132 PRINCIPLES OF VETERINARY SURGERY 



seat of inoculation, together with some loss of appetite and 

 spirits, may be regarded as a chain of condemning circum- 

 stances. A mere swelling without fever is negative. A 

 sudden burst of fever, even to 104° Fah-r., that drops as sud- 

 denly within several hours, is likewise negative, or at least 

 is never a positive indication of glanders. And again, a 

 high elevation of the temperature without any marked local 

 swelling at the seat of inoculation, must always be cau- 

 tiously judged. It may have been provoked by other 

 causes. The mallein test for equine glanders is valued high- 

 est by those who have used it the most, and is condemned 

 only by the inexperienced or unobserviftg diagnosticians, 

 largely because of the fact that only the febrile feature 

 of the test is taken into account. Post mortems, ex- 

 ceeding four hundred in number, made by Wright, on 

 tested horses, have proven conclusively that mallein will 

 "ferret out" the minutest glander lesion. Failure to 

 find them may often be traceable to the crudeness of 

 the autopsy and the minuteness of the lesions. It 

 is no longer the custom to kill all the reacting sub- 

 jects. Only those having external symptoms are regarded 

 as dangerous infection-carriers. Although this plan, which 

 is .now quite universally adopted in the veterinary pro- 

 fession, is not without fault, it is, from the economic 

 standpoint, the only practical one. The best sanitar- 

 ians in America — Rutherford, Pearson, Gill, Moore, 

 Wright, Tiffany, Reynolds, et al., have adopted this plan in 

 dealing with the disease in large cities, but all of them are 

 known to recognize the danger of the occult case dissemi- 

 nating the disease without ever developing into a clinical 

 case. 



Mallein. — Mallein is the metabolic product (toxin V of 

 the bacillus mallei in artificial media. It is prepared from 

 artificial cultures of the micro-organism in glycerin bouillon. 



