Glanders: medicine and veterinary medicine in common pursuit of a contagious disease.

TODAY, GLANDERS is a disease rarely heard of in Western Europe, Britain, and North America; but a hundred years ago the annual total of cases of glanders in the horse, published by the Board of Agriculture, exceeded 2,000,1 and British veterinarians were all too familiar with the disease. Moreover, transmission to man took place with distressing regularity, and the outcome was nearly always fatal.2 In 1908, William Hunting, Chief Veterinary Inspector to the London County Council, wrote: "Glanders in man is such a loathsome and fatal disease as to deserve more attention than it receives. ... If the medical profession called for the suppression of glanders as loudly as they did for the extermination of rabies, prevention in all animals would be accelerated. Hydrophobia in man ceased when we had stamped out rabies in dogs, and glanders in man will only cease when the disease no longer exists among horses".3 Historically, the juxtaposition with rabies is apt. Over the centuries the number of animals of the equine species, and of men, whether infected naturally or in the laboratory, killed by glanders have probably equalled or even outweighed those who have succumbed to rabies. In times of war, from the Middle Ages onwards and as late as World War I,4 losses of horses through glanders in the armed forces of all nations must have been always an important and influential factor.' Yet in historical terms the literature on rabies is copious, while glanders has remained very much a neglected subject. Whereas the drama and unpredictability surrounding the clinical manifestations of rabies have frequently attracted the attention of medical and lay historians alike, glanders has remained ignored by most historians even in the context of the