248 



OTHER CAUSES OF GLANDERS. 



That both glanders and farcy have on occasions taken their 

 rise from other causes than contagion and the miasm of the stable, 

 there is on record ample evidence to prove in the face of all mere 

 assertion to the contrary ; and this will account for the number and 

 variety of causations we find enumerated by authors in their de- 

 scriptions of the origin of the disease as it happens to have occurred 

 within their own particular sphere of observation. Looking over 

 the accounts of different writers, we find glanders ascribed to con- 

 tagion, to infection from the miasm of the stable and other sources, 

 to transitions from cold to heat and from heat to cold, to suppressed 

 perspiration, to sudden immersion in cold water, to humidity of the 

 atmosphere, to want of exercise, to over-work, to bad forage, to 

 water of some particular quality, to locality, to marasmus or debility, 

 to fulness of condition, to wounds and other injuries of the head, 

 to previous disease, &c. 



Such of these divers alleged causes as rest upon any good ground 

 of authority admit of distribution into three classes, which we have 

 already specified and numbered among our general causations as 

 third, fourth, and fifth classes*. The perusal of these will shew it 

 is our opinion that for any cause of a common description to pro- 

 duce glanders or farcy, that cause must operate against a constitu- 

 tion predisposed to take on such a diseased action. Mr. Vines 

 views this predisposition as consisting simply in unhealthiness ; 

 for our own part, however, we rather side with Dupuy, and fancy 

 there must exist somewhere in the body the seeds of lymphatic or 

 tubercular disease, waiting only for the requisite amount of excita- 

 tion to lead to their development in the form of glanders and farcy. 

 Were mere unhealthy state of body all that was required for a 

 cause of an ordinary nature to produce glanders or farcy, the disease 

 would, surely, be a great deal more prevalent than we now find it. 

 How far a common cause acting with inordinate severity or sudden- 

 ness might occasion either glanders or farcy, is another question : 

 that such causes have produced effects semhlant of such diseases 

 we are well convinced ; but, that these results were veritable 



* At page 218. 



