["Acute human glanders". Contribution for the scientific history of the Museum of pathological anatomy established in Trieste Hospital]. / Morva umana. Contributo alla storia scientifica del Museo Anatomo-Patologico di Trieste.

The Museum of Pathological Anatomy of the Regina Elena City Hospital of Trieste houses various pathological preparations of infective and contagious diseases, dating back to the early 1900's (ileo-typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis, syphillis, pulmonary plague, etc.) together with their relative diagnostic certificates. These bear witness to the key role of the Hospital's Anatomical Institute (in operation operating since 1872) during the height of the Pasteurian age. In fact, the Institute houses several anatomical-pathological preparations from a fatal clinical case of "acute human glanders". These preparations were correlated by laboratory animal experiments using Strauss' method and emblematically recall the eziological determinism of the new bacteriological science. The preparations served in their day not only as indisputable diagnostic evidence, but can now be considered a promotional metaphor of the scientific mission the Triestine Anatomical Institutés Director, Dr. Enrico Ferrarri (a disciple of Richard Paltauf), endeavored to assign to the Triestine Pathological and Anatomical Institute by strenghthening it with new laboratory methodologies. The establishment of a new "predominant and determining vision" in the international diagnostics of infectious disease was also emerging from the Haspurg city's hospital medicine. Indeed, it was here that in 1907, the brief scientific debate focussing on the cadaver of a coachman who had been infected by a glanders-infected horse was apparently taking place only locally. Yet, it can now be seen as referring to what was happening on the international scale, in a setting that after a century of empiricism and morphologism, was characterized by the progressive penetration of laboratory medicine into clinical-anatomical medicine.

[Rayer's studies on the contagion of glanders (1837-1843)]. / La contagion de la morve: méthode d'étude de P. Rayer à la Ferme de Lamirault (papiers inédits 1837-1843).

P. Rayer (1795-1867) had never thoroughly published his experimental studies on the contagion of glanders. His recently un-earthed hand written papers allow us to depict his experimental approach and its results. He was not the first who transmitted glanders from a patient to horses or donkeys. But he did it systematically with glander secretions from acute and chronic cases. Whatever was the disease of the donors the transmitted forms were unpredictably either chronic or acute. His conclusion was that the two forms were two symptomatic aspects of a unique disease. Clinically dormant states were shown to be also contagious. He demonstrated it through deliberately altering healthy and sick horses inside the stable and by using saddles, bridles and brushes of sick horses on healthy ones. Moreover he excluded other causative factors tentatively proposed, peculiarly food products. The systematically logical and rigorous experimental approach used by Rayer for this research is a mile stone, 30 years before Pasteur. This methodology is still nowadays used to study the epidemiology of diseases such as Prion Diseases, Mad Cow for instance.

Early methods for the surveillance and control of glanders in Europe.

From the many existing documents on the history of glanders, it is possible to detail the practical measures adopted for disease surveillance and control from antiquity until the 19th century, principally in European countries. Surveillance is based on clinical diagnosis, post-mortem examination, animal inoculation and knowledge of the conditions under which infection occurred: aetiology, pathogenesis, susceptible species, virulent material, mode of infection, incubation period, etc. The historical data are assembled and compared, with comments on each of these points. Control is based on the application of general disease control measures and attempts at vaccination and treatment. A study of these procedures enables a comparison of their efficacy and a description of the major steps in their implementation.