440 
THE NATURE AND TREATMENT OF FARCY. 
is predisposed to be acted upon by that influence. Smallpox may 
be generated although the child is shut up in a place where small¬ 
pox had never before existed ; and many a contagious fever is ge¬ 
nerated in prisons and on shipboard, where such fevers had never 
before prevailed, and so horses may become farcied where farcy 
was never known before. 
Heated and foul air is the prevailing cause of farcy; the 
animal being forced to breathe over and over again the atmo¬ 
sphere polluted by the emanations from the urine and the dung, 
and empoisoned by the change which it undergoes in the lungs. 
Farcy was never seen in a horse that had wandered from his 
birth in a forest or on a common. 
Heated and polluted air will likewise act as a predisposing 
cause; it will render an animal more likely to receive the disease 
by contagion than he otherwise would be, but it acts more as an 
exciting cause. A horse worked excessively at one time, and 
then left for days and weeks without exercise; or suddenly 
removed from cold to heat, or heat to cold, or from poor to plen¬ 
tiful feed, will often become farcied; and some diseases, as grease 
and strangles, have terminated in farcy. These, or other causes, 
operate so powerfully, that farcy is scarcely ever produced by 
contagion: there is not one horse in a thousand that becomes far¬ 
cied by contagion, and yet it may be and is produced by artificial 
inoculation. These causes produce different effects on different 
animals : this empoisoned air, which is the source of farcy in the 
horse, is the origin of husk in the pig, and of roup in the fowl. 
The deeper seated absorbents are not susceptible of farcy; and 
even when the leg of the horse is often more than double its usual 
size, it is still the inflammation and enlargement of the absorbents 
of the skin, or the immediate subcutaneous tissue. 
If farcy is more easily cured than glanders, it is because we 
can more easily get at the seat of the disease in the former than 
in the latter; and, beside, the seat of glanders is a secreting 
membrane, and although a great deal of blood is sent to it, the 
blood is principally employed in furnishing the secretion : ulcera¬ 
tion of such a part is with more difficulty healed than if the 
blood could be employed in the formation of new and healthy 
granulations. 
Farcy, however, is not so often cured as some people imagine, 
for in the majority of cases it returns, and generally connected 
with glanders, and is then inevitably fatal. 
In the treatment of farcy, ^internal medicines are of far less 
consequence than local applications. Mr. White, of Exeter, suc¬ 
ceeded in producing farcy by inoculation with the matter of 
farcy. His object was not so much to ascertain whether this 
