TIIKKAPEUTIC TREATMENT. 327 



llierapeutic Treatment of Glanders. 



Having got our patient lodged in some secluded habitation, our 

 next consideration is, what is to be done with him, or rather for 

 him? Should his attack turn out to be acute glanders, death, 

 through suffocation, will so soon end his days that it seems a pity 

 the poor sufferer should be allowed to labour out his existence ; 

 indeed, humanity ought to forbid it, and at once blow the wretched 

 creature's brains out with a pistol-shot. Leblanc says he has, 

 on several occasions, performed tracheotomy for such subjects, 

 but has failed in affording any permanent relief. And there is 

 nothing that I know of that will^, in any material or marked de- 

 gree, ameliorate their horrid condition. 



In the present state of our knowledge of the therapeutics of 

 glanders, the only varieties admitting of treatment are the sub- 

 acute and the chronic : the acute, as we have just seen, running 

 its course too hurriedly and fiercely to admit of any check from 

 medicine. In its less virulent forms, occasionally as sub-acute but 

 oftener as chronic, the disease has been known to disappear under 

 medical treatment, and oftentimes to the delusion of the director of 

 that treatment, who has naturally inferred that his prescriptions 

 had worked the cure, when in point of fact, as subsequent expe- 

 rience has proved to him, the patient has recovered under the in- 

 fluence of the vix medicatrix naturce. Nevertheless, in one form 

 or other, glanders has been the subject of treatment from the earliest 

 times down to the present, every experimentalist varying his plan 

 of procedure, directing it to the parts diseased or else to the system 

 generally, in accordance with whatever notions he happened to 

 entertain concerning the nature of the disease. 



Vegetius, in his methodus medendi, considered it necessary to 



purge the head of the horse, in order to rid it of its " stinking and 



thick humours;" for which purpose he prescribed a mixture of oil, 



adeps, and wine, and directed it to be poured into the nostrils ; and 



further ordered, that the horse's head should he bound to his foot, 



with the intention that, as he stepped along, ''all the humours 



might drop out*." 



* Op. cit., at p. 253. 



VOL. 111. U u 



