10 HIPPOPATHOLOGY. 



vomit his patient almost as soon as the emetic is taken ; he 

 can effect purgation in a couple or three hours : the 

 veterinarian can accomplish neither; — at least, the one not 

 at all, and the other but at a period when his patient 

 (labouring under acute disease) is too far overcome to 

 admit of being recovered. Duly weighing these important 

 distinctions between veterinary and human pathology and 

 therapeutics, it will not be a matter of so much surprise, 

 why in the one case bloodletting has been oftener prac- 

 tised than in the other. Independently, however, of the 

 absolute necessity there seems to exist for venesection in 

 veterinary practice, there still appears another reason why 

 we, oftener than surgeons, have been induced to employ it ; 

 and that is, the consideration, on two accounts, that our 

 patients may not long lie ill : first, because his services 

 are required by his master, and cannot for any length of time 

 be dispensed with ; secondly, because expenses are going on 

 for his keep, &c., although he himself be in a condition to 

 earn nothing. These considerations it is which have induced 

 us to bleed in cases which would recover perhaps quite as 

 surely and as completely without bloodletting; but not, as it 

 appeared to us, within so short a space of time. However, 

 in the practice of bleeding, in particular for pulmonary dis- 

 ease, in the horse as in man, strange but salutary changes 

 in our practice have within these few years past taken place. 

 Coleman was in the habit of saying, in "inflammation of the 

 lungs,'^ bloodletting is our sheet anchor: at the present 

 day, I would rather say, in young subjects especially, blood- 

 letting, as a general measure, must be abstained from alto- 

 gether. In the form of pneumonic affection often called 

 Influenza, to bleed is little less than to kill the patient. 

 Other remedies must be employed. 



In eegard to medicine, bearing in mind how requisite 

 it is, in general, that what is exhibited should take speedy and 

 due effect, we ought to take care — at least in all cases at- 

 tended with danger — to run no risk, in prescribing, as to the 

 event : by which I mean, that in a case wherein we conceive 

 purgation to be highly desirable, it is our duty to insure, by 



