242 
GLANDERS AND FARCY IN MAN. 
tinued to enjoy, from contamination of any kind, notwithstanding 
the dissections and the examinations and the dressings of glandered 
and farcied horses we were all so frequently engaged in, appeared 
so to establish the truth of this doctrine that, for my own part, I 
must confess such a thing never entered my mind as catching 
either glanders or farcy. I have, scores of times, dissected glander- 
ous heads and farcinous limbs, imbued my fingers — heedless whether 
they had any cuts or scratches upon them or not — in the discharges 
from the noses of glandered horses, applied even my own nose to 
the apertures of their nostrils for the purpose of ascertaining the 
presence of fetor, during which I must have inhaled the very 
breath of the diseased animal ; — scores of times, I repeat, have I 
done all this, regardless of washing my hands or wiping my face 
after such examinations, or, at least, until such time as I had leisure 
and opportunity so to do, and yet — providentially now I must look 
upon it — have I escaped every sort of contamination. Still, as was 
afterwards shewn to my cost, my system did not prove insuscepti- 
ble of imbibing animal poison. For, while a pupil at St. Thomas’s 
Hospital, in the year 1820, dressing at the time for Mr. Travers, 
in sewing up the abdomen of a woman who a few hours before 
had died of femoral hernia, I pricked both my thumbs, and two of 
my fingers of my right hand, in consequence of which lymphatic 
inflammation had, by the following morning, set in with so much 
violence and apparent danger that — from the circumstance of no 
less than nine of the students of the hospital having, during the 
the same winter, died from similar irritations — my mind took alarm, 
and I instantly set off into the country ; to which step, under the 
very judicious treatment of my kind master, Mr. Travers, I felt at 
the time, and now am convinced, I owed the preservation of my 
life. I have intruded thus much of my own case here to shew 
that my constitution, although it had resisted the virus of glanders 
and farcy, was far from being proof against the influence of animal 
poisons. 
The tocsin of alarm of a man taking a disease something ap- 
proaching to glanders and farcy was first sounded at the Veterinary 
College in 1817, on the occasion of my poor school-fellow — the 
late Mr. William Turner — then a pupil, taking the disease; or, at 
least, taking a disease after having “ received a small wound on 
his hand from dissecting the head of a horse that had been destroyed 
by glanders Abscesses made their appearance upon different 
* Such is the account given by Mr. Coleman in his letter on the subject to 
Mr. Travers. Vide “ Inquiry concerning Constitutional Irritation,” p. 352. 
According to Mr. Travers’ own statement, however, the horse “ died of glan- 
ders.” P. 351. While, according to an account since given, the horse from 
which Mr. Turner contracted his disease never had glanders — hut strangles ! 
