AN INQUIRY. 
281 
existed from the remotest antiquity, as we are told that it has, 
it may be asked why it never, prior to the epidemic we have been 
discussing, gave rise to a syphilitic disease. The only answer to 
such a question can be this, viz.: That while glanders has un¬ 
doubtedly been communicated from the horse to man at different 
times since its existence, yet it never before was transmitted to 
a sufficiently large number to enable it through its passage from 
one individual to another to become milder and milder, and finally 
to limit its infecting centre to the sexual organs, and thus un¬ 
doubtedly to become a venereal disease. 
As vaccine can be inoculated on any portion of the body, and 
which generally becomes milder from a scab of the third or fourth 
generation, so we believe glanders—usually at first so fatal—be¬ 
came less quickly so after its passage through a number of indi¬ 
viduals ; and hence resulted, after long time, in the so-called 
syphilitic disease. 
We are told that “ for many years after its outbreak” (refer¬ 
ring to the epidemic) “ sexual intercourse does not appear to 
have been suspected as the mode of its propagation ; the primary 
affections of the sexual organs were not noticed as constant 
symptoms.” 
Further, that “ if this plague has been, strictly speaking, a 
venereal disease, the sexual organs ought to have shown the first 
symptoms of a recent infection, whereas, as Grenbeck justly ob¬ 
serves, they only became affected incidentally, in consequence of 
the general spreading of the pustules over the surface of the body.” 
Jahr writes as to its cause, “the external circumstances favora¬ 
ble to the production of a pathological event as great as it was 
incredible—such, for instance, as the meeting of large hosts from 
every country, encamped for a long time in a climate to which 
they were unused, and sustained by unwholesome and unwonted 
supplies of nourishment; considering, moreover, the atmospher¬ 
ic influences, the noxious emanations from thousands of cadavers, 
excess and licentiousness of every kind ; and, finally, the wild 
passions let loose by the war, the non event of such a plague as 
the modern syphilis would have seemed a source of astonishment, 
rather than that its advent should excite our wonder.” (ibid, 
p. 291.) 
