534 DISEASES OF THE HORSE. 



Hippiatary," published in 1755, establishes glanders as a virulent 

 disease. 



Extensive outbreaks of glanders are described as prevailing in the 

 great armies of continental Europe and England from time to time 

 during the periods of all the wars of the last few centuries. 



Glanders was imported into America at the close of the eighteenth 

 century, and before the end of the first half of the last century had 

 spread to a considerable degree among the horses of the Middle and 

 immediately adjoining Southern States. This disease was unknown 

 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 this disease, and pre- 

 vailed by their opinion to such an extent against the common opinion 

 that several of the governments of Europe undertook a series of ex- 

 periments 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- 

 tions. The results of these experiments proved conclusively the con- 

 tagious character of the disease. 



In 1881 Professor Bouchard, of the faculty of medicine in Paris, 

 assisted by Drs. Capitan and Charrin, undertook a series of experi- 

 ments with matter taken from the farcy ulcer .of a human being. 

 They afterwards continued their experiments with matter taken from 

 horses, and succeeded in showing in 1883 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 Loef- 

 fler 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 cqme to find 

 proof of the slow incubation and latent character of the disease as it 

 exists in certain individuals, we will 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 BaciUvs mollei. 



In studying the writings of the older authors on glanders, and the 

 works of those authors who contested the contagious nature of the 



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