Special report on diseases of the horse / by Drs. Pearson [and others].

Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Special report on diseases of the horse / by Drs. Pearson [and others]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    619/690 (page 533)
    tury a large body of veterinarians and medical men protested against the contagious character of this disease, and prevailed by their opinion to such an extent against the common opinion that several of the gov- ernments of Europe undertook a series of experiments to determine the right between the contesting parties. At the veterinary school at Alfort, and at the farm of Lamirault in France, several hundred horses which had passed examination as sound had placed among them glandered horses under various conditions. The results of these experiments proved conclusive^ the contagious character of the disease. In 1881 Professor Bouchard, of the faculty of medicine in Paris, assisted bjr Drs. Capitan and Charrin, undertook a series of experiments with matter taken from the farcy ulcer of a human being. They after- ward continued their experiments with matter taken from horses and succeeded in showing in 1883 that glanders is caused by a bacterium which is capable of propagation and reproduction of others of its own kind if placed in the proper media. In 1882 the specific germ of glanders was first discovered and described by Loefiler and Schuetz in Germany. When we come to study the etiology of glanders, the difference of susceptibilit}^ on the part of different species of animals, or even on the part of individuals of the same species, and when we come to find proof of the slow incubatioli and latent character of the disease as it exists in certain individuals, we will understand how in a section of country containing a number of glandered animals others can seem to contract and develop the disease without having apparently been exposed to contagion. Causes.—The contagious nature of glanders, in no matter what form it appears, being to-day definitely demonstrated, we can recog- nize but one cause for all cases, and that is contagion by means of the specific virus of the disease. In studying the writings of the older authors on glanders, and the works of those authors who contested the contagious nature of the disease, we find a large number of predisposing causes assigned as fac- tors in the development of the maladj^. While a virus from a case of glanders if inoculated into an animal of the genus Equus will inevitably produce the disease, we find a vast difference in the contagious activity of different cases of glanders. Yvre find a great variation in the manner and rapidity of the development of the disease in different individuals and that the contagion is much more apt to be carried to sound animals under certain circumstances than it is under others. Only certain species of animals are suscepti- ble of contracting the disease, and while some of these contract it as a general constitutional malady, in others it only develops as a local sore. In acute glanders the contagion is found in its most virulent form.