Glanders. 679 



the birth of Christ (the name, malleus, owes its origin to Aristotle, 

 being derived from the Greek word i^'^^"=bad disease or epidemic). 

 Its transmissibility was recognized by Apsyrtus and Vegetius in the 

 fourth century and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was 

 generally recognized as an infectious disease. In 1784 the French 

 government enacted stringent veterinary sanitary police laws for the 

 prevention of the spread of the disease. At that time Viborg (1797) 

 maintained that glanders and farcy (nasal glanders and cutaneous 

 glanders) were identical. But before Viborg 's time Abilgaard had 

 expressed the same view and had experimentally demonstrated by 

 inoculation the infectious nature of nasal glanders. Toward the middle 

 of the last century, however, the Alfort school, on the basis of un- 

 successful inoculation experiments, denied the infectiousness of glanders 

 and in spite of the fact that the School of Lyons took a firm stand 

 against this view, this new doctrine which was defended even by such 

 men as Renault and Bouley, found many adherents. Under their 

 influence the former regulations of protection and extermination were 

 for the greater part suspended, which resulted in an extraordinary 

 dissemination of the disease. This was in itself a convincing argument 

 against the correctness of the new conception and when Rayer (1837) 

 and Le Blanc (1838) again demonstrated the transmissibility of the 

 disease by faultless inoculation experiments the former, more correct 

 view, gradually gained the ascendency, and at the same time the claims 

 of Dupuy that the disease was the same as tuberculosis, those of Bouley, 

 Hering and Funke that it was merely a pyemia, and the claims of 

 others that it was a general dyscrasia, diphtheria, etc., were perma- 

 nently abandoned. 



After the contagious character of the disease had been generally 

 acknowledged, the belief still persisted that the disease now and then 

 developed spontaneously, or as the result of a degeneration of some 

 other morbid process, e. g., distemper or strangles, until Gerlach (1868) 

 and Bollinger (1874) demonstrated, by means that eliminated the last 

 doubt, that glanders resulted from the mediate or immediate contact 

 exclusively with diseased animals or their pathologic products. 



The investigations of more recent times have demonstrated the 

 exact nature of the contagion. After Chauveau had shown that the 

 removal of the cellular elements from glanderous secretions by means 

 of filtration destroyed their infectious properties and thus demon- 

 strated that, the infectious principle was in some manner fixed to 

 organized elements, a number of authors directed their search for the 

 virus to the microscopical examination of the secretions. Thus Babes 

 (1881) observed in the pus and in the walls of an ulcer of a man 

 affected with glanders, small rod-like structures with thickened ends. 

 Rozsahegyi observed straight or slightly bent, homogeneous, immotile, 

 slender rods in the contents of a pustule of a diseased main. Bouchard, 

 Charrin & Captain (1882) produced bouillon cultures from the morbid 

 products of diseased persons and horses which produced glanders in 

 guinea pigs and asses in the fifth generation, but it remained for 

 LoefiBer, with the cooperation of Schuetz (1882) _ to isolate and grow 

 pure cultures of the characteristic rod-like bacterium which he demon- 

 strated indisputably by means of exact animal experiments (1886) 

 to be the etiological factor at the bottom of this disease. 



Since that time the chief object of researches has been the deter- 

 mination of the exact modes of infection and the perfection of methods 

 of diagnosis. For the latter purpose, aside from the experimental 



