278 DISEASES OE THE STOMACH. 



When simply the mastication is found faulty, mingling the 

 oats with chaff sometimes proves remedial : should it not, 

 the teeth ought to be inspected. Linseed and malt may be 

 given in mashes, or the latter may be made into tea; or 

 hay-tea may be offered; though the horse is not likely to 

 drink either of them voluntarily, unless he have been pre- 

 viously kept short of water. Drink ought, in all cases, to 

 be given to the full the animal will take : better still, if the 

 pail be so placed that he can help himself at pleasure. All 

 this, however, comes within the proper province of horse 

 DIETETICS : a subject into which inquiries upon a large 

 scale have proved of the greatest service, at the same time 

 that they have been productive of interest and satisfaction 

 to the experimentalist. 



GASTRITIS. 



Gastritis or inflammation of the stomach is a disease 

 which in the horse but rarely comes under the veterinarian's 

 notice. Not that it is so uncommon a disease ; for every 

 practitioner who has been in the habit of inspecting the sto- 

 machs of horses after death well knows that nothing is more 

 common than to find the vascular gastric membrane red- 

 dened ; and in cases* wherein medicaments of an irritating 

 nature have been administered, it is but natural, unless any 

 very evident cause should exist for a contrary opinion, to 

 refer this inflammatory appearance to the medicine. I am 

 so far from denying the existence of even idiopathic gas- 

 tritis, at least in a chronic form_, that I think it not at all 

 unlikely it may have much to do with indigestion, and, per- 

 haps, with some other like cases about which we are at present 

 equally in the dark.^ Admitting, however, that it has a 

 claim, in the spontaneous or self-originating form, to be 

 numbered among horse diseases, we are in possession of no 

 sure signs to lead to its detection ; at least, I do not pre- 

 tend to know of any. We appear to pronounce with cer- 

 tainty upon gastritis only in those cases in which its presence 



' Bear this in mind in perusing the account of Gastro-Enteritis. 



