182 VARIETIES OF GLANDERS. 



It commences with symptoms of slight febrile catarrhal disorder, 

 and the fever attendant never quits the patient: we, therefore, 

 might with some reason give it the name o^ febrile glanders. Tn the 

 young ass, as we have seen, the disease, once commenced, rages 

 with pecuhar violence and malignancy ; indeed, so remarkably so 

 that the ass has, by many writers, been regarded as more suscep- 

 tible of taking or harbouring the disease than the horse. And 

 from my own experience, while serving in the peninsular campaign, 

 I can attest the virulent and destructive course the disease likewise 

 assumes in mules. Still, we are not in the habit of inoculating 

 horses ; and, moreover, we rarely find horse-patients of the same 

 tender age, or of the impoverished condition asses are in ; and 

 again, horses are taken greater care of when sick than the poor 

 despised ass is : on the whole, therefore, considering all these cir- 

 cumstances, I am not disposed to admit that either the ass or the 

 mule presents any extraordinary innate susceptibility; but rather 

 think that it is all acquired in the age and condition in which the 

 animal receives the disease. 



The Course of Acute Glanders is uninterrupted; often- 

 times, like the product of inoculation, terrifically rapid, from 

 the period of its attack to that of its surely fatal termination. 

 The horse seems unwell, has manifestly lost the bloom on his coat, 

 is unusually dull in his spirits and movements, does not feed with 

 his ordinary appetite, evinces a sparing discharge from the nose of 

 an unhealthy character, with submaxillary tumefaction, and this is 

 followed by swelling of the nostril, chancrous ulceration, augmented 

 and inspissated discharges, and appearances of farcy ; symptoms 

 which day by day increase and extend, and at that rapid rate that 

 puts an end to life even so early as the second or third or fourth 

 week, through the extreme irritation occasioned by the suffocating 

 effects of the enormous tumefaction of the nostrils, and the clog- 

 ging of their apertures from the inspissation and scabbing of the 

 discharges within and around them. In this last stage of the 

 acute disease the patient becomes so much an object of pity and 

 compassion that it is but rarely he is suffered to live on to the 

 last. Every breath he takes he draws with the utmost difficulty 

 through his contracted nostrils, all but plugged up with the matters 



