THE MIASM or THE STABLE. 247 



differed — ^no more tlian farcy and glanders differ — only in being 

 seated in different parts or tissues ; therefore, when Coleman as- 

 serted that the same poison that produced glanders would produce 

 ophthalmia, grease, and rabies, it is manifest he could have re- 

 garded the poison but in the light of a common though malignant 

 infector. 



There is no absolute need to suppose that the infection or 

 miasm generated in the atmosphere of the stable, and believed to be 

 the producer of glanders and farcy, is the same as the contagious 

 virus of glanders itself: it may be a sort of inalaria^ the result of 

 the decomposition of animo-vegetable matter, or else of a com- 

 pound of mephitic vapours positively injurious of themselves to 

 the mucous membrane of the nose and air-passages, independently 

 of any exclusion or diminution of the oxygen of the confined air. 

 And as a poisonous agent, it may either prove at once noxious to 

 this membrane itself, or, through its medium, become absorbed and 

 carried into the circulation, contaminating the blood, and breaking 

 out in the form of farcy in some horses, in that of glanders in 

 others ; and capable — the same as malaria is thought capable of 

 producing fever in some persons, cholera in others — of producing, 

 according to Coleman, ophthalmia and grease as well, and even, 

 in the dog, rabies. Whatever plausible reasons there may be, 

 however, for believing that what will produce glanders and farcy, 

 the same may create ophthalmia and grease, there do not appear 

 to be any examples of the spontaneous origin of rabies : the only 

 argument in support of such a presumption being the hackneyed 

 question of, how the first case of rabies came to appear. 



and the most healthy horses went into those new stables, and a great number 

 became glandered, atiected with farcy or diseases : a great many of them died. 

 Many of the horses were sent to Hythe and placed in an open shed ; not one 

 of these horses became affected. It was certainly intended that animals with 

 lungs should have an element to breathe once, and but once, and that the air 

 should receive something from the blood, and impart something to the blood ; 

 but that, when made to go several times into the lungs, it produces a disease 

 which becomes infectious. In the human subject it produces fevers and the 

 plague, and farcy and glanders in horses, the pip in fowls, and the husk in 

 pigs." 



VOI, III. K k 



