26 
ON ANASARCA, AND THE EFFECT OF 
that no course of medicinal treatment, however judicious in other 
respects, could succeed. 
It is a disease which generally attacks colts from one to three 
years old. The symptoms are oedematous swellings of the belly, 
the legs, the sheath, lips and nose, accompanied by great debi- 
lity, general laxity of the muscular fibre ; producing, in its rapid 
progress, diarrhoea and ascites, and terminating very commonly, 
under injudicious treatment, in death. 
The predisposing causes are to be found in the food and wa¬ 
ter ; and, however mysterious the agency may be by which all 
this is accomplished, there is no doubt as to the fact itself. It 
is towards the latter end of the year that they are more com¬ 
monly the subjects of this attack, when they are living on coarse 
sour grass, and generally drinking water rich with green slime. 
It appears to me that there is this combination of circum¬ 
stances in the disease, such as I have described it, great want 
of tone in the stomach and intestines, general debility in the vas¬ 
cular system, decreased power in the absorbents, and that the 
action of the kidneys is greatly impaired also. Under such im¬ 
pressions, the course to be pursued naturally appears to be, in the 
first place, total change of situation, food, and water; and this, 
as I before hinted, is absolutely essential to success. The best 
plan to adopt is, to have the animals removed to a covered 
shed, or warm yard at least; their food should be good sound 
hay, with a plentiful allowance of dry barley; very little water, and 
this with meal of some kind stirred in it. The external swell¬ 
ings may be easily reduced by scarifications and stimulant ap¬ 
plications. The medicine given must be such as will act power¬ 
fully upon the kidneys, and give tone to the stomach and intes¬ 
tines ; and bleeding and cathartics must be carefully avoided. 
I do not write altogether unadvisedly on this subject, for, be¬ 
sides having had some experience in fen practice myself, I have 
had the advantage (so far as it may be imparted) of the expe¬ 
rience of my father, a respectable practitioner for more than forty 
years in a fen country, and whose treatment of this disease, in 
the manner I have described above, has been attended with 
great success. 
Perhaps one of the greatest peculiarities in feltric is, the 
flabbiness and loose texture of the muscles; in fact, it seems as 
if a complete want of tone pervaded the whole system. Its ter¬ 
mination in ascites has helped many a blundering practitioner 
with his employer, as it is but seldom that either of them have 
thought it necessary to search for any other or remoter cause of 
death than “ water in the belly a circumstance which they 
have generally considered that none but Providence could either 
avert or remedy. 
