114 DISEASES OF THE LUNGS. 



pronounced to be such; and the horse may limp quite as 

 much, or even more. In some cases only one leg will ex- 

 perience this ; but it more commonly happens, I think, that 

 after an interval of some days — in one case it was seventeen 

 days — the other fetlock becomes attacked. The swelling 

 at first feels puffy, as though its contents were fluid ; is ex- 

 ceeding tender to pressure, and is often situated to one side 

 of the flexor tendons in the leg, from which, in two or three 

 days, it drops down to the fetlock-joint, gradually losing its 

 puffiness as well as its tenderness. Regarding it as a sort 

 of rheumatic metastasis, I have fomented and used cold 

 lotions and bandages for it, and, on some occasions, have 

 practised local bloodletting — from the plate-vein — for it, 

 and at the same time have exhibited gentle aperient 

 medicine : I am not quite sure, however, that I have done 

 any good by all this. A case has lately occurred to me in 

 which during convalescence both hocks became swollen, 

 tender on pressure, and warm to the hand, causing the 

 horse to have a stiff straddling gait in his hind parts, 

 evidently arising from a translation or fresh attack of in- 

 flammatory action upon ligamentous tissues. In one instance 

 it ended in anchylosis. 



In the treatment of sub-acute pneumonia, although 

 we may have got rid of the acute or dangerous symptoms, yet, 

 even supposing the disease to have assumed this comparatively 

 mild form from the beginning, are we not to imagine that 

 in this mitigated condition it is harmless ; so far from it, 

 this is the form of all others in which inflammation, by con- 

 tinuance, brings about those alterations of structure — inter- 

 stitial effusion, hepatization, induration, tuberculation — 

 which are so much to be apprehended, not only from their 

 indirect tendency to destroy life, but also, supposing they 

 do not do this, from their rendering the lung more or less 

 impermeable to air, and consequently so much the less per- 

 fect for the purposes of respiration, leaving the horse short 

 or thick-winded, unthrifty, consumptive, valueless. The 

 presence or continuance of inflammatory action is still to be 

 met at every point, not with the same boldness of practice, but 



