INDIGESTCON. 273 



and tremors; the pulse^ from being quick and small, and 

 thready, growing weak and more frequent, and, at length, 

 running down and becoming altogether imperceptible; the 

 countenance denoting gloom and despondency of the heaviest 

 character; looking back at the flank and groaning; some- 

 times crouching with the hind quarters ; with or without 

 eructation and vomiting. I do not think that any peculiar 

 or strange posture the animal may throw himself into in a 

 fit of pain can be relied upon as worth much ; and as for 

 the agitation of the tail — which I suppose to be what 

 Dupuy means by " des mouvemens convuhifs des ynuscles coc- 

 cygiens inferieurs'^ — it is a symptom which so frequently 

 portends extreme danger in other cases that I should ima- 

 gine no especial import can be attached to it here. 



INDIGESTION. 



Though a word in everybody's mouth, indigestion, in a 

 medical sense, is a phrase of such comprehensiveness that it 

 becomes requisite for me to explain^ prior to entering on the 

 subject, what meaning it is my desire to have attached to 

 it. By some physiologists, digestion is applied exclusively 

 to the change the food undergoes within the stomach ; by 

 others, it is extended to every subsequent change the ali- 

 ment experiences in the course of being reduced to its ulti- 

 mate states of conversion, viz., chyle or nutritive matter, and 

 faeces or in nutritive matter. In man, whose digestive 

 organs are in some respects differently constructed from 

 those of horses, there is much reason for regarding the sto- 

 mach as the grand agent of digestion; but in the horse, 

 who is a graminivorous animal, one that is almost always 

 feeding, anrl whose food is, for the most part, of a nature to 

 occupy a large volume notwithstanding his stomach is in 

 itself but small, the organ appears to do little towards the 

 completion of the process, leaving much to be done after 

 the alimentary matters have passed into the intestines. To 

 say, therefore, that indigestion is owing to some fault in the 

 stomach alone, is taking much too confined a view of the 



II. 18 



