VETERINARIAN. 
VOL. XXII, 
No. 261. 
SEPTEMBER 1849. 
Third Series, 
No. 21. 
LAMENESS IN HORSES. 
By William Percivall, M.R.C.S. and K.&. 
[Continued from p. 441.] 
Capped Elbow. 
AKIN to “ capped hock” is the disease I am now about to 
describe under the analogous appellation of capped elbow. 
The Point of the Elbow, a part as familiarly known to a 
horseman as the point of the hock, exhibits under disease the 
same rotund fulness or enlargement as in either case is signified 
by the epithet “ capped.” And anatomists know that while there 
exists a correspondence between these “ points” or protuberances 
in relative position and structure there can be discovered sufficient 
analogy between their diseases to warrant the placing of the affec¬ 
tion we are about to consider in the same nosological category with 
capped hock. Over the olecranon of the ulna, the same as over 
the tuberosity of the os calcis, the skin is gathered into a sort of 
cap, interposed between which and the bone beneath are several 
concentric, dense and yet loose, layers of cellular tissue, which 
render the cap in every direction extremely moveable, while they 
admit of free and complete flexion of the elbow joint. And these 
layers are so arranged that an imperfect sort of cavity, having 
some resemblance to a bursa mucosa, is formed in the midst of 
them, which, as in the case of the correspondent formation upon 
the point of the hock, in the normal state appears to contain nothing 
beyond a kind of serous vapour, such as is exhaled into the cells of 
the reticular tissue of the body generally. 
In a State of Disease, however, the exhalation becomes aug¬ 
mented to that degree that the vapour condenses into a serous fluid, 
and as such collects in the cells of the reticular tissue clothing the 
point of the elbow, stretching the cells, and causing them to break 
one into another, so as ultimately to form one large pouch or small 
ones for the collected fluid. Capped elbow, therefore, like capped 
hock, is no more at the beginning than serous abscess, though in 
time the serous may become changed into solid albuminous deposit; 
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