222 
CHARLES F. RING 
which was disseminated by contagion through Italy, France and 
Spain. * * * “ Lord Bacon credited this story and endeavored 
by his writings to render it more plausible.” (Helmuth’s System 
of Surgery, 3d Ed. p. 145). 
That the eating of human flesh alone could hardly have 
caused this epidemic must he at once apparent to all medical 
men, for, unless the dead had suffered from some specific disease, 
a pyaemia or a septicaemia at most could have resulted there¬ 
from. What, then, could have been the nature of the food or 
poison taken ; for we must at least credit the alchemist’s story of 
the famine—which only agreed with what many others have 
written upon the same subject. 
Noav, it is not the most natural tiling to suppose that recourse 
was first had to human flesh, when food far less repulsive to the 
feelings, if not to the palate, was not difficult to obtain ; and we 
cannot but consider that it was horse flesh instead of human that 
was furnished by the butchers, and that this was diseased _dis¬ 
eased with the glanders or farcy. 
We are strengthened in taking this initiatory step when it is 
known that glanders prevailed to a considerable extent among the 
horses employed at the siege, and also during the epidemic which 
followed, and was at one time supposed to have originated coin- 
cidently with it, but this theory was soon dispelled when the 
antiquity of glanders became known, it having been described by 
Aristotle fifteen hundred years airo. 
As ideas that are to become established on the basis of facts, 
are generally foreshadowed long before the period at which they 
are received as corresponding to facts, let us see if we cannot find 
some mention in the past of this relation we have proposed. 
Lafosse (senior) in his “ preface” to his treatise upon the true 
seat of glanders in horses, states : That “ great was his surprise 
when lie found that such distemper was not only unknown to the 
ancients , but that it was altogether a new disorder , and did not 
appear in Europe till about the year 1494.” ’Twas at the siege 
of Naples, after the arrival of the Spaniards from their discoveries 
in America, that glanders in horses appeared for the first time. 
I ai azzei is the first author who has mentioned it—he himself 
was at the siege j and the Spanish authors are the first who have 
