534 REVIEW. 
show that the popular mind has been long impressed with 
some strange notion,—some difficulty or impossibility,—in 
relation to horses being sick, alias vomiting; while the 
records of science bear evidence of the subject being one 
which has for upwards of a century, at one time or other, 
attracted the attention of medical philosophers. Mr. Gamgee 
has been at the pains, as we have seen in the course of his 
paper, (printed in the two foregoing Numbers of “The 
Veterinarian,”) to present us, in detail, with the opinions 
of the most eminent of these; and has, in addition, interspersed 
them, here and there, with citations from such veterinary 
authorities as he found to be of any weight or importance in 
his c Inquiry.’ With this collective evidence he not only 
establishes the fact, in limine , that the horse can , and on 
occasions does, vomit; but various and different as are the 
theories said to account for the fact, he is enabled to reduce 
them all down to this one point of accordance and simili¬ 
tude—that they, one and all of them, ascribe the difficulty 
of the act to mechanical obstacle . 
“ Different/ 5 says Mr. Gamgee, “ as are the opinions we 
have hitherto commented upon, they yet present one re¬ 
markable point of analogy, inasmuch as all their authors 
attributed the horse’s difficulty to vomit to a mechanical 
obstacle. It affords me pleasure gratefully to acknowledge, 
that for not falling into the same error I am indebted to 
Dr. Sharpey, who gave me an all-important hint by suggesting 
an inquiry into the action of emetics on the horse. It at 
once occurred to me, that as the mechanical part of the act 
of vomiting is excited by a reflex stimulus from the nervous 
centre, it behoved those w ho undertook to demonstrate why 
the horse rarely vomits, to study two classes of phenomena— 
the nervous and the mechanical :—for it is quite obvious that if 
the stimulus to the expulsive effort be wanting, it is useless 
to attribute the impossibility of the evacuation of the stomach 
by the oesophagus to mechanical obstacles, for they have no 
opportunity of coming into operation. Moreover, since I 
have excluded the existence of any mechanical impediments 
to vomiting in the horse, it is evident that the question which 
forms the subject of my inquiry can alone be solved by 
determining what is the action of emetics on the nervous 
system of the horse.” 
