THE 
VETERINARIAN. 
VOL. XVII, No. 203. NOVEMBER 1844. New Series, No. 35. 
GLANDERS. 
By William Percivall, M.R.C.S., Veterinary Surgeon 
First Life Guards. 
The Miasm of the Stable. 
THE late Professor of the Royal Veterinary College was a great 
non-contagionist in his opinions, not believing that “ one glandered 
horse in a thousand, or even in ten thousand, caught the disease 
from contagion ;** but that the ordinary and almost exclusive source 
of glanders and farcy was what he called the poison — what I have 
here denominated the miasm — of the stable : “ a poison generated,” 
he said, “ in a confined atmosphere, out of exhalations from the 
breath, the dung, the urine, and the perspiration of horses pent up 
in it.” And in support of this theory of general and almost exclu- 
sive causation he had collected many facts which, with great in- 
genuity and force of reasoning, he shaped into arguments admitting 
of the following classification : — 
First : the Professor argued, since nothing short of immediate 
contact could, in his opinion, produce glanders by contagion, and 
since, even then, abrasion of the touching surface or inoculation in 
some way or another was, he thought, required, the disease could 
rarely, according to his notions, be propagated in any such manner. 
Secondly : that the first horse that ever became glandered could 
not possibly have contracted the disease through contagion. 
ThirdR : that several well-authenticated instances stood on record 
of glanders and farcy having broken out (in an epidemical form) 
among horses who, in apparent health at the time, had been placed 
in new stables or on board new ships ; and that such sudden and 
general attack of the disease had been satisfactorily shewn to be 
owing to want of due ventilation. 
VOL. XVII. 4 Q 
