258 SEAT AND NATURE OF GLANDERS. 



in this distemper being contagious or infectious ; for he might as 

 well say that loe catch colds, consumptions, Sfc, by infection*." 



Bartlet, 1773, a surgeon, who wrote a veterinary work about 

 the same period, became another of Lafosse's proselytes. "A new 

 light," he tells us, " having been thrown on this whole affair by the 

 studv of M. Lafosse, the Kinsf of France's farrier, who has been at 

 the pains to trace out and discover, by dissections, the source and 

 cause of this disorder ; we hope the method he has proposed, with 

 some farther experiments and improvements, will soon bring to a 

 certainty the cure,t" &c. &c. 



BOURGELAT, 1765, the great founder of the French Veterinary 

 School, saw reason to secede from the notions of Lafosse, which, in 

 his day, had firm hold of public opinion. He believed glanders to 

 liave its source in the corruption of the blood and humours of the 

 body, and thought there was great analogy between the ulcera- 

 tion of glanders and venereal chancres. 



Paulet, however, as we learn from Hurtrel D'ArbovalJ, was 

 the French writer who especially drew attention to the similarity 

 there existed between glanders and syphilis. " The two viruses," 

 he says, " exert their action in a similar manner : in both diseases, 

 the lymph, contaminated through the presence of the virus, in its 

 turn infects the gland in the neighbourhood to which it has been 

 taken. In one case it happens to the glands in the groin, in another 

 to those in the throat ; both performing the same office. The two 

 viruses, acrid and irritating in their nature, having reached, in one 

 instance the urethral canal of mem, in the other the cavities of the 

 jiead of the horse, lined by the pituitary membrane, and being 

 there dissolved and decomposed, occasion by their presence irrita- 

 tion, inflammation, burning, speedily followed by purulent flux, 

 together with augmentation of the natural mucous secretion." 



Gilbert, another French veterinary writer, regarded the know- 

 ledge of the means of preventing glanders as hardly less in import- 

 ance to the discovery of the cure for the disease. His notions, like 

 SoUeysell's, were that both strangles and bastard-strangles frequently 



* Farriery Improved. By Henry Bracken, M.D., 1769. 



f The Gentleman's Farriery, by T. Bartlet, Surgeon, 8th edit. 1773. 



X Op. cit., at page 217, article " Morvc." 



