DISEASES OF THE DIGESTIVE ORGANS. 163 



Oil, Glauber salts), with calmative (Dover's powder, laudanum). 

 Alter the laxative has operated give daily Dover's powder with 

 ipecacuanha, or sal ammoniac, or should these fail to improve 

 the discharge, astringents (kino, catechu, gall-nuts, oak bark, 

 black-currant bark, walnut leaves, tormentilla, rhatany, etc.), 

 with tonics (quinia, nux vomica, salicine, cascarilla, carbonate 

 or sulphate of iron, sulphate of copper, nitrate of silver). Small 

 doses of oil of turpentine, copaiva, creosote, or carbolic acid 

 often act beneficially on the diseased mucous membrane. The 

 same agents may be given as injections in mucilaginous fluids. 

 Diet must be bland, easily digested, and fed little at a time. 

 Mashes of wheat bran, or flour from the whole grain of wheat, 

 barley, or oats, and fresh pulped or cooked roots may be given 

 to the herbivora; and farinas made into puddings, with just 

 enough juice of meat to insure their being eaten, to the carnivora. 

 Fresh raw meat without fat, beaten to a pulp in a mortar, will 

 often agree when nothing else will. The drink should be mixed 

 with a little boiled linseed, gum, slippery elm, or barley wate' 



OBSTRUCTION OF THE BOWELS. 



Under this head may be considered all cases of completv 

 obstruction of the bowels excepting those of the nature of 

 hernia or rupture. It will include blocking of the gut by 

 hardened dung, calculi, and foreign bodies swallowed; in- 

 vagination or the slipping of a portion of gut into what is 

 adjacent, like the drawing of a finger of a glove into itself; 

 volvulus, or the rolling on itself of a portion of intestine with 

 its connecting membrane until nothing can pass through it; 

 strangulation of an intestine by another rolled round it, by a 

 tumour hanging by a long pedicle, or by a band of false mem- 

 brane formed in some pre-existing inflammation and gradually 

 contracting; tumours formed within a gut; and in steers the 

 strangulation of a loop of intestine in a pouch in the right flank 

 formed 'Xiy contraction 011 the spermatic cord in castration. 



