Although George Gatheral's letter quoted above was published in the Bradford Observer, Gatheral was in fact a wool merchant based in Constantinople, a city that was in this period responsible for the export of a large proportion of the exotic fleeces destined for Bradford. In this letter, which he sent from Constantinople in December 1879 and was published in the Observer in January 1880, Gatheral noted that the regions which raised the animals for their hides were free from human anthrax, while he had encountered cases in Constantinople only on very rare occasions. On this basis he surmised that the conditions the raw materials were subjected to during their carriage to Bradford caused these fleeces to become agents of disease; in his words, the resulting ‘dirt, dust, and moisture’ gave rise to woolsorters' disease.

Gatheral's letter merits attention three times over.