46 
IIEVIEW—GLANDERS IN THE HUMAN BEING. 
while living, had communicated any disease to the human being : 
that in the infirmary, no veterinary surgeon, or other person 
attendant on glandered horses, had been infected, but that malig¬ 
nant inflammation, and sometimes followed by gangrene, hud 
supervened when the hands had been pricked in the dissection of 
glandered horses. 
M. Dietrich, another veterinary surgeon, and about the same 
time, equally denied the communicability of glanders from the 
horse to the human being, acknowledging, however, that he had 
seen some persons who, having wounded themselves in the dis¬ 
section of glandered horses, had become ill, the wound assuming 
a gangrenous character, and death speedily following. 
Hitherto, then, there is not a case which would justify the sus¬ 
picion of communicated glanders. We have merely an account 
of that constitutional and malignant irritability which too often, 
in our hospitals, follows inoculation with some mysterious ani¬ 
mal poison, derived occasionally from the dead body, and with¬ 
out certain connexion with any particular disease. There is no¬ 
thing more than happens continually in our medical schools, and 
has happened from time immemorial, and where no dissection of 
the horse, glandered or not glandered, would take place in a 
dozen years. 
A medical gentleman, however, lately returned from walking 
the French hospitals, has thought proper to say that Dr. Copland 
“ is poor in his- article on human glanders,because he does not 
refer to these unsatisfactory cases. We can justly appreciate, 
and highly admire the zeal with which the student identifies him¬ 
self with and defends the reputation of his instructor ; but let not 
that zeal border on rashness, and let him not endeavour, for there 
he would assuredly fail, to found his own preceptor’s fame on the 
erroneously asserted mental poverty of another. Dr. Copland 
alluded not to those cases because they did not necessarily bear 
upon the point in question : and what does Dr. Rayer—whose 
research this gentleman is lauding at the expense of Dr. Copland 
—what does he say? The first positive and well-characterized 
case of acute gangrenous glanders in the human being is related 
by Schilling.” What does even this writer say in his translation 
from Rayer? The first positive observation regarding this dis¬ 
ease {La premih'e observation, positive et hien caracterisee !) was 
published by Schilling, veterinary surgeon (?) at Berlin.” For our 
own parts, we have ever been accustomed to regard Dr. Copland’s 
not only as a rich and inexhaustible store of observation and 
truth, but as an example, scarcely equalled, of skilful condensa¬ 
tion, and we applaud him for omitting that which would not il¬ 
lustrate but encumber his subject. 
