80 
DOMESTIC ANIMALS. 
exercised, the course of the blood is accelerated in every direction, and 
to the brain among other parts. The vessels that ramify on its surface, 
or penetrate its substance, are completely distended and gorged with it; 
perhaps they are ruptured, and the effused blood presses upon the brain ; 
it presses upon the origins of the nerves, on which sensation and motion 
depend, and the animal suddenly drops powerless. A prompt and 
copious abstraction of blood ; or, in other words, a diminution of this 
pressure, can alone save the patient. Here is the nature, the cause, 
and the treatment of apoplexy. 
Sometimes this disease assumes a different form. The horse has not 
been performing more than his ordinary work, or perhaps he may not 
have been out of the stable. He is found with his head drooping and 
his vision impaired. He is staggering about. He falls, and lies half 
unconscious, or he struggles violently and dangerously. There is the 
same congestion of blood in the head, the same pressure on the nervous 
organs, but produced by a different cause. He has been accustomed 
habitually to overload his stomach, or he was, on the previous day, kept 
too long without his food, and then he fell ravenously upon it, and ate 
until his stomach was completely distended and unable to propel for- 
ward its accumulated contents. Thus distended, its blood-vessels are 
compressed, and the circulation through them is impeded or altogether 
suspended. The blood is still forced on by the heart, and driven in ac- 
cumulated quantity to other organs, and to the brain among the rest, and 
there congestion takes place, as just described, and the animal becomes 
sleepy, unconscious, and if he is not speedily relieved, he dies. This, 
too, is apoplexy : the horseman calls it stomach staggers. Its cause is 
improper feeding. The division of the hours of labor, and the introduc- 
tion of the nose-bag, have much diminished the frequency of its occur- 
rence. The remedies are plain : bleeding, physicking, and the removal 
of the contents of the stomach by means of a pump contrived for that 
purpose. 
Congestions of other kinds occasionally present themselves. It is no 
uncommon thing for the blood to loiter in the complicated vessels of 
the liver, until the covering of that viscus has burst, and an accumula- 
tion of coagulated black blood has presented itself. This congestion 
constitutes the swelled legs to which so many horses are subject when 
they stand too long idle in the stable ; and it is a source of many of the 
accumulations of serous fluid in various parts the body, and particu- 
larly in the chest, the abdomen, and the brain. 
Inflammation is opposed to congestion, as consisting in an active state 
of the capillary arterial vessels ; the blood rushes through them with 
far greater rapidity than in health, from the excited state of the nervous 
system by which they arc supplied. 
Inflammation is either local or diffused. It may be confined to one 
organ, or a particular portion of that organ ; it may involve many 
neighboring ones, or it may be spread over the whole frame. In the lat- 
ter case it assumes the name of fever. Fever is general or constitutional 
inflammation, and it is said to be sympathetic or symptomatic when it 
can be traced to some local affection or cause, and idiopathic when we 
cannot so trace it. The truth probably is, that every fever has its local 
