48 
PROCEEDINGS OF THE SCHOOL AT ALFORT. 
observation to our pupils, in the study of these important diseases, 
and, especially as the most part of these animals had under¬ 
gone, before their arrival at our school, a medical treatment, 
more or less rational; and they have in general been restored to 
work in a much shorter time than that usually assigned to the 
cure of these complaints. These happy results, according to 
M. Renault, ought to be attributed to the scrupulous attention 
he has always exercised in the operations he has performed on the 
foot, religiously to husband the sensible frog and the laminated 
tissue, and to abstain in his dressings from those hard compres¬ 
sions so much recommended in some works. He rarely requires 
more than two dressings for the complete cure of sand-cracks; 
and the cartilaginous affections which had been already treated 
by caustics, or incompletely operated on before the patient’s 
arrival at the school, required, at the most, four or five dressings 
for their radical cure. 
IV. Twenty-three horses presenting those disordered symp¬ 
toms vulgarly called colic, have been brought to the hospital, and 
treated by bleedings and frictions of the limbs; seventeen were 
discharged cured. Of the six who died, two only presented the 
least hope of cure on their arrival; two others were in a des¬ 
perate state, and had not been submitted to any treatment; and 
of the two last, which had been treated for some days, their death 
was caused by old organic lesions, over which medical skill had 
no power. One died from the rupture of an aneurism of the 
ccecal portion of the great mesenteric artery ; the other from the 
strangulation of a portion of the small intestine, which had been 
pressed through an old rupture, of an inch or more in diameter, on 
the fleshy part of the diaphragm. This last horse had suffered 
frequent attacks of colic ; and it was remarked, that from the 
commencement of the last attack until death, he always fell back¬ 
ward when standing, and then remained sitting on his haunches, 
without any struggle. Thus the antiphlogistic and revulsive 
treatment made use of failed only in two horses; and the exami¬ 
nation of them after death has shewn, that it was the only one 
that could offer some chance of success, since thev found on the 
whole of the diseased part extravasated blood in the mucous 
membrane of the ccecum and part of the colon. 
During the six years thatM. Renault has devoted to researches 
into the causes of colic in the horse, he has opened a great num¬ 
ber both in and out of the school; and he is convinced, that in 
nineteen cases out of twenty, the disease expressed by the term 
“ colic,” whether it be more or less violent, is a congestion of the 
intestinal blood, sometimes followed by haemorrhage. In some 
cases, these congestions are provoked by the continuance of ill- 
