Of all the skin infections, farcy [1] is that which has been considered the most formidable.

Van Helmont, [2] with regard to these symptoms and their progression, declared them to be the source and origin of the pox. This judgement, without a doubt, little impressed the inquisitors [3] who piously imprisoned him on the pretext that his successes in the treatment of diseases of the human body were beyond the forces of nature.

Solleysel, [4] this oracle who is still consulted in our day, gave a definition of it which suggests that his celebrity is less a testament to his wisdom than our own ignorance. It is poisonous air , he says, corrupted spirits that penetrate the parts of the horse’s body with the same ease that sunlight passes through a glass.  [5] The obscurity of such a text demands commentary, but we have neither the audacity nor the temerity to undertake explanation of what we do not understand, and that which, very likely, the author did not understand himself.

Let us consider farcy through its signs, its causes, and in its therapeutic rules, which we must follow in the treatment of this malady.

It always declares and manifests itself with an eruption. It is nevertheless important to observe that the characteristic bumps do not consistently have the same appearance nor do they necessarily appear in the same place.

There are those that appear indistinctly on any given part of the animal body. Their volume is not significant. They sometimes abscess.

Other bumps are more or less similar, however there are more of them, and they commonly only occupy the back with a few spread to the neck and head. As it is, some dry out and disappear, while others recur and reappear.

Often we notice extended tumors, strongly attached and unmovable, with very hard protuberances on the extremities and in the middle. When these hard bumps suppurate they expel a white and cloudy matter.

Often these same extended tumors follow and accompany some of the principal venous branches, such as those of the jugular, the maxillary, the axillary, the humeral, the cephalic, the aural, the saphenous. And, the kinds of nodes dotted along these cords degenerate into ulcers so that the calloused edges seem tightened and narrowed, emitting a watery, corrupt, and fetid pus.

It happens sometimes that farcinous ulcers hold the nature of verminous ulcers, of dry ulcers, of cankerous ulcers. And, that is what we principally notice among those that result from the piercing of the bumps raised around the heel or on the hind fetlocks of the posterior extremities. These extremities exude an insufferable odor. Ordinarily, they develop to a monstrous volume and are in some way leprous.

Finally, these symptoms are sometimes accompanied by engorgement of the maxillary and sublingual glands; yellowish, greenish, and bloody matter runs from the nostrils (which is quite different from that matter which normally flows by the same path) when some of these bumps emerge in the nasal cavities with a light inflammation of the pituitary membrane, great weakness, and withering. All these signs are indications of the animal’s impending death.

No doubt it is due to all these variations and these significant differences that we owe the many names given to different kinds of farcy, such as the flying, the farini oculus, the corded, the chicken’s anus, [6] the cankerous, the internal, the mole, the fork, etc. They [the variations] have also suggested the prognostic used for the kind of farcy which attacks the head, the shoulders, the back, the chest, and which seemed very easy to vanquish, whereas that kind which occupies the horse’s hind presents a mechanism of foul ulcers has been declared refractory and even incurable when it is accompanied by runny nostrils.

The obvious causes of this disease are too much exertion in great heat, too much food given to thin and overheated horses or to those who get very little exercise: foods such as freshly cut hay, freshly cut oats, shaved hay, considerable quantities of grain; the effect of cold, humid air charged with noxious vapors; obstruction; the tightening of cutaneous pores; etc. All that which could accumulate in the early stages of acidic, salted, and viscid crudities, [7] change the state of the blood, and carry new heterogenous particles that are poorly suited for assimilation and that purge from the nose. Their enduring and successive manner repeatedly augments the humor’s thickness, acrimony, and vitiation. All that which impedes the circulation, all that which raises mass, and all that which influences the tone of skin and opposes perspiratory excretions would thus be capable of producing all the described phenomena.

Depending on the degree of the thickening and of acrimony, it [the farcy ] will be more or less daunting. Benign farcy is characterized by bumps that are simply scattered here and there or grouped on one part, elongated tumors that do not extend considerably, and by a laudable suppuration: but, the tumors that follow result from significant swelling of the lymphatic canals; the undeniable hardness that marks, so to speak, each of the nodes or each of the same vessels’ valvular dilations, and the end is confirmed through extremely acrid fluid, more or less difficult to dilute, to correct, and to extract. This designates a farcy of formidable malignity, provoking (if it is not stopped in its progress and if we do not remedy this primitive perversion) the tenacity, the viscosity, the coagulation of the whole mass of blood and humors, the annihilation of the principal spirit of the vital fluids, the impossibility of salutary secretion and excretion, and will inevitably drive the animal to death.

