EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 595 
wherein influenza has assumed the form of " cholera in horses ” 
which have come under our notice, are the two mentioned by Mr, 
Cherry in our journal for last month. 
To the account which we submitted of the disease in August 
last, we have but little to add, save a narrative of the employment 
of a novel remedy which the obstinacy and danger of one of the, 
in the whole, thirty-six cases that have come under our manage¬ 
ment seemed at the time to demand. It was a case from the 
first attended with a good deal of disposition to filling of the legs, 
which at length ran into rheumatic attacks of the knees and 
hocks, of a more swollen and painful character than we remem¬ 
bered, with few notable exceptions, to have seen before. At the 
time these fresh (rheumatic) attacks commenced, the horse—but 
four years old—was greatly reduced from influenza; and the pain 
they occasioned him, especially when forced as he was to take 
exercise in order to keep down the accompanying swellings of the 
lower limbs, together with the circumstance of his not being able 
to endure such flexion of the rheumatic joints as would enable him 
to lie down to take rest, reduced him at length to a degree of ema¬ 
ciation and debility which rendered him not only an object of 
pity, but likewise, from the failure of every soothing treatment to 
the joints which humanity could suggest, as well as of every 
varied routine of treatment constitutionally which art could devise 
(mercury being the chief remedy), at the same time an object of 
hopelessness. Pushed to this extremity in the treatment, ether 
was thought of; but ether, although shewn, as it has been by Mr. 
Mayhew, to be a sort of specific in certain stages of the influenza, 
did not seem to us calculated to do much good in a case of this 
description. 
What then was to be donel The horse was losing his appetite, 
which up to this time had been, notwithstanding his loss of flesh, 
much better than could have been expected. Added to which, he 
was every hour becoming, if possible, thinner, and certainly 
weaker. The perusal of Mr. Murray’s case of ophthalmia (in our 
Number for last month) had determined us some time before, so 
soon as a fitting case should occur, to give colchicum a trial; and 
in the present dilemma it occurred to us that, from a recollection of 
the benefit we had seen derived from it in rheumatism in men, it 
