178 COMPTE-IIENDU OF THE ALFORT SCHOOL 
This school has, in the year just expiring, added another mournfu. 
case to those previously recorded in the hospitals of the biped 
of the communication of glanders to the human being. Must we, 
however, conclude that the contagion which has been commu¬ 
nicated produces precisely the same disease as that of which the 
horse died ? Although these unfortunate individuals may have 
been placed in contact with certain glandered horses, is it necessary 
that from this contact they may have obtained the germ of the 
disease! and yet it is on data of this character that the opinion is 
propagated, and said to be definitely demonstrated, by many 
medical men, that glanders is communicable from the horse to 
man. For reasons, however, which would be too long to state in 
this compte-rendu, and observing all the precaution which pru¬ 
dence prescribes in deciding on such a case, we have not seen in 
all the facts which have been produced any circumstance which 
demonstrates the contagion. On the contrary, there are so many 
facts which have existed from the earliest period, and which are 
now of daily occurrence in our schools, in the army, and in the 
practice of the veterinary surgeon, of men of every condition 
being daily in direct and prolonged relation with glandered horses, 
and yet suffering no harm, that glanders in the human being is 
more probably to be attributed to other causes than that of conta¬ 
gion. For the most part, these unhappy beings Avho furnish the 
examples of acute glanders are precisely in those conditions of 
health and of habitation which produce acute glanders in the horse, 
and is it not at least as rational to attribute the disease to those 
conditions as to contagion! However this may be, the question is 
too interesting to science and humanity to be settled by mere 
theoretical reasoning. MM. Renault and Bouley have, there¬ 
fore, undertaken a series of experiments, which, although made on 
quadrupeds, possess very great interest as connected with this 
subject. It results from these experiments that acute glanders is 
developed spontaneously in horses affected with old suppurating 
wounds, whether these animals had, at the time the wounds 
were inflicted, any apparent germ of acute glanders, or were 
already affected with chronic glanders, or were entirely free from 
disease. 
But that which observation had rendered probable has been con¬ 
firmed by experiment. Pus taken from animals that were not 
glandered has been injected, with certain precautions, into the 
veins of horses labouring under chronic glanders, and acute glan¬ 
ders has appeared in the course of a few days. Pus taken from a 
horse free from glanders has also been injected into the jugular of a 
sound horse, and, some days afterwards, that horse has died with 
acute glanders. A little while after this, there were two horses in 
