536 DISEASES OF THE HORSE. 



to time affected with glanders without an apparent cause. The mare, 

 whose only trouble was an apparent attack of heaves, was sold to a 

 huckster who placed her at hard work. Want of feed and overwork 

 and exposure rapidly developed a case of acute glanders, from which 

 the animal died, and at the autopsy were found the lesions of an acute 

 pneumonia of glanders grafted on chronic lesions, consisting of old 

 nodules which had undoubtedly existed for years. 



In a case that once came under the care of the writer, a coach horse 

 was examined for soundness and passed as sound by a prominent 

 veterinarian, who a few months afterwards treated the horse for a 

 skin eruption from which it recovered. Twelve months afterwards 

 it came into the hands of the writer, hidebound, with a slight cough 

 and a slight eruption of the skin, which was attributed to clipping 

 and the rubbing of the harness, but which had nothing suspicious in 

 its character. The horse was placed on tonics and put to regular 

 light driving. In six weeks it developed a bronchitis without having 

 been specially exposed, and in two days this trouble was followed by 

 a lobular pneumonia and the breaking of an abscess in the right lung. 

 Farcy buds developed on the surface of the body and the animal died. 

 The avitopsy showed the existence of a number of old glanderous 

 nodules in the lungs which must have existed previous to purchase, 

 more than a year before. 



Public watering troughs and the feed boxes of boarding stables and 

 the tavern stables of market towns are among the most common 

 recipients for the virus of glanders, which is most dangerous in its 

 fresh state, but cases have been known to be caused by feeding animals 

 in the box or stall in which glandered animals had stood several 

 months before. While the discharge from a case of chronic glanders 

 is much less apt to contain many active bacilli than that from a case 

 of acute glanders, the former, if it infects an animal, will produce 

 the same disease as the latter. It may assume from the outset an 

 acute or chronic form, according to the susceptibility of the animal 

 infected, and this does not depend upon the character of the disease 

 from which the virus was derived. 



The animals of the genus Equus — the horse, the ass, and the mule — - 

 are those which are the most susceptible to contract glanders, but in 

 these we find a much greater receptivity in the ass and mule than we 

 do in the horse. In the ass and mule in almost all cases the period 

 of incubation is short and the disease develops in an acute form. We 

 find that the kind of horse infected has an influence on the character 

 of the disease; in full-blooded fat horses of a sanguinary tempera- 

 ment, the disease usually develops in an acute form, while in the 

 lymphatic, cold-blooded, more common race of horses the disease 

 usually assumes a chronic form. If the disease develops first in the 



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