Glanders : a clinical treatise / by William Hunting.

  • Hunting, William, 1846-1913.
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Glanders : a clinical treatise / by William Hunting. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    In 1858, William Percival published his well-known work on Hippo- pathology—a systematic treatise on the disorders and lameness of the horse. In Volume III. is an article on Glanders, extending to 200 pages, and embracing a most careful and extensive review of the work done on the disease by every writer from Solleysel downwards. No less than forty authors are quoted and analysed, but very few contributed much useful information. Of this history I have made use in compiling these pages. Percival himself says on page 239: I have no more doubt of glanders being a contagious disease, than I have of syphilis or small-pox or itch being contagious. He then proceeds to discuss the opinions of other authorities as to the origin of the disease, and says : No doubt has ever been entertained by me of the spontaneous origin of glanders and farcy—of their origin, apart from the influence of contagion. Further on we find : Of the nature of the (so-called) virus of glanders we know no more than we do concerning the supposed viruses or poisons of syphilis, rabies, or variolus. We have the same ground for arguing the existence of virus, as there is for doing so in the diseases just named, and no more. . . . We do not imagine that simply an unhealthy or ill- conditioned state of body can give rise to glanders or farcy. We believe that the specific virus must, in some form or another, somewhere or other exist. Percival also recognised that: the poison of glanders after its absorption may be latent, or in the system for weeks—months even—the same as the virus of syphilis is kno\^ n on occasions to be, and as that of rabies always is. For many years after Percival wrote, the views expressed by him were generally accepted, and few practitioners disbelieved in the occasional spontaneous origin of glanders. Miasmas or mephitic vapours arising from bad ventilation and over-crowding, tempered by climatic changes of an indefinite kind, were the assumed cause of outbreaks which could not be traced directly to contagion. Thus practical measures of prevention were neglected, or limited to the isolation of the most marked cases. Not until Pasteur, in 1863, had demonstrated that every living organism arose only as the result of a similar previous organism, did the theory of spontaneous origin of contagious disease yield to observation