186 MR. youatt’s veterinary lectures. 
The countenance becomes wilder, and still more haggard : its 
expression can never be effaced from the recollection of him who 
cares about the feelings of a brute. Think of violent cramp of a 
single muscle or set of muscles—it makes the stoutest of us cry 
out; and then imagine this torture to spread over the whole 
frame, and to continue with little respite from day to day and 
week to week. True, when you approach and touch him, he 
moves not—he scarcely shrinks—but the sudden acceleration of 
the pulse tells you what he feels and fears. Still, I doubt whe¬ 
ther the torture of our patient, or the violence of the spasm, is 
equal to that endured by the human being. We have no account 
of any bones being broken by the force of the muscular contrac¬ 
tion ; there are some cases of this in the records of human medi¬ 
cine, and particularly of one man, both whose thigh bones were 
broken by the violent contraction of the flexor muscles during a 
momentary remission of the extensors. The horse, in proportion 
to his bulk of muscle, has not the energy and power of the 
human being, and certainly he has not the sensibility. The 
human patient is generally worn out in a few hours—the horse 
will labour under the disease for as many days. 
The Nature of the Spasm. —Tetanus, then, is spasm of the 
whole frame—not merely of one set of muscles, but of their anta¬ 
gonists also; the flexors and the extensors are equally affected 
and fixed. The fixidity of the animal is the effect of opposed 
and dreadful muscular contraction. It belongs to the motor co¬ 
lumn only—the sensibility is unimpaired; perhaps, it is height¬ 
ened ; or if not, the compression and the lesion of so many 
sensitive fibrils by the forcible contraction of the muscles, are 
fully sufficient to account for all the torture that the animal ex¬ 
periences. The organic system is even to the last scarcely in¬ 
volved—the horse would eat, if he could—he tries to suck up 
some moisture from his mash, and the avidity with which he 
lends himself as well as he can to assist in the administering of 
a little gruel, these things tell us that the feelings of hunger 
and thirst remain unimpaired. Digestion in the mean time goes 
on ; and if the horse experiences difficulty in voiding his urine, 
it is because he has lost the aid of certain auxiliary muscles 
of voluntary power; or if the bowels are constipated, it is be¬ 
cause the whole abdomen is compressed by the spasmodic con¬ 
striction of its parietes, and no room is left for the peristaltic 
motion of the bowels to be effected. Still to the last there is 
appetite. 
Duration .—If the disease terminates fatally, it is about the 
()th, 7th, or 8th day, when, if there has been no remission, or 
only a slight remission, of the spasms, the horse dies exhausted 
