CONTAGION OF GLANDERS. 
203 
easily to be conceived as being produced by the hard food on which 
the horse is supported, or the occasionally severe discipline of 
the bit. 
More contagious than some have supposed. —One point, how¬ 
ever, is established, I think,—that glanders is far more conta¬ 
gious than many have supposed : Mr. Turner’s mare destroyed 
four of her companions. The poor widow at Paddington had 
her stable perfectly emptied by the disease; and I will venture 
to say, that there is not a district throughout the kingdom, in 
which some farmer, by the loss of a considerable proportion, or 
the greater part, of his team, has not had sufficient proof of the 
contagiousness of glanders. The cause of this doubt with regard 
to the frequent communication of the disease by inoculation, 
seems to have arisen from ignorance of its insidious nature. 
When glanders appears, and the horse has for several weeks or 
months scarcely been exposed to the possibility of contagion, it 
has at once been concluded that the disease was generated in 
him by some assigned or unknown recent cause. It has now, 
however, been proved to us that the disease may exist and may 
be communicated to others, when, for many months, there has 
been nothing to excite suspicion in the mind of the groom or the 
owner; and when the candid veterinarian acknowledges, that, had 
not the circumstance been pointed out to him, it would probably 
have escaped his observation. The truth of the matter then is, 
that every horse that passes through a fair, or is baited at an inn, 
or even travels the common public road, may be infected without 
the rider’s or owner’s knowledge or slightest suspicion. Aglan- 
dered stallion neighed at a mare that was separated from him by 
a double hedge and a deep lane; the virus was wafted across by 
the wind, and she became diseased, and died. It is impossible 
for any one to say, except there be some plain and manifest cause 
for the generation of the disease, that any horse did not receive 
it by infection. There would be a degree of presumption in the 
assertion which the calm inquirer after truth should not display. 
Uncertain Time of its Appearance after Infection .—In the 
experiments which have been made for the communication of 
glanders, a few days only have generally elapsed before the dis¬ 
ease appeared. In some cases, however, a fortnight or three 
weeks have passed, and no symptoms of glanders have been 
seen, and the animal, generally a condemned subject, has been 
destroyed, or has died from some other malady; and thence the 
conclusion has been drawn, either that the horse whence the 
matter was taken w’as not glandered, or that glanders could not 
be propagated in this way. The new light, however, which has 
been thrown on this early history of the malady, will make us a 
