2G2 
VOMITING IN A COW. 
perience among cattle, doubted the existence of these diseases. 
He regards it as rumination carried a little too far, or performed 
with an undue degree of spasmodic action. If he had observed 
the cow, whose disease is related in the third case, he would 
have been of a different opinion, and would have acknowledged 
that true vomiting did occasionally exist in ruminants. It is, 
nevertheless, true that he could have rested his opinion on the 
experience of many veterinarians, who have employed all kinds 
of emetics, and in very large doses, in order to produce vomit¬ 
ing, and who have never succeeded in so doing. 
We have read with considerable interest these cases of M. 
Santin, and the observations which he has made are, in our 
opinion, well worthy of the attention of the reader. It is, how¬ 
ever, necessary to come to some understanding about the matter. 
The food which reascends from the first stomach or rumen into 
the mouth, in order to be rejected, can it be considered as being 
vomited ? We have always considered vomiting to be the act by 
which substances, solid or liquid, contained in the stomach are 
forcibly rejected ; but the first stomach is only a duplicature of 
or appendix to the stomach—it is only a reservoir: the fourth, 
or abomasum, is the true stomach. The substances rejected in 
the cases of M. Santin not being those which were contained 
in the true stomach, that which M. Santin calls vomiting, ought 
to be considered only as regurgitation. In this point of view 
Fromage is right; and rumination is, in fact, a kind of regurgi¬ 
tation rather than vomiting .”—French Edit., Journal des Sciences 
Zooiut., Juillet 1836. 
[The importance of these cases ought not to be diminished by 
a mere quibble about words. Rumination is regurgitation ; and 
yet what is regurgitation but vomiting with the slightest degree of 
spasmodic action ?—the mechanism, the agents emplov ed, are pre¬ 
cisely the same. The question whether the rumen can be pro¬ 
perly considered as a stomach, or whether it is a mere appendage 
to the oesophagus, admits of much to be said on both sides, and 
should scarcely be agitated here. M. Santin describes a disease 
of the digestive organs, fortunately a rare one, but attended by 
serious consequences. We shall most of us witness it in the 
course of our practice ; and we are thankful to him for the suc¬ 
cessful mode of treatment which he has pointed out. As physio¬ 
logists we wall at some other time debate the question of the 
identity or difference between regurgitation and vomiting in ru¬ 
minants; but we will not have our attention here withdrawn from 
an important point of practice.—Y.] 
