AILMENTS AND ILLNESSES 61 



intestine which needs clearing away, pure olive oil will 

 do all, and more than castor oil, and will neither cause 

 the pain at the time nor the subsequent constipation, 

 which will be the inevitable results, if there are no 

 worse ones, of the stronger, and, I must call it, vile, drug. 

 Another fallacy is the supposed desirability of con- 

 stantly washing the eyes and nose with warm water. 

 This is often not properly dried off, and chill results, 

 while all the fuss and worry is quite needless and does 

 no good. A little bit of old linen rag may be torn up 

 and the fragments used to clean off the discharges 

 and at once burnt. Once, or even twice, a day a sponge 

 damped with boracic lotion can be used, but very 

 sparingly. 



The watchword in distemper, as I said before, is 

 nursing good nursing alone will pull most dogs through 

 and I deliberately refrain from giving any prescrip- 

 tions, because, as each case varies according to circum- 

 stances and the patient's constitution, each should be 

 prescribed for on its merits. 



For far too long we have gone on in a rough-and- 

 ready rule-of-thumb method of dosing dogs all in the 

 same way, without regard to idiosyncrasy, which all 

 the time has been as marked in them as in human 

 kind and the sooner we change all this and study each 

 dog after its kind, the better for them and for us. 



Skin Troubles. The most annoying thing about 

 the skin complaints which occasionally beset toy dogs 

 is the difficulty to the amateur >f diagnosing them 

 correctly. Even veterinary surgeons are sometimes 

 hazy in this respect, and it is therefore well when a 

 skin trouble refuses to yield to simple remedies, incap- 

 able of doing harm, to consult a man really experienced 

 in toys, and not some uninterested, and even rather 

 contemptuous, practitioner, who may even commit such 

 a cruel barbarity as I have heard of, in the advising 

 of sheep dip ! 



The most common form of skin disease in adult 



