main subjects being red milk and blue milk. Red milk was a less important problem, mainly caused by blood in the milk of which the origin was uncertain; Gellé cites, without giving the source, a certain M(onsieur) Serain who in 1805 had a couple of cows, some of which gave milk full of blood; it appeared to be some kind of epidemic in the field that was called “vaches harondelées” because it was thought that the udders of these cows were picked at by swallows (hirondelles).

With regard to blue milk Gellé included in his review quite a number of reports of persons who had observed blue milk occurring in practice and had tried to explain and cure or prevent it. Of the many theories described and commented upon by him I want to concentrate on a report by Monsieur Sarin, a health officer in Saintes, in France, who did some investigations in Normandy. As with the others, the source of the report is not given by Gellé; it may have been oral. Sarin had observed in a certain, not specified, year that during the months June, July and August, when blue milk was expected to manifest itself as usual, he could not find it, because, as he speculated, the weather was rather cold then. In addition, he observed that in regions where it was a custom to tie the cows to a stake during the whole day and right in the sun, blue milk was seen frequently. Sarin concluded from these observations that an excess of atmospherical heat should be the cause. He described that he had met a farm-maid (bonne femme) who had told him that she protected the tied cows against blue milk by pouring three or four buckets of cold water on the back of the cows, in the morning and in the afternoon. Sarin believed he had found the cause and the remedy and was supported in this belief by an experiment he performed  in which he produced blue milk in cows in a very warm cow-shed; subsequently he got rid of the blue milk by the cold water treatment. When he repeated this “protocol” by heating the shed again and then cooling the cows in the shed by cold water, the blue milk returned and disappeared as before.

Gellé did not believe it, he prefered the other theories, given by his sources: either nutrition is the cause because the cows eat plants containing substances that give a colour to the milk, or it is the consequence of irritations of the udder, developed during the parturation process.

I think the report of monsieur Sarin is interesting for two reasons.

First he is trying to confirm an hypothesis, based on field observations, of heat as a cause of blue milk, by performing an experiment. I our view it may be a sloppy experiment; it lacks at least one necessary control, i.e. cows in the same shed not treated with cold water. But nevertheless it is an experiment as a step in scientific reasoning that was absent in most of the other theories that were based on observations and subsequent correlations alone. Gellé thought it was a mistake to adhere to the heat theory because in other regions in France with “atmospherical heat” no blue milk was found. Sarin’s theory was rejected, not because his experiment was wrong but because the hypothesis that was the starting point for his experiment was considered not plausible and was not supported by other evidence, apart from his experiment.

Second, Sarin’s report is interesting because he tells us about farming practices of the early 19^th century, that we easily forget since we are used to machine milking and farms with tens or hundreds of cows. In Sarin’s days cows were sometimes tied to a stake and left on their own for the whole day. What did they eat? I suppose the plants that were in their reach, but probably also all kinds of vegetable feedstuff that was collected by the farmer or his wife and his employees in the direct environment of the farm: plants from fallow land and sides of ditches, containing weeds and contaminations, sometimes causing the milk to be coloured blue, red or yellow. Compared to what we are used to now, farming practices were different, housing of cows was different and what cows were given to eat was also different.

And concepts of disease were different.

1. P.-B.Gellé. Pathologie bovine ou traité complet des maladies du boeuf. Tome troisième.

Paris, Bouchard-Huzard, 1841

Blue milk according to Chabert and Fromage (1805), part 2

Chemical observations and ethical considerations

The third chapter of Lait bleu, the book of 1805 about the problem of blue milk, is called Observations chimiques qui peuvent avoir quelques rapports au phénomène du lait bleu, or, “Chemical observations that may be related to the phenomeon of blue milk”. It is not the chemistry that we are used to since our highschool years, however, because in 1805 chemical ideas were still under the influence of alchemy and early pharmaceutical concepts whereas the investigations of Lavoisier and Priestly did not yet have an impact on ideas about the composition and properties of milk.