The proof of the fluid’s putrid corruption comes not only from all of farcy ’s ravages – certainly, we offer testimony, of this genre and of this character – but of its fetidness and of the ease with which it spreads and extends from one body to another, little by little, by direct contact, and even sometimes over a certain distance. Also, the danger of communication requires us to remove the animal with malignant farcy, and to separate it from healthy ones. And, the worry of a continuous reproduction of relicts [8] in the horse with a proclivity to lick the watery, squalid, corrupt, and corrosive matter that escapes from his [9] ulcers, obliges us to take advantage of the means of restraint offered by a chaplet. We call by this name (chaplet) the assembly of several sticks cut in the form of a rung and arranged in a row that are approximately equally spaced. [10] Line them in parallel in relation to the neck’s total length. Attach them with a notched cord to strengthen the fastening. We place these cords around the animal’s neck so that, abutting against the chest and shoulders by the jaw, they will hinder movement and bending at this part. Might one hazard a guess that this name comes from the resemblance of this particular collar to the endless rope that holds the buckets or the valves of a hydraulic chain?

Be that as it may, in the treatment of this disease, about which I have not claimed to offer more than very general ideas, one must attempt to alleviate, to incise, to resolve the tenacious and viscous humors, to thin them, to evacuate them, to soften their salts, to correct their acrimony, to facilitate the circulation of fluid in the most dilated of vessels, etc.

We will begin with bleeding; we will put the animal on a very gentle diet of bran in water; we will administer an emollient bath, purgative drinks in which we do not forget to use aquila alba.  [11] Some of the diaphoretics put to use will cause dissipation of the bumps and those tumors that appear in benign farcy, and total desiccation of those that are suppurated.

The inveterate and malignant farcy is infinitely more stubborn. It is important then to multiply the bleedings and the emollient baths, to mix within the animal’s ordinary drink a few pints of a decoction made from mallow, marshmallow, pellitory, etc. Moisten the bran with an aperitif-tisane and refresh with the roots of patience, elecampane, Spanish salsify, burdock, strawberry-plants, and wild chicory. Keep the horse on this diet for a long time. Do not resort too soon to those evacuations that are capable of irritating solids, agitating lumps, and increasing acridness. Ensure the success of the administered purgatives, the dilatants, and the relaxants that preceded them. Do not repeat these purgatives blow by blow. Order, before newly prescribing, the bleeding that he needs. After these evacuations (whose numbers are set by circumstance) and after the regime of humectants and coolants observed over a certain interval of time, we prescribe a tisane of wood and moisten every morning the bran that we give to the animal if the bumps have not disappeared. If the elongated tumors have the same adhesion and immobility, we begin anew the bleeding, the washings, the purgatives, return again to the same tisane, and move from there to mercurial preparations, such as those of Ethiops mineral, cinnabar, etc. whose energy and virtue are palpable in all cutaneous diseases.

All these internal remedies have marvelous efficacy, and usually bring about the animal’s healing so long as they are administered according to the art and with method: we are nevertheless sometimes obliged to employ external medicine. The most appropriate in cases of hard and immobile tumors are those making use of althea ointment. If the bumps have not yet come to suppuration, and the animal has been sufficiently purged, one can, using the greatest circumspection, lightly rub them with Napolitain [12] ointment.

Conditioning lotions made with decoctions of mucilaginous plants are indicated in circumstances of a suppuration that can be helped by the use of creamy and resinous remedies, such as ointments of basil and althea. We must be careful to abstain from all desiccative remedies when there is hardness, inflammation, and the suppuration is considerable. We can, once the swelling has gone down, wash the ulcers with hot wine in which we will dissolve common honey.

Those ulcers that we call verminous require a liniment made with a one ounce dose Napolitain ointment, a half-ounce dose of balsam of Arcæus, [13] a one dram dose of staphisagria and aloe succotrina, one half-dram myrrh, and all this in a sufficient quantity of absinth oil. This liniment is not just able to destroy worms, but can also cleanse and resolve callosities. If the ulcer is truly disposed to corruption we add Fioravanti balm [14] to this liniment.

Calcinated alum mixed with Aegyptiac or other catheretics, will be put to use when ulcers maintain a cankerous character. With prudence we could even employ actual cauterant. And when there is running from the nostrils, no matter the cause, several times a day we insert into the nasal cavities an injection of common water, in which we have lightly boiled barley grain and dissolved honey.

It is still very useful to protect the leprous legs from the air’s effects. We must at least admit that it is not so difficult to cover this area with a course clean cloth.

I have frequently observed a suppuration in one of the animal’s feet, and sometimes in all four feet at once at the moment when all the symptoms of farcy disappear. We must, therefore, make an opening at the site where it seems to start, and, once the fault is found, place a tincture of myrrh and aloe, and place quills soaked in this same tincture in it (the opening). I have several times noticed a considerable cavity in the interior of the nail, between the sole and the parts that we protect. This cavity is detected by the sound made when the hoof strikes. I have filled this cavity, whose existence I am certain of, when it is not an extension of the suppuration, by way of a farrier’s hoof knife with a compress laden with a digestive, which I have infused with hypericum oil, turpentine resin, egg yolks, and a sufficient quantity of eau-de-vie.

