80 DOMESTIC ANIMALS. 



exercised, the course of the blood is accelerated in every direction, and 

 to the brain among other parts. The vessels that ramify on its surface, 

 or penetrate its substance, are completely distended and gorged with it; 

 perhaps they are ruptured, and the effused blood presses upon the brain ; 

 it presses upon the origins of the nerves, on which sensation and motion 

 depend, and the animal suddenly drops powerless. A prompt and 

 copious abstraction of blood ; or, in other words, a diminution of this 

 pressure, can alone save the patient. Here is the nature, the cause, 

 and the treatment of apoplexy. 



Sometimes this disease assumes a different form. The horse has not 

 been performing more than his ordinary work, or perhaps he may not 

 have been out of the stable. He is found with his head drooping and 

 his vision impaired. He is staggering about. He falls, and lies half 

 unconscious, or he struggles violently and dangerously. There is the 

 same congestion of blood in the head, the same pressure on the nervous 

 organs, but produced by a different cause. He has been accustomed 

 habitually to overload his stomach, or he was, on the previous day, kept 

 too long without his food, and then he fell ravenously upon it, and ate 

 until his stomach w^as completely distended and unable to propel for- 

 ward its accumulated contents. Thus distended, its blood-vessels are 

 compressed, and the circulation through them is impeded or altogether 

 suspended. The blood is still forced on by the heart, and driven in ac- 

 cumulated quantity to other organs, and to the brain among the rest, and 

 there congestion takes place, as just described, and the animal becomes 

 sleepy, unconscious, and if he is not speedily relieved, he dies. This, 

 too, is apoplexy : the horseman calls it stomach staggers. Its cause is 

 improper feeding. The division of the hours of labor, and the introduc- 

 tion of the nose-hag^ have much diminished the frequency of its occur- 

 rence. The remedies are plain : bleeding, physicking, and the rem^oval 

 of the contents of the stomach by means of a pump contrived for that 

 purpose. 



Congestions of other kinds occasionally present thernselves. It is no 

 uncommon thing for the blood to loiter in the comphcated vessels of 

 the liver, until the covering of that viscus has burst, and an accumula- 

 tion of coagulated black blood has presented itself. This congestion 

 constitutes the swelled legs to which so many horses are subject when 

 they stand too long idle in the stable ; and it is a source of many of the 

 accumulations of serous fluid in various parts of the body, and particu- 

 larly in the chest, the abdomen, and the brain. 



Illflamniation is opposed to congestion, as consisting in an active state 

 of the capillary arterial vessels ; the blood rushes through them with 

 far greater rapidity than in health, from the excited state of the nervous 

 system by which they are supplied. 



Inflammation is either local or diffused. It may be confined to one 

 organ, or a particular portion of that organ ; it may involve many 

 neighboring ones, or it may be spread over the whole frame. In the lat- 

 ter case it assumes the name o{ fever. Fever is general or constitutional 

 inflammation, and it is said to be sympath'€tic or symptomatic when it 

 can be traced to some local affection or cause, and idiopathic when we 

 cannot so trace it. The truth probably is, that every fever has its local 



