ON GLANDERS. 
81 
much gratified in its perusal; and if I was but as quick with my 
pen and ipse dixit as some of my professional brethren, the Edi¬ 
tors would much more frequently hear from me. But engaged, 
as I am, it was impossible for me to allow those observations of 
Mr. Karkeek to pass without saying a something in reply; be¬ 
cause I entertain a different opinion of the work, and my expe¬ 
rience of the use of canthandes is quite the reverse. From the 
very great advantages I have had of witnessing the progress 
and termination of that dreadful scourge to horse-flesh, in which 
disease I have witnessed the constitution so variously attacked, I 
have some time since concluded a specific remedy never will be 
found for the cure of glanders. I quite agree with Mr. Vines, 
that what we call glanders in the horse, is no more nor less than 
the sequel of organic lesion, produced by other diseases, unwhole¬ 
some food, &c. And now, having stated my belief in his theories, 
allow me to make a few observations in support of them. If Mr. 
V. has not discovered a specific cure for glanders, in all its forms, 
which probably some subscribers to his book expected to find on 
perusal of the work, a discovery to which the language has no 
pretensions, Mr. V. has certainly given us the most feasible 
description of the origin and nature of the disease of any thing 
yet offered to the profession : he has thrown, if not a new, a fur¬ 
ther light upon that part of our pathology. 
M. Dupuy first called the attention of the profession to tuber¬ 
cles, as the cause of glanders, but he mistook the effect for the 
cause, and left us in the dark at a very important point, viz. 
“ that tubercle is the product of an unknown causebut Mr. V. 
tells us that tubercle is the effect of inflammation in an unhealthy 
constitution. This is as rational and clear to me as the language 
of Sir Astley Cooper, who, speaking of the different results aris¬ 
ing from inflammation in healthy and unhealthy constitutions in 
the human subject, says, “ Let us suppose that two women re¬ 
ceive each a blow on the breast, one with a healthy and vigorous 
constitution, and the other with a system worn down with care, 
anxiety, and disappointment, and in a constant state of chronic 
feverish excitement, in which the secretions are imperfectly per¬ 
formed: in the first individual, the inflammation produced will 
be strictly healthy, going through its different stages, until the 
cure is accomplished ; but in the other, owing to constitutional 
peculiarity, the same extent of injury will produce cancerous 
disease ; an affection over which all remedies, hitherto tried, have 
little control, and extirpation is but an uncertain mode of relief.” 
And most assuredly is inflammation in the various textures in 
unhealthy constitutions of horses attended with the same destruc¬ 
tive results, although it may not be of the same description and 
