242 CAUSES OF GLANDERS. 



Extract of a Heport from the Principal Veterinary Surgeon. 



" I have always considered it the duty of all commanding officers and 

 veterinary surgeons of cavalry regiments to report to the respective barrack- 

 masters any and every stall occupied by a glandered horse, and requiring 

 painting, &c. ; and, in my opinion, those stalls or standings only, occupied 

 by horses with symptoms of glanders, require being painted in oil, but that 

 the whole of the racks and mangers should be thoroughly washed with soft 

 soap and hot water well softened by soda, and which I have no doubt, if 

 the stables are properly ventilated, will prevent all danger from infection. 

 Glanders is much more frequently produced by defective ventilation of stables 

 than by glandered matter." 



(Signed) " Edward Coleman, P.V.S." 



If it can be shewn, beyond any reasonable ground for doubt, that 

 glanders may be, and not infrequently is, taken through mediate 

 contagion, through stabling, &c. — and I think enough has been 

 advanced in these pages to demonstrate, at least, the plausibility 

 of such a deduction — then Coleman's first argument sustains so 

 much weakening, that the miasm of the stable no longer can be 

 regarded as the universal and exclusive cause of glanders and 

 farcy^which he in his enthusiastic prosecution of his schemes of 

 ventilation imagined it to be, but must descend in the grade of 

 causation, to take no more than its due share in the production of 

 the disease, along with other equally well-grounded and recog- 

 nized causes. 



Secondly : that Coleman established his great point, that glan- 

 ders and farcy did originate independently of contagion, there is 

 no question. Setting aside the necessity of actual contact, and 

 the improbability of horses coming together in such manner as to 

 catch the disease through inoculation one from another — neither of 

 wiiich positions would experience suffer Coleman to maintain; — 

 setting aside, also, the posing query ever put to contagionists, 

 '' Whence did the first glandered or farcied horse take the dis- 

 ease 1" there is ample evidence on record to demonstrate that 

 foul and ill-ventilated stabling has proved a fertile source both of 

 farcy and glanders*; and to Coleman the greatest credit is due 



* M. Patu, M.V. to the 4th (French) Cuirassiers, ascribes the extra- 

 ordinary prevalence of glanders and farcy in the French cavalry to the crowd- 



