539 
Extracts from British and Foreign Journals. 
DIAGNOSIS OF GLANDERS AND FARCY, AND THEIR 
RELATION TO OTHER DISEASES. 
It being admitted on all hands that there is no essential 
difference in kind between glanders and farcy, that they 
vary only in severity, and are producible in different indivi- 
duals by the same poison, there appears no good reason why 
so confusing a nomenclature should be retained. Farcy is 
the chronic and less severe form of glanders ; in horses it 
generally begins in the skin, and according, indeed, to a 
popular but most arbitrary classification, it differs from 
glanders in never having the nasal complication, which is so 
prominent a feature in the latter. The differential diagnosis 
founded upon the last-mentioned symptom can serve no 
useful purpose, and we cannot but think that great advantage 
would result if the term farcy were disused entirely, and that 
of glanders, qualified by the adjectives, acute , subacute , and 
chronic , alone retained. 
Respecting the real nature of glanders, there can, we think, 
be no reasonable doubt. It is a specific disease, the result of 
the introduction into the system of a specific animal poison. 
The opinion maintained by Travers, that its phenomena are 
no more than the ordinary results of the absorption of dead 
animal matter, must be abandoned by every one who will 
carefully examine the facts since collected in reference to it. 
Excepting, perhaps, however, the nasal inflammation, it has 
no single symptom peculiar to itself; it is the combination 
and the course in which they are developed which give it its 
specific character. Its eruption resembles that of ecthyma, or 
boils ; from other constitutional causes, its subcutaneous 
abscess, the rigors, sweatings, etc., which follow, remind one 
of those of pyaemia; and in the phlegmonous inflammation of 
the parts adjacent to the inoculated spot, and in the great 
prostration which is rapidly induced, it displays features 
similar to those occurring after poisoned dissection-wounds. 
The occurrence of an ecthymatous eruption may follow other 
animal poisons than that of glanders. It is common, after 
the bite of the common adder, and may result from the inocu- 
lation of the matter of ordinary boils. An instance has quite 
recently been under the writer’s observation, in which a man, 
in dressing a large carbuncular sore, from which his wife 
