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TREATMENT OF GLANDERS AND FARCY. 



Veterinary surgeons are taunted with glanders being the 

 opprobrium of their art — a bane for which they possess no anti- 

 dote — and they feel the taunt to be too true to admit of reply : they 

 reluctantly and sorrowfully and reproachfully condemn a noble 

 animal, in the apparent enjoyment of health and strength, to 

 slaughter, because he has a disease upon him, though it be seem- 

 ingly only in his nose, for which they know of no remedy, and 

 because that disease is likely to spread from him to other horses ; 

 nay even, through possibility, to man himself. Although veteri- 

 nary science, however, has hitherto failed in discovering any cure 

 for glanders, it may certainly be said to have elicited a course of 

 medical treatment which oftentimes proves of essential service in 

 cases o^ farcy : why farcy, which we have found to be in nature 

 nowise different from glanders, should be at times curable, and 

 glanders in its acute and confirmed stages never so, will be pointed 

 out when we come to consider their respective therapeutics. And 

 though our art proves unavailing in the removal of glanders, yet 

 have we sufficiently good reason to boast of ihe prophylactic mea- 

 sures it has devised and put into practice. This leads us to make 

 a division of the treatment into prophylactic and therapeutic. 



Prophylactic Treatment. 



To form a judgment of the efficiency of our prophylactics we 

 have no more to do than to institute a comparison between the 

 existence of glanders and farcy at the present day and their pre- 

 valence in times past. The day was when in almost any large 

 horse establishment, certainly in most public horse markets, such 

 as Smith field and others, one was almost sure to meet with a 

 glandered or farcied subject : the metropolitan horse-slaughterers' 

 yards were never without them, and most loathsome spectacles the 

 poor wretched creatures presented, tied up as they were for days 

 together without food, breathing hardly and stertorously through 

 their pluggcd-up nostrils, waiting their turn for the poll-axe. 



