703 
(ESOPHAGITIS IN THE HORSE. 
perly speaking 1 It seems to be an utter impossibility that these 
excruciating pains, if they had reference to the intestinal canal, 
should have endured four or five days, and no stricture, no entan- 
glement, no inflammation of any tissue, left behind. After having 
described the lesions of the oesophagus and the stomach, M. Re- 
nault adds, that no other portion of the intestinal tube presented any 
morbid lesions. All this difficulty of swallowing — these dreadful 
colicky pains as they were called, for want of a better name — 
these spasms, the part to which they were principally referrible 
the poor animal not being able to tell us — all these sympathetic 
affections of a disease of the oesophagus, are plain and dreadful 
enough when [the scalpel displays them to view. 
This is a portion of the animal rarely examined primarily, and, 
indeed, rarely examined at all ; else I have no doubt we should 
find more alterations in this tube than we are aware. We should 
find it thickened, contracted, ulcerated, vegetating. We should 
have scirrhus, and abscess, and attenuation and softening, and 
gangrene and effusion. Can none of our correspondents furnish 
us with cases of these I 
One circumstance cannot fail of being remarked, and to which 
we have more than once referred, — the strange difference in the 
treatment of the same disease by French and English practitioners 
of acknowledged and equal repute. This was, in the opinion of 
M. Renault, and would so have been considered by us, a case of 
spasmodic colic. We should have given our tinct. of pimento, or 
our sp. of turpentine, with the sp. of nitrous ether, and certainly our 
laudanum ; and if the case did not readily yield, we should have 
abstracted our four or five or six quarts of blood, and have re- 
peated this, if we saw occasion ; nor should we have been long, 
when constipation was connected with the spasm, ere we admi- 
nistered our aloes or our oil ; nor would our injections of similar 
ingredients have been omitted. But M. Renault — the flower of 
the French school — what does he do ? He subtracts five pints of 
blood, and he gives his mucilaginous drinks sweetened with ho- 
ney, and his emollient injections. On the following day a degree 
of meteorization appears, and then a small quantity of ether is 
added to the mucilage and the honey, and four pounds more of blood 
were abstracted. From the beginning to the end of the case 
there is no antispasmodic but this little ether — and no purgative at 
all. We impute no blame — it is the custom of the two countries ; 
and a most marvellous difference of custom it is. — Y.] 
