A treatise on the horse : its diseases, lameness, and improvement : in which is laid down the proper method of shoeing the different kinds of feet ... / by William Osmer.

Date:
1830
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on the horse : its diseases, lameness, and improvement : in which is laid down the proper method of shoeing the different kinds of feet ... / by William Osmer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    Chap. IV.] HARDENED DUNG. bowels, causing inflammation of the bowels, is what the writers and farriers indiscriminately call “ the strangullion,” or “ twisting of the guts,” for such they always suppose it to be. Yet this never happens originally, though it may be effected by some other misfortune. The plain truth is, that certain particles or pieces of dung, or excrement, in passing through the guts, become hard or in- durated from an excessive degree of dryness, or heat in the system; whence it comes to pass, that the space of the gut where it rests is stretched and enlarged. Hence follows a narrowness or stricture round the adjacent part of the fame, so that the excrement cannot pass along. This occasions an inflammation; and the horse, if not soon relieved by cooling and relaxing medicines, dies of a mor- tification in such part. Another cause may be in- flammation of some particular part of the intestines, where the excrement may not be so lodged ; that is to say, a tumour or tubercle on the mesentery. [From the time Osmer first wrote, to this hour of the improved edition going to press, we have no instance of strangullion (i. e. strangulation of the intestines) on record ; as, indeed, how should it be, in the absence of all liberality in the profession, as to the communication of any extraordinary cases; and of nearly all means of making such public, except those which were held out and tardily embraced in the Annals of Sporting, during the six first years of its existence ! But the French veterinarians had watched the progress of this hideous, and as we