BROKEN-WIND. 155 



mens d^eau pure tres froide,'' with which, and bloodletting, 

 he says he has had great success. Let his diet consist of 

 nought but bran-mash and cold water. Keep him con- 

 stantly tied and racked up, so that his head be elevated ; 

 and do not suffer him to lie down, or move about, or be in 

 any way disturbed. The medicine given with the best 

 effect in man is the superacetate of lead in combination with 

 opium. Turpentine, also, is highly recommended in human 

 practice. And Dr. Copland says the balsams, so extolled 

 for the same virtue, owe their efficacy to the turpentine 

 they contain. 



BROKEN-WIND. 



The appellation " broken-wind^' is apt to convey, to an 

 unprofessional or unequestrian mind, a meaning very diffe- 

 rent from that which we, from education, professionally 

 attach to it; and there can be no doubt, I think, but 

 that those who first gave this appellation to the disorder did 

 so from the circumstance of the horse affected with it being 

 observed continually to be breaking wind, in the vulgar 

 sense in which we ordinarily use the phrase; although the 

 late Professor Coleman, whose theoretical ingenuity was 

 proverbial, was wont to turn the word " broken" to his 

 account, while discoursing on his favorite theory of rup- 

 tured air-cells, by saying, that those who gave the name to 

 the disease evidently must have known that something — 

 the lung, most probably — was broken. Judging, however, 

 of the pathological knowledge possessed by the old writers 

 on farriery by what is displayed in the works they have left 

 behind them, I must repeat my opinion — and this opinion 

 seems to be confirmed by a disgusting operation they some- 

 times performed for the disease — that in the ^fl/M5 passed 

 from behind will be found the derivation of this remnant of 

 the cant phraseology of farriery. Be this, however, as it may, 

 it is a name by which the disease is still universally known 

 amongst us ; and the only way I see of forcing it into direct 

 application, is, either to admit, with Professor Coleman, that 

 it implies the rupture we find in the lung, or to deem it indi- 



