692 IRISH CENTRAL VETERINARY MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. 
Mr, Haycock is almost the only author who gives us any idea of 
the disease, and designates it “hay asthma,” from its similarity to 
the same disease in man, when it is attributed to a peculiar kind of 
dried grass amongst herbage which compose the diet. He informs 
us that he has treated a number of cases of the disease, and in 
several instances with perfect success, and continues to say that for 
a long time he regarded them as cases of broken wind, and was 
sanguine in the belief that he had found a remedy for it. Expe¬ 
rience, however, based on an extensive observation of the facts, led 
him to perceive that his prior conclusions were erroneous. This I 
can fully endorse, for several of the earlier cases which came under 
my notice I considered as broken wind, and was astonished at find¬ 
ing them improve under treatment, or even without it. 
It is not an unfrequent occurrence to put a hunter or harness- 
horse out for a run at grass in the summer, and find him come up 
broken-winded, but I have found in many of those cases proper 
stable management and treatment remove the symptoms almost com¬ 
pletely. Such I consider to depend on functional derangement 
producing spasmodic action of the bronchial tubes and true asthma. 
It may also occur in another way to horses turned out to grass. A 
severe night may come on, and the animal, previously in a stable 
and well clothed, so exposed, an attack of catarrh or bronchitis is 
the result; this is kept up from the animal having to travel for his 
food, and the air-passages suffer from the irritation, and chronic 
condition of it follows, producing spasmodic contraction as a 
sequel, especially if the grass is old and bad, and a large quantity 
has to be consumed to sustain the horse. 
The pathology of asthma is equally the same as in the human sub¬ 
ject, but, as I have before alluded, the symptoms in the horse are 
generally combined with those of other diseases. It is somewhat 
difficult to define or distinguish the difference between those of 
broken wind, but the most marked ones which I have detected is the 
absence of the second beat or expiration. In asthma, both inspira¬ 
tion and expiration are even, excepting in bad cases, when the latter 
is performed with a spasmodic jerk. The alee of the nostrils, as a 
rule, are not flapping, and the dyspnoea is more intense than in 
broken wind on exertion. 1 have failed in auscultation to satisfy 
myself on any marked difference between the two diseases, excepting 
after exertion, when a peculiar wheezing noise is detected at the en¬ 
trance of the trachea into the chest in asthma. I may illustrate the 
subject fuller by relating a marked case which I treated in an aged 
hunter which was put out to grass for the summer, and his owner, 
much to his disappointment, found, on taking him up, all the 
symptoms of broken wind, but which, on closer examination, did 
not present the usual ones, and led me to conclude the character of 
the case. The horse had the increased and spasmodic respiration, 
and very little exercise almost produced dyspnoea. The cough was 
not frequent, and came on in fits. The eyes were sunken, animal 
debilitated, and his coat looking unhealthy and staring. Paroxysms 
of spasms came on three, four, or five times a day, and during their 