Furthermore, no one is ignorant of viper powder’s usefulness, by which we must complete the cure of the disease which is the subject of this article. And as we do not doubt the positive effects of moderate exercise, it is unimaginable that we would not mention the necessity of regularly moving the animal during treatment and while the virus’s activity is lessened.

It is important not to return the horse cured of farcy to his food and his normal diet except little-by-little, and only in case of complete and perfect recovery.

Moreover, it seems to me that there are enough of these practical facts recorded in a sort of horse hospital that I have been directing for seven or eight years, and where I have healed more than eighty cases of the disease in question, to give infinitely more certain notions of the aid required than the knowledge that one may imagine drawing on, in this respect, from most of our authors: knowledge which presents us with nothing more advantageous than all those marvelous secrets spouted mysteriously at a very high price by a group of charlatans as numerous as those who nowadays infect human medicine.

Notes

1. If one were translating across time as well as language, farcy might better be translated as glanders. Glanders is presently understood as a bacterial infection that typically afflicts the skin and respiratory system of equine species. It is transmissible to other mammals (including humans), though it spreads less easily across species than among equine animals. Before these different manifestations of the same bacteria were lumped into “glanders” as a single diagnosis, different names were given to different manifestations. “Farcin” and “morve” were the most common in eighteenth-century French.

2. Jan Baptista van Helmont (1579-1644), Flemish physician and disciple of Paracelsus, who was imprisoned for controversial publications on curatives that were considered magical and therefore heretical.

3. In 1621 van Helmont’s Magnetic Cure of Wounds was published – without his knowledge, so he claimed – and was condemned by the Louvain Medical and Theological Faculties, Cologne’s Theological Faculty, and the University of Reims. He was eventually placed before the Spanish Inquisition, multiple times, and placed under house arrest between 1634 and 1637. He was a contemporary of Galileo who had been imprisoned the year prior. For more information see Georgiana D. Hedesan, An Alchemical Quest for Universal Knowledge: The ‘Christian Philosophy’ of Jan Baptiste Van Helmont’ (1579-1644) (New York: Routledge, 2016).

4. Jacques de Solleysel (1617-1680), French equestrian who published multiple works on horsemanship and equine disease. Spelled in the original as “Soleysel.”

5. I was unable to recover the quote from an edition of Solleysel’s work published during his lifetime, and therefore actually written by him. For this quote in a post-humous and revised edition see De Solleysel, Le Parfait Mareschal qui enseigne a connoistre la beauté, la bonté et les defauts des chevaux (Paris: Pierre Emery, 1712) New Edition, tome 1, p. 360. Consultable here.

6. A literal translation of cul-de-poule . Also corresponds to a French idiom meaning to purse one’s lips.

7. May refer to undigested or morbid humors.

8. In humoralism, this refers to particles from the disease lingering in the body – such as because the horse keeps lapping up the excretions – after curatives have been offered, which would thus continue to imbalance the humors.

9. The use of gendered pronouns in the history of animals is both complicated and contentious. I use them because cheval in French may refer to either a male horse in the particular or universally for the species from a masculinist position. Though there is no case of jument , or mare, in this piece of Bourgelat’s writing, in his larger œuvre he moves back and forth between cheval and jument quite purposefully, and very rarely in his medical writings signals a male horse in particular through étalon (stallion/stud) or hongre (gelding).

10. This description is slightly varied from that Bourgelat later used in Claude Bourgelat, Élémens de l’art vétérinaire : essai sur les appareils et sur les bandages propres aux quadrupèdes (Paris: 1770), pp. 40-41. There is an associated plate (VIII B) that is only consultable online through the 1813 edition, but does correspond to the 1770 original. That 1813 plate can be found here.

11. A term in early modern pharmacology that describes mercury after having undergone seven sublimations. Also sometimes referred to as “calomelas.”

12. A mercury-based ointment, as the name suggests, from Italy.

13. A reference to the sixteenth-century Spanish surgeon, Franciscus Arcæus. [Noel] Chomel’s Dictionnaire Œconomique (Commercy: Henry Thomas, 1741), 4th ed., t. 1, p. 89 identified it as composed of sheep fat, pork fat, turpentine, and gum of the elemi tree.

14. Balm named for an Italian physician, Leonardo Fioravanti (1517-1588). It is a distilled alcoholic tincture that has been infused with Venetian turpentine, bay leaves, elemi resin, tacamahaca resin, liquid styrax, galbanum, male incense, myrrh, aloe, galangal, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, zedoary, ginger, origanum dictamnus, and aloe succotrina.