546 DISEASES OF THE HORSE, 
in Mexico until carried there during the Mexican War by the badly 
diseased horses of the United States Army. During the first half of 
the last century a large body of veterinarians and medical men 
protested against the contagious character of the disease, and by 
their opinion prevailed to such an extent against the common opinion 
that several of the Governments of Europe undertook a series of 
experiments to determine the right between the contesting parties. 
At the veterinary school at Alfort and at the farm of Lamirault 
in France several hundred horses which had passed examination as 
sound had placed among them glandered horses under various condi- 
ticns. The results of these experiments proved conclusively the con- 
tagious character of the disease. 
In 1881 Bouchard, of the faculty of medicine in Paris, assisted 
by Capitan and Charrin, undertook a series of experiments with 
matter taken from the farcy ulcer of a human being. They after- 
wards continued their experiments with matter taken from horses, 
and in 1883 succeeded in showing that glanders is caused by a 
bacterium which is capable of propagation and reproduction of 
others of its own kind if placed in the proper media. In 1882 the 
specific germ of glanders was first discovered and described by 
Loeffler and Schuetz in Germany. 
When we come to study the etiology of glanders, the difference of 
susceptibility on the part of different species of animals, or even on 
the part of individuals of the same species, and when we come to find 
proof of the slow incubation and latent character of the disease as 
it exists in certain individuals, we understand how in a section of 
country containing a number of glandered animals others can seem to 
contract and develop the disease without having apparently been 
exposed to contagion. 
Causes.—The contagious nature of glanders, in no matter what 
form it appears, being to-day definitely demonstrated, we can recog- 
nize but one cause for all cases, and that is contagion by means of 
the specific virus of the disease. The causative organism is known as 
the Bacillus mallet. 
In studying the writings of the older authors on glanders, and the 
works of those authors who contested the contagious nature of the 
disease, we find a large number of predisposing causes assigned as 
factors in the development of the malady. 
While a virus from a case of glanders if inoculated into an animal 
of the genus /'guus will inevitably produce the disease, we find a vast 
difference in the contagious activity of different cases of glanders. 
We find a great variation in the manner and rapidity of the develop- 
ment of the disease in different individuals and that the contagion is 
much more liable to be carried to sound animals under certain circum- 
stances than it is under others. Only certain species of animals are 