The chapter has three parts and all three are quotations from the work of two French chemists, Antoine François Comte de Fourcroy (1755-1809), who had been working with Lavoisier and supported his ideas, and  J.A.C.Comte Chaptal de Canteloup (1765-1832), who was also an important person in the French government. The first part quotes de Fourcroy and deals with the relation of temperature on the fluidity of cream and the coagulation of milk under the influence of electricity (thunderstorms). The second part, also by de Fourcroy, is a report of observations made by putting fresh milk in the open air for 30 days; understandably for us is the development of moulds on the surface, and when a blue colour develops, it may be related to the blue colour of Roquefort cheese. The third part is a quotation from the work of Chaptal, and is a speculation of the nature of the blue colour that may also explain why milk becomes blue. Chaptal has the opinion that oxygen gas may condensate in different degrees, each degree giving its own degree of deflection of light; since blue rays are the weakest rays, they will be deflected first when oxygen binds to the material of cadavres and milk.

The importance of this chapter is not its contents, but the fact that Chabert and Fromage suspected that the phenomenon of blue milk could be explained by the influence of factors from the outside: something happens to milk when it is kept under certain circumstances in which electricity, oxygen and moulds may have a role.

The forth chapter returns to the cows as the source of the blue milk, because, as explained in the earlier chapters, it is also the constitution of the cow that contributes to the problem. The underlying cause is that cows that have been fed a poor diet in winter are going to the fields in spring and have access to excessive and rich fodder, which may cause the milk becoming blue. So chapter 4, dealing with prophylaxis and cure, concentrates on dietary regimens and therapies that are in essence an advice to prevent the access of the cows to an excessive amount of food, or in the case of a cure of blue milk, to reduce the food, drench the animals with salts and apply blood letting. But the most interesting part of this chapter is an ethical consideration which is worth while citing. Chabert and Fromage fully understand that farmers want their cows to eat much as soon as possible, because that helps the milk production, but, they state:

“ … we should realize how the demands we make of high and lasting milk production weakens the lungs; by the state of domestication of the animals, we knowingly condemn them to inanation for our needs and it is not reasonable to requiere that the Doctor to furnishes remedies for a disease that is absolutely voluntary. So, either the cows are exhausted and waste away of lassitude to give us milk, or the butcher kills them to feed us with their meat, men should not pretend that he does not know, neither in the first case nor in the second, that his taste condemns the animals to be his victims. Only his interest and his sensibility should stimulate him to let them suffer as little as possible until the moment of their sacrifice.”¹

[1] P.Chabert en C.M.F.Fromage, ‘D’une altération du lait de vache, désignée sous le nom de lait bleu’, Paris, A.-J.Marchant, 1805, p. 32-33

Blue milk according to Chabert and Fromage (1805)

Early in the nineteenth century blue milk was an important problem, even more than mastitis. Most authors of veterinary publications, especially in Germany, treated mastitis and blue milk in one and the same chapter of diseases of milk, but only blue milk was mentioned as affecting the economy of the dairy farm, or any other farm at which milk was a commercial product for consumption, butter and, sometimes, cheese.

I have written about blue milk before (blog of september 18, 2013), but since I found that the problem of blue milk has been intimately connected to the development of the chemistry of milk and the microscopical detection of what we now call microorganisms in milk, the problem of blue milk merits a more detailed historical analysis.

One of the first publications discussing blue milk is a French booklet, dating rom 1805 (Germinal an XIII) and is written by P.Chabert and C.M.Fromage, both members of the Imperial Veterinary School of Alfort of which Chabert was the director and Fromage a teacher. The title of the booklet is “D’une altération du lait de vache, désignée sous le nom de lait bleu” or “The alteration of cow’s milk, designated as blue milk”.

Its introduction contains an interesting statement: “most of the alterations [i.e. changes in colour, consistency and other properties that make milk agreeable] have not sufficiently been the object of observations of the Chemistry and the Hygiene”. And although the authors gave much attention to the chemical background and characteristics of blue milk (to be discussed next time), hygiene is left out of their text, at least the hygiene that we in  the 2015 recognize as such; I suggest that chemistry and hygiene in 1805, as scientific disciplines, may belong to one and the same activity.

What follows is an essay of about 30 pages, dealing with blue milk only.

According to Chabert and Fromage the characteristics of blue milk are the following. Freshly drawn milk is normal, the cow looks healthy and the quantity of milk is not diminished; nevertheless, after 12-18 hours the milk starts to become blue, the surface of the milk and cream is covered with small small blue dots, the size of a lentil, which expand  to form a closed layer on top of the milk in a pail or vessel. Butter and cheese are affected in quality too, but the blue stain is mostly limited to the whey. The phenomenon does not occur in the milk of all cows but sometimes in one out of ten only; when the affected cow is kept separately, in another field, and its milk not mixed with the normal milk, the problem seems to disappear, but when the cow is brought back to the other cows it may appear again. As a passing remark, Chambert and Fromage tell us that some people think that blue milk is contagious, which may be based on the re-appearance of the problem after bringing formerly affected cows back into the herd. Other people say that the occurrence of blue milk may be reduced when you clean milk vessels with common salt. Both remarks seem important to us, because of what was later found about the cause and treatment of blue milk.

