Company Of Spears

Sam shrugged. ‘We have made some progress – much, I have to say, by observing what our cousins in human practice have learned. But as to the cause of illness, I confess it is true we have not made great steps. If you want my opinion it is simply put: that we may divide disease into two classes, the specific and the non-specific.’ He took off his reading glasses and began polishing them. ‘Each specific disease, into which class glanders and influenza fall, is marked by certain fixed and unchangeable features which distinguish it from any other disease, if not always perfectly to our observation, and it can only arise by propagation from the original source. The non-specific diseases are those of spontaneous growth, such as constitutional disturbance in the lungs, liver, stomach and so on.’

Hervey frowned. In one sense he himself might have observed as much. ‘To what does this tend?’

Sam hesitated. ‘Hervey, you look done in – if you’ll permit me.’ He stood and opened one of his medicine cabinets, taking out a bottle and two glasses. ‘I would not as a rule prescribe this, but I myself have been about the whole night.’

Hervey smiled. ‘I’m as happy to take my medicine from a horse doctor as from any.’

Sam poured two glasses of brandy. ‘What do you know of germs?’

Hervey looked blank.

‘You have not heard of germs?’

Hervey raised his eyebrows.

‘Or animalculae?’

‘No.’

Sam sipped a good measure of his brandy. ‘What is the root cause of the influenza in A Troop?’

Hervey took his glass and began warming it between his hands. ‘Since I do not know where precisely A Troop was when it acquired the disease, I cannot say.’

Sam nodded. ‘That is reasonable enough. But you would ascribe the disease to place?’

Hervey looked wary. ‘Ye-es.’ He took a sip of his brandy.

‘And what particular to the place would be the cause?’

Hervey frowned. ‘The air, of course. What else? And wind-borne poisons. Miasmas, are they not called?’

‘They are. And these are generated…?’

‘By stagnant water, rotting matter – by filth, commonly.’

The veterinarian shook his head. ‘You would be entirely at ease in the Royal College of Physicians, Hervey. And indeed my own. But to my mind it is an insufficient hypothesis. You suffer from remittent fever, do you not, contracted in Ava?’

‘Who has told you that?’

‘Hervey, I am not so strange to the regiment!’

Hervey took another sip. ‘Yes, I suffer from remittent fever. What is the connection?’

‘Where do you suppose you contracted it?’

Hervey laughed. ‘I know very well where I contracted it, I assure you! The stinking swamps of Rangoon!’

‘Mal aria.’

‘Just so.’

Sam took a longer sip of his brandy. ‘The problem, you see, is that there are marshes without malaria, and malaria without marshes. And if this is so it surely cannot be that the circumstances alone – torpid water, decaying vegetable or animal matter, excreta – it cannot be that these of themselves generate the disease, else it would be invariable. And what might account for the different diseases? Do we suppose, say, that a rotting cat begets an influenza miasma, whereas glanders comes from a dead dog?’

Hervey looked thoughtful. ‘I had not considered it in those terms, no. What do you say is the progenitor?’

Sam sighed again, but out of weariness with his own state of knowledge. ‘There is no doubt, from extensive observation, that filthy conditions are associated with disease. But the connection is not for me sufficiently explained by the miasmatists. I am drawn instead to the notion of animalculae, germs – we may call them what we like: the most infinitesimally small creatures, which somehow invade the body. It is but speculation, and some hold it to be perilously wild, and yet I am convinced it is the future, at least so far as specific disease is concerned. For the non-specific I myself believe the cause remains an imbalance in the body’s humours. Oh, not the bile and phlegm and such like; there is much more to it than that. But if we observe a spontaneous growth in the organs of an otherwise healthy horse we may conclude that the microscopical constituents of the animal’s physiology are … un-balanced. So far as I may see, the treatment of non-specific disease must tend to the restitution of that balance – by medication, by surgery perhaps, or by the proper regulation of the animal’s regimen and environment. That is the business of farriery, Hervey – of horse-management as you progressives call it. And what every man in the Sixth should strive to excel in.’

Hervey drained his glass and held it out for more. ‘That is understood. But are you implying that the other sort of disease, the “specific” kind, is beyond our management?’