ON THE TRANSMISSION OF DISEASES, &c. '2S9 
exposing yourselves, and much less your assistants or servants, 
to danger. Simple or common medicine should in no case be 
given. It is playing with the disease, and compromising your 
own safety and that of others. A dose of physic or a little nitre 
will be utterly powerless, and the exhibition of them nothing can 
excuse. If you wish to try some new or potent drug, let it be 
placed in the food or the water,—in the latter it will seldom be 
refused. I do not know that even the thickest or longest glove 
would afford sufficient security to justify you in attempting to 
ball a horse with regard to whom there is the least suspicion of 
rabies ; for there is often, even in the earliest stage, a degree of 
treachery about the rabid animal, and particularly the rabid horse 
—a deeply-laid plan to lull suspicion, and assuredly to accom¬ 
plish mischief—of which they only who have watched the pro¬ 
gress of the disease can form an adequate conception. 
ON THE TRANSMISSION OF SOME DISEASES 
FROM ANIMALS TO THE HUMAN SPECIES. 
By M. Lavergne, Assistant Professor at Toulouse, 
I HAVE no intention to give a detailed history of contagious dis¬ 
eases ; I mean only to speak of their transmission from the brute 
to the human being,—to hint at the different opinions of authors 
on this subject, and to add some new facts, which, from their 
nature and rare occurrence, seem to deserve to be known. I 
will say little of the cow-pox, which, in the opinion of all medi¬ 
cal men and veterinary surgeons, possesses the property of being 
transmitted to man by inoculation, and, having been so trans¬ 
mitted, preserving him from the small-pox. It is to Jenner 
that we owe the discovery of the cow-pox, and the benefits re¬ 
sulting from its application. I will only remark that, in passing 
from the cow to the sheep, it acquires a new character—its march 
is more rapid, and it loses its anti-variolous property. 
I may, perhaps, be permitted to say a word or two of the etio¬ 
logy of cow-pox. According to Jenner, this disease is produced 
by the transference and inoculation of the matter of grease from 
the heels of the horse to the teats of the cow, by means of the 
hands of the person who, having dressed the former, afterwards 
milked the latter. This opinion seemed to be confirmed by the 
experiments of the younger Godine, who believed that he had 
produced cow-pox by inoculating the cow and the sheep with 
the serous fluid of grease; and he particularly relied on tlie fol¬ 
lowing fact:—a coachman, that had not had small-pox, and who 
attended on a horse having grease, had a pustular eruption on 
