THE 
VETERINARIAN. 
VOL. XXIII, 
No. 270. 
JUNE 1850. 
Third Series* 
No. 30. 
LAMENESS IN HORSES. 
By William Percivall, M.R.C.S. and V.S. 
Lameness arising from Laceration or Rupture 
of Muscular Fibre. 
ACCORDING to our notions of the general or ordinary causes 
of lesions of muscular fibre, if men are not infrequently the sub- 
jects of it, horses seem in our eyes to manifest double the liability. 
Muscle or flesh, I need not tell my reader, is the tissue in an 
animal body through which, by some inexplicable vis movendi it 
derives from vitalization, all the motions of the body are performed; 
its more obvious function being that of locomotion , or, in other 
words, enabling the animal to move from place to place. Nobody 
could possibly imagine, from seeing flesh hanging up in a butcher’s 
shop, how wonderfully vitalization alters its properties. While the 
fleshy fibre out of the body will rend or break with but compara- 
tively little force or weight applied to it, the muscle or living fibre 
is capable of resisting force or weight to a very great amount. 
But it is not so much the amount of force or weight applied as the 
suddenness of its application, which, in the living body, is apt to be 
followed by rupture or rend of muscular fibre. A man feeling 
conscious in his own mind of any act he is about or likely to per- 
form, prepares his mind and his muscles accordingly ; and so, 
though the feat be great and trying, it rarely happens, unless 
through some unforeseen occurrence, that harm results. Now and 
then, however, it occurs that the mind and the muscles are taken 
by surprise, and then accident is very likely to follow ; as when a 
person, in descending a strange staircase in the dark, chances un- 
expectedly to step down two stairs at once when he had prepared 
himself only for descent equal to one. But a horse must be a 
great deal more subject to such like untoward events than a man. 
VOL. XXIII. s s 
