THE DISEASES OF CATTLE. 257 



culiar to animal organization, seems absolutely necessary in 

 order to correct the erroneous impressions that some persons 

 have formed of the nature and seat of disease incidental to 

 horses and cattle, and in this view I offer these preliminary re- 

 marks as introductory to the subjects of " horn and tail ails" 

 (imaginary diseases, which oftentimes, perhaps always, are the 

 result of a fertile imagination, or rather a sequence of that 

 faulty mode of reasoning which confounds effects with causes). 

 Any person conversant with the sympathetic relations existing 

 in the animal economy, can readily discover the difference be- 

 tween a pathological condition and the local or general symp- 

 toms which usually accompany it. An animal, for example, is 

 attacked with acute disease of the liver ; he evinces signs of 

 pain from pressure on the right or off side, in the region of the 

 liver, and possibly the lameness is of so grave a character as 

 to mislead the non-medical observer, and he necessarily con- 

 cludes that the subject is lame, "and nothing more," he prescribes 

 an external remedy accordingly, which is neither calculated to 

 cure nor palliate the liver difficulty. Thus for want of the ne- 

 cessary knowledge, the symptoms are mistaken for the disease. 



In derangement of the digestive organs, more particularly 

 of the stomach, the brain is usually sympathetically affected. 

 The symptoms of disturbance in that organ or its functions, 

 may escape the attention of the " cow-leach," yet they are al- 

 ways present, and range from what has been observed as 

 " dullness," up to somnolency, accompanied by other morbid 

 phenomena well understood by the physician, 



A knowledge of these and other sympathetic relations exist- 

 ing throughout the animal economy, enables us to understand 

 what occasions vomiting in a man, when a blow of sufficient 

 force is received on the skull. The blow arouses a certain set 

 of involuntary operations which the subject is unable to con- 

 trol, as in the cases of vomiting, etc. It explains, also, why 

 giddiness or vertiginous symptoms usually follow when a blow 

 is received on the region of the stonaach ; how the impregnated 

 uterus influences the mammae ^n^ stomach, causing increase of 

 function an4 volume in the former, and morning nausea in the 

 22* 



