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

William H. McNeill, in Plagues and peoples, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1977, while primarily interested in the epidemics of humankind, finds room to discuss in passing some zoonotics, among them rabies and rinderpest, but remains silent on glanders.7Smithcors has pointed out that the routes of the Crusades may have been responsible for the early emergence of veterinary literature in Italy.J. F. Smithcors, Evolution of the veterinary art, Kansas City, Missouri, Veterinary Medicine Publishing Company, 1957, p. 130. ' This may also account for the fact that the transmissibility of glanders to man was discovered only belatedly, and not generally accepted until well into the nineteenth century.9The mallein test was developed in the 1890s after Kalning in Riga and Helmann in Dorpat, and Leonard Pearson in the United States prepared mallein in 1890, after the pattern of Koch's tuberculin.See [-J Schneidemuhl, 'Ueber die fri0hzeitige Erkennung der Tuberculose und des Rotzes bei Thieren durch Tuberkulin-bezw.Mallein-Injectionen', Dt. med.Wschr., 1891, 17:1260-1262, see p. 1261; and W. E. Jen- nings, 'Glanders' in Diseases transmitted from animals to man, compiled and edited by Thomas G. Hull, Springfield, Ill., C. C Thomas, 1963, p. 265.According to Saunders (op.cit., note 126 below), Kalning worked in Dorpat and Helmann in St. Petersburg at the time.10 In addition to tuberculosis and pyaemia, glanders has also over the centuries been frequently confused with ozaena and strangles, see F. Smith, The early history of veterinary literature and its British development, vol.I, 1919; reprinted London, J. A. Allen, 1976.11 After the bacillus was first described in 1882, it has suffered a number of changes of nomenclature and classification, from Bacillus mallei via the genera of Actinobacillus, Pfeifferella, Malleomyces, Loefflerella, and Acinetobacter to its present position as Pseudomonas mallei.See T.