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THE. VETERINARIAN, NOVEMBER 1 , 1833 . 
Ne quid falsi dicere audeat, ne quid veri non audeat.— Cicbro. 
STRANGLES. 
Though, in accordance with custom, and rather than run any 
risk of being found fault with for introducing new and unintel¬ 
ligible names into veterinary medicine, I call the disease I am 
about to discourse on, strangles; yet is it with the impression on 
my mind, that the term is not only an inadequate one, but one 
very apt to carry with it a false notion of the disorder it is 
meant to designate. It appears to have had its origin in times 
when little more was known or thought about the disease than 
its evident tendency to strangle the patient; and from genera¬ 
tion to generation has been handed down to the present day. 
The old English term for this disease,’^ says John Law¬ 
rence, was the strangullion which is evidently a corrupt 
rendering or transmutation of the French word etranguillon — 
from the verb etrangler, to strangle. 
That accurate observer, the late and lamented Mr. Castley, 
V.S. in the 12th Lancers, who has left us an excellent paper on 
this subject (published in the third volume of The Veterina¬ 
rian, p. 426), truly remarks, that ‘‘ often when a young horse 
is looking sickly, delicate, or thriftless, farmers or breeders will 
say, ‘ he is breeding the strangles,’ or that ‘ strangles is hang¬ 
ing about him, and he will not get better until he'gets over that 
complaint.’ ” The explanation of which case appears to me to 
be, that the animal is suffering more or less from what I would 
call strangle-fever —from a fever, the disposition and tendency of 
which is to produce local tumour and abscess ,* and most com¬ 
monly in that situation—underneath the jaws—in which it has 
obtained the appellation of strangles. 
Nature of Strangles. —Mr. Castley’s paper has led me to 
take more extensive and somewhat different views of the sub¬ 
ject from any I had ever thought or heard of before. It was from 
perusing this and comparing the account with a retrospect of 
