240 CAUSES OF GLANDERS. 



agreement, I believe the conclusions I have, after a good deal of 

 deliberation and some experience, come to here, will not be found 

 widely diverse from the opinions entertained by the majority of 

 veterinarians whose works or words are, at the time I am writ- 

 ing, known to us. 



THE MIASM OF THE STABLE. 



The late Professor of the Royal Veterinary College, as has been 

 shewn by extracts from his Lectures on Glanders and Farcy, was 

 a great non-contagionist in his opinions, not believing that " one 

 horse in a thousand, or even in ten thousand, caught the disease 

 from contagion ;'' but that the ordinary and almost exclusive source 

 of glanders and farcy was what he called the poison — what I have 

 here denominated the miasm — of the stable : " a poison generated," 

 he said, " in a confined atmosphere, out of exhalations from the 

 breath, the dung, the urine, and the perspiration of horses pent up 

 in it." And in support of this theory of general and almost exclu- 

 sive causation he had collected many facts which, with great in- 

 genuity and force of reasoning, he shaped into arguments admitting 

 of the following classification : — 



First : the Professor argued, since nothing short of immediate 

 contact could, in his opinion, produce glanders by contagion, and 

 since, even then, abrasion of the touching surface or inoculation in 

 some way or other was, he thought, required, the disease could 

 rarely, according to his notions, be propagated in any such manner. 



Secondly : that the ^r^/ horse that ever became glandered could 

 not possibly have contracted the disease through contagion. 



Thirdlv: that several well-authenticated instances stood on record 

 of glanders and farcy having broken out (in an epidemical form) 

 among horses who, in apparent health at the time, had been placed 

 in new stables or on board new ships ; and that such sudden and 

 general attack of the disease had been satisfactorily shewn to be 

 owinff to want of due ventilation. 



Fourthly : that where s,Mc\i fomites of infection had been destroyed, 

 places, before to the utmost degree unhealthy, had been rendered 

 perfectly salubrious by the introduction of proper ventilation. 



