SPASMODIC COLIC IN A HORSE. 
135 
continued the arsenic, increasing it two grains a day till it 
reached a drachm a day, i. e., half a drachm morning and 
night, when my patient having improved so much under its 
influence, 1 gradually discontinued it. At the end of seven 
weeks he resumed his labour, in part, in a flour- wagon ; 
and although a “no-haired horse,” he bore the cold from 
zero to ten degrees below as well as any other horse, and in 
the spring he had as good a natural covering. He has 
ever since remained well and capable of performing all the 
services required of him. I should have said that about the 
time w T hen this horse became a subject of medical treatment, 
our city and its vicinity were visited with epidemic influenza. 
Several horses were attacked, and treated in the same stable 
during his sickness ; but this animal escaped that malady, 
unless his disease can be in some way ascribed to the same 
cause. 
Remarks . — Examination showed the general health of the 
animal to be deranged. He was evidently suffering from a 
costive habit of body, and the first object was to relieve the 
system from the accumulations consequent upon it, not only 
in the bowels, but throughout the system. When the 
bowels, the great emunctory for all the waste of the body, 
fail to perform their functions, like delay occurs in all the 
excretories which enter into them ; thus the system becomes 
loaded, the health fails, the power of reaction is reduced, and 
finally lost. And this reaction is our only reliance for 
recovery from local, and indeed all diseases. If this habitual 
constipation be not corrected it becomes a fertile cause of 
disease, especially of acute diseases ; and in cases of accident, 
death takes place from slight causes. It is often not only a 
cause of sudden death, but a prolific source of chronic 
diseases. Such a state of the system unrelieved has no 
“ self-limit” but death. The palliative treatment may re- 
lieve it, but it returns in some other form, and with every 
revival is more intense. A radical cure can only come 
through the same organ by whose defective action it was 
induced, i.e., by remedies well chosen, well directed, and 
continued till a cure is obtained. But this takes time. A 
disease of long standing cannot be remedied by a few doses 
of medicine. The period required for its cure depends on the 
time it has continued. Empirically, it never can be cured, 
except by accident. This condition of the system is frequentty 
misunderstood by the regular, as well as the irregular, prac- 
titioner. Hence the vast amount of unrelieved, or fatal 
cases. “Medicine,” says an able writer, “always empirical, 
has been growing more and more inefficient, until it has 
