664 MR. YOUATTS VETERINARY LECTURES. 
and one which no inquiry could supply, What was the cause of 
the spinal affection ? 
H EMiPLEGiA AND PARAPLEGIA. —The human practitioner 
has yet another distinction, hemiplegia and paraplegia. In the 
former the affection is confined to one side of the patient: it 
occupies, as it were, one half of the chord. In paraplegia the 
posterior lower extremity on both sides is affected. 
Cases of Hemiplegia .-—Few cases of hemiplegia occur in our 
patients. Old Gibson relates some cases of it. If you should 
chance to see his work on farriery on any bookstall, it is worth your 
purchase. There is a great deal of what would yet be considered 
as good matter in it. He describes it as an epidemic in his time. 
Girard describes what he supposes to be a case of it, but re¬ 
specting which I have some doubt. It looks to me a great deal 
more like rabies. ** A horse fell while at work. He was raised 
with much difficulty, and was found to be powerless on the left 
side—feeling, however, remained : the left nostril was closed, the 
eye was also closed and ulcerated. Hay was offered to him; 
he seized it with the right side of his lips; he opened his mouth 
strangely wide in order to get it to his grinders, but he could not 
masticate it, for all of it presently accumulated between the left 
molars and the cheek. Oats he could not get at all into his 
mouth. In order to drink, he plunged his muzzle in the water 
up to the commissures of his lips, and then sucked up a little 
of the fluid slowly, and with difficulty. He however had evi¬ 
dently the sense of smell in his left nostril. 
The palsy was not perfect on that side, for he could walk, 
although with a great deal of difficulty. His left legs trembled 
under him as they were dragged after him ; and if he was turned, 
and a little too sharply, on the left side, he fell, but scrambled up 
again with great difficulty. He continued in this state six days, 
and died. The grey substance of the brain was a little more in¬ 
jected than usual, and there was a slight injection in the left 
corpus striatum, on the pons varolii, and in the cerebellum, and 
all on the left side. 
M. Vigney relates another case in which a cure was effected 
by repeated bleeding and purging. In fact, these cases appear 
to be more manageable than those of paraplegia; but if the affec¬ 
tion is not removed, it usually degenerates into paraplegia before 
the death of the animal. 
Why not hemiplegia in the horse? It would appear singular 
that this should be the most common form of palsy in the human 
being, and so rarely seen in the quadruped, were it not for the 
considerations already stated. It commonly follows apoplexy ; 
