APPENDIX 239 



nothing be done ?' he may ask. The veterinary surgeon 

 is truthfully bound to admit that a dose of a powerful 

 sedative will alleviate them. At the same time, he may 

 know that, in this particular case, it will not be the best 

 treatment possible. He is conscious of the fact that to 

 drive that home to the mind of a layman he must give 

 a lengthy explanation. He doubts whether, should his 

 case go wrong, his explanation would be accepted. He 

 wavers. The syringe is produced, and, hoping to please 

 his client, the agony is treated instead of the disorder. 

 Does not that mean in many cases that the sedative is 

 often administered to cloak the practitioner's want of 

 knowledge — administered to hide a pain concerning 

 whose cause there is blind ignorance ? 



Again, those who have given this subject much thought 

 are almost certain to come to the conclusion that the 

 • dread of enteritis ' often wrongly influences the prac- 

 titioner to the administration of an anodyne. In the 

 horse we have, in enteritis, a form of colic that is, per- 

 haps, apart from contagiousness, only equalled in human 

 medicine by cholera. Its rapid fatality, when once set 

 in, is appalling. With one or two recent cases of that 

 description uppermost in his mind, the veterinarian at 

 once pushes the administration of sedatives in his next 

 case of acute abdominal pain. And yet he may be doing 

 wrong. I hold the opinion, rightly or wrongly, that 

 enteritis as we know it is a form of acute septic infection 

 of the blood-stream, commencing from the intestines, 

 with a cause as yet undiscovered. And if, until I see 

 its fatal signs well in evidence, I withhold the adminis- 

 tration of sedatives in a case of colic, I always console 

 myself with the fact that their earHer exhibition would 

 not have helped in the least to bring about a favourable 

 issue. 



