2o8 THE HORSB. 



vasion of healthy tissue by the primary process, or that it may exert a 

 remedial influence upon the first disease, but it can not and does not at 

 once remove that inflammation and obliterate its lesions, for the products 

 of any inflammation, however simple, require a certain time for their re- 

 moval, and it is impossible that the products of inflamed lung tissue can 

 be immediately removed and the inflammation in whole transferred to 

 the laminae. Metastatic laminitis, then, is nothing more nor less than 

 concurrent laminitis, and as such presents little if any peculiarity 

 outside the imperfectly understood exciting cause, and the practitioner 

 who allows the acute symptoms of the laminitis to mislead him, simply 

 because their severity has overshadowed those of the primary disease, 

 may lose his case through unguarded subsequent treatment. This form 

 of laminitis is by no means commonly met with, but when seen will 

 usually be found in conjunction with pneumonia, according to Youatt 

 with inflammation of the bowels and eyes, and according to I^aw and 

 Williams sometimes with bronchitis. 



7. Concussion. This acts as a producer of this disease by the local 

 overstimulation which it occasions, the exces.sive excitement being fol- 

 lowed by an almost complete exhaustion of the functional activity 

 of the laminated tissues, the exhaustion by congestion, and event- 

 ually by inflammation. But congestion here, as in all other tis- 

 sues, is not necessarily followed by inflammation; for although the 

 principal symptoms belonging to true laminits are present, the con- 

 gestion may be relieved before the processes of inflammation are 

 fully established. This is the condition that obtains in the many so- 

 called cases of laminitis, which recover in from twenty-four to forty- 

 eight hours' time. These are the cases which should be called conges- 

 tion of the laminae. 



Prevention. To guard against and prevent disease, or to render an 

 attack less serious than it otherwise would be, is the highest practice of 

 the healing art. In a disease so liable to result from the simplest causes 

 as laminitis, and especially when the best judgment may not be able to 

 know the extent of the disease-resisting powers of the tissues which are 

 liable to be affected, or of what shall constitute an over-excitement, it is 

 not strange that horse owners find themselves in trouble from uninten- 

 tional wrong-doing. If the disease was dependent upon specific causes, 

 or if the stability of the tissues were of a fixed or more nearly determi- 

 nate quality, some measures might be adopted that would prove gener- 

 ally preventive. But when we recall the fact that predisposing causes 



