GLANDERS. 
643 
by horses with symptoms of glanders, require being painted in oil, but that 
the whole of the racks and mangers should be thoroughly washed with soft 
soap and hot water well softened by soda, and which I have no doubt, if 
the stables are properly ventilated, will prevent all danger from infection. 
Glanders is much more frequently produced by defective ventilation of stables 
than by glandered matter.” 
(Signed) “ Edward Coleman, P.V. S.” 
If it can be shewn, beyond any reasonable ground for doubt, that 
glanders may be, and not infrequently is, taken through mediate 
contagion, through stabling, &c. — and I think enough has been 
advanced in these pages to demonstrate, at least, the plausibility 
of such a deduction — then Coleman’s first argument sustains so 
much weakening, that the miasm of the stable no longer can be 
regarded as the universal and exclusive cause of glanders and 
farcy which he, in his enthusiastic prosecution of his schemes of 
ventilation, imagined it to be, but must descend in the grade of 
causation, to take no more than its due share in the production of 
the disease, along with other equally well-grounded and recog- 
nized causes. 
Secondly : that Coleman established his great point, that glan- 
ders and farcy did originate independently of contagion, there is 
no question. Setting aside the necessity of actual contact, and 
the improbability of horses coming together in such manner as to 
catch the disease through inoculation one from another — neither of 
which positions would experience suffer Coleman to maintain ; — 
setting aside, also, the posing query ever put to contagionists, 
“ Whence did the first glandered or farcied horse take the dis- 
ease ?” there is ample evidence on record to demonstrate that 
foul and ill-ventilated stabling have proved a fertile source both of 
farcy and glanders*; and to Coleman the greatest credit is due 
for the masterly and persevering manner in which he discovered 
and exposed this fomes of infection, and for never, after his dis- 
covery of it, leaving it — so far, at least, as the cavalry and ordnance 
stables were concerned — until he had cleansed it out from the very 
bottom, and, in the place of a heated and polluted atmosphere, filled 
the public stables with currents of cool and pure air — with air that 
was wholesome for the horses to breathe, in the place of that which 
was pregnant with miasmatic vapours : continually charged as the 
unrenewed atmosphere of the closed-up stable must have been, 
even in the daytime but especially by night, with carbonaceous 
exhalations from the lungs of its inhabitants, and ammoniacal and 
* M. Patu, M.V. to the 4th (French) Cuirassiers, ascribes the extra- 
ordinary prevalence of glanders and farcy in the French cavalry to the crowd- 
ing together of the horses in small, low-pitched, ill-ventilated, dark, damp 
stables ; and finds great fault — not without reason — with the authorities for 
not affording proper and healthful accommodation. — Veterinarian for 1836. 
