86 The Management and Treatment of the Horse, 



honour among some gentlemen (spare the mark !) that if 

 they have a screw which a respectable dealer will not 

 buy, they sell it to their friend. The horse soon goes 

 lame, and then the poor groom has to bear the blame ; 

 this is often the case with a horse suffering from 

 laminitis ; he is patched up, his shoes taken off, put on 

 wet clay, cooling medicine given, coronet blistered, and 

 after three months' run he is sold to some friend. Look 

 well to the foot of the horse ; if he has had laminitis the 

 hoof will be wrinkled like a cow's horn. Many people 

 when about to sell a horse that has had laminitis or its 

 companion symtomatic fever will get the smith to rasp 

 out the rings ; if the foot has been rasped up to the hair, 

 look upon it with suspicion, for laminitis is a disease so 

 dreadful in its manifestations, and attended with such 

 agony and excessive distress to the poor patient, that it 

 cannot fail to excite compassion for it from all who 

 witness a case of this terrible type. I can assure my 

 readers that I myself have been so affected that I would 

 not — nay, I could not — leave my patient until I was 

 satisfied that all had been done so far as knowledge lay 

 within my reach to relieve it at least of some portion of 

 its sufferings. . . . The first and most obvious 

 requisite for a practical groom is to possess the faculty to 

 diagnose a disease when he sees it, to distinguish it from 

 others manifesting similar symptoms, and forsee its 

 probable phases and results; and the author, know- 

 ing the difficulties he has had to contend with in his 

 search after knowledge concerning the horse, wishes to 

 place his experience in the hands of younger men, to 

 help them to surmount the difficulties and avoid the 



