227 
Frterinare Stiri^prulrrtirr* 
A CASE of glanders in the human being was related in our last number* 
Dr. Elliotson, to whose kindness we are indebted for the opportunity of 
seeing it, delivered a very interesting clinical lecture on this subject to his 
class, at St. Thomas’s, on the 28th ultimo. A very good report of this 
lecture is given in the Lancet of March the 9th. We extract a paragraph 
or two from it:— 
The Professor commenced by describing contagion as the communi¬ 
cation of a disease which exists in one living system to another living system, 
whether the tw^o systems be those of human beings, or those of brutes, or 
those of a human being and a brute. The term, he said, Avould also hold 
good as applied to the communication of disease between a vegetable and 
an animal, if such a contagion were possible, but of that he knew no 
instance. He then pointed out to the students the exact distinctions which 
exist between the words contagion and infection, describing them each as 
a quality which denotes communicable disease, but defining “ contagion’^ 
to be both that mode of communication which is palpable to the senses (as 
in the poison of syphilis), and that mode which is not (as in scarlatina), 
while infection is applicable only to those modes of contagion which are 
not evident to the senses. “ Now, that the diseases of man are commu¬ 
nicable to beasts, is a well-established point. 'Phe measles, according to 
good authority, have been imparted to sheep, and a disease of the hair 
(trichoma), and the plague, have also each been communicated to brutes. 
Whether that is the case also with any other disease, is not well known. 
On the other hand, several diseases may be communicated from brutes to 
men as the cow-pox by vaccination, the mange from dogs (in which case the 
disease in man assumes the appearance of itch), and also hydrophobia, the 
probability being, that in each case the disease may be given back again 
from man to the brute. The cow-pox certainly may, and Magendie has 
himself reproduced hydrophobia in a dog, by inoculation from the froth of a 
rabid man. To these instances may now be added glanders, a disease which 
must be ranked as one of the most readily communicable of them all, to 
be caught, however, only by contact with the diseased secretion from the 
mucous membrane of the nostrils inglandcrcd animals, or the pus produced 
in the tumours on other parts. The glanders, according to the testimony 
of the first veterinarians, is not acquirable by any other mode, nor by 
infection. 
“ The fact of its occurrence in man w'as first established, or made highly 
probable, in this country, by Mr. Coleman, and by two cases w hich came 
under the notice of Mr. Travers, recorded in his w^ork on “ Constitutional 
Irritation,” as being very like cases of glanders, but described by him (as 
though glanders in man were not possible) as instances of a diseased state 
of the constitution. Mr. Coleman had taken some of the glanderous mat¬ 
ter from one of the men, and inoculated an ass with it. Glanders and 
farcy were the result, and death ensued in twelve days. Farther proof, 
moreover, was obtained, yet the facts were alluded to at the time by Mr. 
Travers as a matter for w^onder, that disease could be communicated from 
a mah to a brute, and yet the disease in the brute not be the same as that 
which existed in the man. 
“ With regard to the period of time during w iiich any cases have been 
recorded as cases of glanders in the human being, it may be mentioned 
that, ten years since, two instances were recorded in Rust’s German 
journal, both of them ascribed by tiie narrators to contagion from glandered 
horses, the editor also himself stating it as his opinion that the assumption 
W'as correct. In these cases, a minute account of all the post-mortem ap* 