The authors think that the problem of blue milk was seen for the first time in 1787 at an abby near Evreux and elder people think that it is a very old problem. It is certain, say the authors,  that it has been increasing rapidly during the last 12-15 years (which is, for Chambert and Fromage, since 1790). Some farmers think that magic may be involved, or poisoning by enemies.

Dairy farms close to a larger town may succeed in selling their milk when it is still fresh and unchanged. Otherwise it should be given to pigs or dogs (who may not like it).

Chabert and Fromage discuss five possible causes. 1. The lay-out of stables and milk rooms. 2. The cleanliness of the milk rooms and the farmer’s houskeeping. 3. The nature of the soil and the cultivation of the vegetation. 4. The forage. 5. Wheather and climate. With regard to forage, they mention several plants that may contain indigo-like compounds that may bne transferred to the milk unchanged after ingestion.

Their main conclusion is that the blue milk comes and goes without any regularity and that it should be seen as a real disease because there is a change in the product of the phenomena of life. The underlying cause may be a change in physiology, which itself may be due to weakness of several organs, in combination with what we now may call stress by sudden heat or cold. This may lead to an altered action of the lymph, the blood vessels, the lungs and the milk glands.

(to be continued)

The Langreuter project: the reconstruction of the rise and fall of a milking machine

In the collection of big and small objects that are present in the basement of the Utrecht University Museum is a milking machine. It had been standing there for years, collecting dust only and doing nothing, a dead object.

On my proposal to try to revive the machine again the response was more than favourable: Babke Aarts, assistant-curator of the veterinary collection of the museum, and deciede to start a project immediately,  with the aim of finding out whether the milking machine could be brought to life and of reconstructing its history.

Hardly any data were available in the archives of the museum with regard to this machine. It had a number painted on it, corresponding to a card, telling us that it was obtained some 60 years ago. This was in agreement with a publication in the Tijdschrift voor Diergeneeskunde (Journal of Veterinary Medicine) of 1963, in which Jan Grommers, than having the function of wetenschappelijk ambtenaar 1^e  klasse (to be compared to an assistant professor nowadays) at the Institute voor Zoötechniek (Animal Husbandry) of the Veterinary Faculty of Utrecht University. The publication dealt with the role of the milking machine in the etiology of mastitis. Grommers wrote:

“Although in the development of the milking machine it has been attempted to imitate the milking by hand (a machine of this type has been handed over to the veterinary department of the university museum) all milking machines that are now in use operate by suction power”. (p. 1553)¹

This was all the knowledge we had when we started: the milking machine had been a property of the Zootechnical Institute and it worked by imitating the hand of the milk-maid or milkman; in addition it had lost the competition for the market.

However, the machine delivered some information too. It had an identity label attached to it with the following text:

Melkmaschine “Langreuter”

(Patent Jens Nielsen)

Fabrikat der Maihak A.G.

HAMBURG

The name Langreuter is apparently the type of the machine and we took this name for the name of our project.

The machine has two parts, which we call the driver and the milking unit.The driver is shown in figure 1.

Fig. 1

   It contains two camshafts (which I hope is a proper translation of what it is called in Dutch) connected to two drawing cables that transfer the operation of the driver to the milking unit. The driver is operated by hand but the handle is missing.

Fig. 2

The milking unit is given in figure 2. It is shown upside down: the milk flows out of the tube’ that is now on top, into the milk-pail.

The progress of the project will be presented in a series of blog messages, in Dutch; for those who understand Dutch, see Langreuterproject.wordpress.com. We will try to translate and/or summarize our findings and I will post them on this blogsite. So keep following PHOAS.

In studying the the Langreuter milking machine and trying to bring it to work again, we hope to obtain more insight in the history of milking machines in general and why the Langreuter, together with other machines of the same type, lost the competition.

1. 1. F.J.Grommers. Een overzicht van de betekenis van het machinaal melken in de aetiologie van mastitis. Tijdschrift voor Diergeneeskunde, 88, 1553-1558, 1963