MEDICAL TREATMENT OF DOMESTIC ANIMALS. 435 



sary bandaging, blanketing, and fomentations, it is fast driving the 

 firing-iron and the bfister, with the inexpressible suffering that 

 they have caused, out of the stable and the shed. With regard 

 to internal remedies and medicines, the scientific and practical 

 worlds are yet apparently far from having reached a point entirely 

 satisfactory even to themselves. But the tendency is undoubtedly 

 in favor of a greater dependence on the natural restorative 

 agencies of diet, fresh air, and suitable temperature. Old-fashioned 

 grooms still have their mysterious secrets concerning the com- 

 position of " balls," and their peculiar ways of crowding them 

 down the throats of patient and long-suffering horses ; and the 

 empire of balls and drenches, though happily weakened in its 

 foundations, has by no means given up its sway over the un- 

 educated minds of those to whom the care of our domestic animals 

 is chiefly intrusted. Specifics for loosening the bowels, produ- 

 cing silkiness of coat, brightness of the eye, and briskness of tem- 

 per, — all more or less injurious, — are still much in use. Happily, 

 however, the number is yearly increasing of those who are dis- 

 posed to send all of these remedies after the vanishing firing-iron 

 and blister, believing that the same effect on the bowels, the skin, 

 the eye, and the temperament may be produced almost as readily, 

 and certainly with less danger, by a judicious change in the 

 character of the food. A soft, moist, warm diet, such as steamed 

 hay or a hot bran-mash, will, except in such obstinate cases as 

 ought not to be allowed under ordinary circumstances to arise, 

 produce all the relaxation of the bowels that it is desirable to 

 effect ; and in obstinate cases of constipation a copious injection 

 of tepid water, repeated as often as may be necessary, cannot fail 

 to produce the desired result, if any thing will do it. 



Especially in the case of horses, the constant winter diet, 

 almost the whole year's diet indeed, consisting, as it usually does, 

 simply of hay and oats in their raw state, is very liable to produce 

 derangements of the digestive organs ; and it has been the custom 

 to remedy the evil by the use of violent cathartic medicines. A 

 particular attention to the changing of the food at times, — the 

 occasional or even regular feeding of carrots, at least the oc- 



