THE MODERN HOUSE DOCTOR. 261 



symptoms are to be met by saline medicines and counter ir- 

 ritants. 



CHRONIC RHEUMATISM. 



Chronic rheumatism is occasionally a sequel to the acute form ; 

 yet it may come on without any previous perceptible acute attack, 

 and entirely independent of it. The principal difference between 

 this and the acute disease lies in the less activity of the attack 

 and inflammatory fever, and the indefinite duration of the symp- 

 toms : the lameness is not persistent, but goes off after exercise, 

 and returns again while the animal is at rest. 



As regards the Causes of this Malady. — It is known to be of 

 hereditary origin ; sometimes arising in a sort of spontaneous 

 manner, without any assignable cause : it frequently follows hard 

 driving, exposure, and chilling the surface with cold water. 



Horses, after having been driven a long distance, sometimes 

 come into the stable in a very exhausted state, and instead of 

 rubbing them dry, clothing them with a w T arm blanket, and pay- 

 ing that attention to them which their circumstances demand, they 

 are suffered to drink cold water, driven perhaps into a cold corner 

 of a stable, neither wind-tight nor water-proof; the legs are 

 sluiced with, cold water to clear them of mud, and the knight of 

 the stable, a humane man perhaps, out of charity for the poor 

 "devil," gives him a double allowance of food just at the \evy 

 time when the digestive organs are unequal to the task. Next 

 morning, on attempting to back the horse out, his fore, and some- 

 times the hind, limbs are as stiff as a poker. " My horse is foun- 

 dered," exclaims the owner — a term very expressive of the ruined 

 condition of the poor brute. The founder, or rheumatism, which- 

 ever the reader pleases to call it, may finally locate on the 

 muscles of the shoulders and fore extremities, or it may run to 

 the feet, and there spend its fury, in the form of laminitis, — in- 

 flammation of the lamina? of the feet: this finally becomes 

 chronic; produces atrophy — a wasting of the muscles. The horse 

 is then said to be foundered in the chest. When the disease 

 locates and remains within the horny covering of the foot during 

 its several stages, and finally leaves the foot in a contracted, ruined 

 condition, the horse is said to be foundered in the feet. "We do 



