EFFECTS OF MEDICINE ON HORSES. 
2*25 
known to be especially on the primary alimentary passages, are 
not likely, in the horse, to prove of much avail. Aloes, we know, 
is noted for its effect on the lower or posterior bowels, on the caecum 
and colon in particular; hence, perhaps, its especial efficacy as a 
horse medicine. 
The late Professor Coleman was in the habit, in his lectures, of 
insisting that purgation was a widely different thing in horses 
from what it was in man ; and, with the view of exemplifying 
this, reminded us how a man might be made to purge in the course 
of a couple of hours by medicine, whereas, in the horse, the same 
operation required in general a period of four-and -twenty hours. 
His data, however, were dissimilar, and consequently the inferences 
he deduced became irreconcileable. The man takes a dose of some 
neutral salt ox of castor oil ; the horse takes ALOES. Did the man 
take aloes, we should not find his bowels acting in two, perhaps 
not in twelve hours afterwards, and we know that every now and 
then it happens that aloes will purge a horse in a dozen hours. 
Again ; the man, though he purge from aloetic medicine in ten or 
twelve hours, will probably not cease to feel annoyed by his dose 
for the subsequent ten or twelve hours. It is common to say, “ a 
dose of physic” engages a horse for three days : the first, in his 
taking it ; the second, in its operation ; the third, in its setting. 
And certainly, where all such advisable precautions are taken, 
this constitutes the period required for putting a horse through a 
dose of cathartic medicine, proving it to be a much longer and more 
serious affair altogether compared to what it is in a man. This 
period, however, may be materially shortened, and the incon- 
venience sustained by the animal being thrown out of employ 
thereby very much diminished. I remember an admirably shaped 
old chestnut horse, a present to Coleman by the late Lord Heath- 
field, to which the Professor used to give — by way of a dose 
of physic — three drachms of aloes in the morning, and afterwards 
drive the horse to Woolwich and back, altogether about two or 
three-and-twenty miles : by the time he^ returned, or soon after, 
the Professor used to find the physic operating, its operation con- 
tinuing perhaps during the night, and the next (the second) day it 
was setting, and, therefore, was not incapacitating the animal 
from continuing his work : such another (long) drive as he had 
had on the first day, however, would certainly not have been re- 
commendable ; it would have brought on more purgation than was 
either pleasant to his master or safe to himself. 
In medicine we are in the habit of making three distinctions in 
the aloes as they reach us, as exports from the native countries of 
the plant : we call the extracts Socotrine, Barbadoes, and Cape. 
The two latter are the kinds known in veterinary medicine, some 
