190 MR. youatt’s veterinary lectures. 
more particularly, worked with unusual severity, and is become 
out of spirits, and falls away in flesh, a holiday is given him: 
he stands idle for three or four days, or a week, until he begins 
to look more lively, and has considerably improved apparently 
in condition. He is then suddenly taken out of the stable, he is 
put to his former hard work, and perhaps the owner attempts to 
make up a little for lost time; but his muscles have got out of 
the habit of action, there is too much interstitial deposit be¬ 
tween their fibres, and it requires a vast deal more exertion of 
nervous energy, and more actual labour, to accomplish his 
wonted task: and, when it is accomplished, and he reaches his 
stable once more, he hangs his head, and stands with eyes half 
closed, and refuses to eat; he is, in fact, in a state of fever. 
The groom, however, attributes this to debility, and instead of 
the slight bleeding, and the mash, and the tepid water, and the 
hand-rubbing, which would presently set all right again, he 
crams him with cordials ; he adds fuel to fire; he aggravates the 
state of fever: and this state of general fever very soon has a 
local determination—so rapidly, indeed, in the majority of cases, 
that some have denied the existence of pure fever in the horse. 
The weakest then goes to the wall; and either the lungs or the 
feet, or this membrane, almost the weakest part of all, exposed 
day after day to the stimulating, debilitating influences of which 
I have spoken in a former lecture—the membrane of the nose— 
becomes the principal seat of inflammation, which terminates in 
glanders. 
Severe Evert ion .—It is in this way that glanders has so fre¬ 
quently been known to follow a hard day’s chase. The seeds of 
the disease may have previously existed ; its progress may have 
been hastened by the general and febrile action excited, the con¬ 
sequence of over-work for which the horse was not prepared, 
and also by the absurd measures which were adopted, not cal¬ 
culated to subdue the fever, but to increase the stimulus. 
Every exciting Cause of Disease .—So it is, partly from the 
natural sensibility of the membrane and the important function 
it is constantly performing, and the injury to which it is absurdly 
subjected, that there is scarcely an exciting cause of disease that 
does not exert its chief, its worst, influence on this membrane. 
Horses exposed to long-continued privations become glandered. 
At the close of a severe campaign the cavalry are more than de¬ 
cimated by this pest. At the termination of the Peninsular war, 
the ravages of this disease were dreadful. It is easy to conceive 
that anything that directly irritates the Schneiderian membrane 
may be a cause of glanders. I have stated that it is frequently 
the result of fracture of the nasal bones, and warned you to give 
