TRANSLATIONS FROM FOREIGN PAPERS. 
361 
is contagion. There is certainly no veterinarian who has not had 
several occasions to observe these facts. On this point, truth is 
definitively granted to science. 
Therefore, it is a fact which must have seemed incomprehen¬ 
sible to all attentive observers, that such educated men and able 
practitioners as H. D’Arboval, Yatel, Rodet and Delafond have 
ignored the contagious property of gourme, specially when all 
those who came before them—Gilbert, Sacco, Goliier and Tog- 
gia—had so well established the fact by considerably numerous 
observations, and even by experiments of incontestable results. 
This error, however, was easy to explain. Two causes have 
contributed to give rise to it and to propagate it for a certain 
time : the first was the influence upon almost all minds of the 
absolute doctrine of Broussais ; the second, the belief that all 
inflammatory diseases of the anterior respiratory passages in the 
young horse was gourme. 
One considered as pathological entities a great number of 
specific diseases, virulent or infectious; and the other, in allowing 
to consider as not contagious by cohabitation certain angina, 
always believed to be gourme, seemed to furnish facts for the 
support of the theory. No more hesitation then to generalize 
and formulate a law opposed the one that no one before had 
thought to doubt. It was overlooked that things entirely different 
were mixed up, a simple inflammation and a specific disease. 
The numerous examples of propagation were no more considered. 
It was so easy to connect their development with the influence of 
all worthless causes, that there was no difficulty to explain them. 
Still we must acknowledge that this idea of the non-transmission 
was never universally adopted. Notwithstanding the authority 
of the names above mentioned, many practitioners, the majority 
even, continued to consider the disease as contagious. Seeing it 
daily communicating itself in such evident manner, they soon 
left aside all other assertions a priori to believe on the clinical 
proof of facts. And thus there remained no one to convince. 
However, as this idea of the non-virulency was strongly ar¬ 
gued, it has seemed to me proper to mention it, at least to show 
to what extreme judicious minds may allow themselves to be 
