192 CONTRIBUTIONS TO VETERINARY MEDICINE. 
tion to medicine, for upon no other question does the public exhibit 
such lamentable ignorance as this. In many districts, human 
quacks, horse quacks, and quacks medical of every grade, colour, 
and degree, will prosper surprisingly, while the most enlightened 
surgeon or veterinary surgeon can scrape but a bare sustenance; 
so much, then, for popularity, so far at least as medicine is con¬ 
cerned ! 
Having now considered, first, the careless manner with which 
veterinary writers have hitherto regarded this disease; secondly, 
enumerated the physical signs so well marked during the progress 
of the malady, especially in the first case, and from which I endea¬ 
voured to shew the great value of auscultation to veterinary sur¬ 
geons in detecting the insidious commencement of cases like the 
present; thirdly, I have touched incidentally upon its causes, 
and attempted to account upon rational principles for the probable 
mode by which these causes produce such general morbid results; 
fourthly, I have hinted at the complications of this disease which 
occasionally are manifested in the same animal; and now, in con¬ 
clusion, I have to offer to the reader, ere I close, a few additional 
remarks respecting the peculiar morbid state of the serous mem¬ 
brane of the heart and veins. The state in which I found the in¬ 
ternal tunic of these organs cannot be accounted for save by the 
action of inflammation, the cause of which inflammation would 
undoubtedly be the presence of the foul or poisonous blood, which 
blood, by its immediate contiguity with the tissue named, would 
readilv produce what I have described, viz., a general inflamma¬ 
tory state of this tissue, constituting true secondary phlebitis; a 
state which I suspect is far from uncommon in the horse, although 
not even so much as a hint of its existence, or of its ever having 
been observed, can I find mentioned by any veterinary author what¬ 
ever. In conclusion, then, I have to observe, that when we carefully 
consider the primary and secondary states of this disease in the 
cases which I have endeavoured, step by step, to unfold before the 
mind of the reader, we need not wonder why the pulse in both 
animals should, day after day, maintain the peculiar character 
which it did. 
Health I regard in a great measure as being dependent upon a 
due balance of the chemical forces resident within the organism ; 
which balance, if disturbed either in the blood itself or in the solid 
tissues with which it is in constant and immediate relation, a 
change is speedily made manifest by a series of morbid phenomena 
more or less extensive, according to the nature and extent of that 
original disturbance. Of the nature of such disturbance, in a pri¬ 
mary point of view, we at present know nothing; we can judge 
of it only through its manifest effects; and what the scientific 
