Hippiatria ; or, the surgery and medicine of horses / [Bracy Clark].

  • Bracy Clark
Date:
1838
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hippiatria ; or, the surgery and medicine of horses / [Bracy Clark]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    blister may be perhaps from the elevation of the cuticle, in its leaving the skin, to which it had strongly adhered. The vesication of the horse’s skin is attended with some rather remarkable circumstances, the effects of the cantharides being somewhat different from the human, a much less degree of intensity of their application will excite a blister in the horse than would be required for the human skin, arising apparently from a more acute sensibility in the skins of animals covered with hair, and which acuteness and susceptibility of feeling may have been given them perhaps by their beneficent creator in order to their better protection from the numerous host of thel. external enemies; whether the hair has anything to do with it, or that it is that the nervous distribution is different I know not, but so it appears; for the dog’s or the horse’s skin is most violently affected by the application of oil of Turpentine which a man may wash his hands and face in with impunity. This excitability of the skin among cattle keeps them in a perpetual state of apprehension and motion during summer from the teazing of flies, of the blood-sucking tribes, and also those that by depositing their eggs with them, not only agitate them by their present operations, but leave them also a resident permanent stimulus, which abiding in their stomachs, or under their skins, keeps up an almost perpetual irritation, and in hot weather a necessity for motion and excitement of some kind, which appears to be a salutary means of saving them from the effects of an idleness and inactivity which their stomachs when full, and the weather hot, would dispose them to give way to indul- gence to their great injury by the invasion of diseases and of indigestions to which they are but too prone. Now in regard to artificial stimuli, or irritants of the skin, if we were to notice them in the order of their effects, we should commence with the mildest as the Fat oils, and terminate with the Red- hot iron, or actual cautery, applied in lines more or less dense, and which, on account of its painful nature, ought not, we apprehend, to be resorted to, but in cases of extreme necessity, being but an unworthy return for injuries received in our service often, by a cruel and unnatural demand of labour and exertion. From this excessive irritability or susceptibility of the skin of the horse, it is found that the milder oils, and even animal fats, will occasion an increased warmth in the surface to which it is applied ; even Hogs-lard, or Horse-oils, will do this, as we have frequently noticed ; also the oil of olives, and linseed oil, which afford an irritation of the mildest kind. If a more impressive excite- ment be thought requisite, it may be readily obtained by the addition of any of the vegetable essential oils, as the Oil of origanum, or the Oil of turpentine. Sometimes, for distinction, the old farriers used to call these applications sweating oils, adding, very often deceived by names, as another oil, the concentrated oil of vitriol, or sulphuric acid, which, when mixed with the former, produced a pungent unpleasant application, creating great heat in the part and much uneasiness, and often increasing the lameness it was meant to allay, for it was often injudiciously applied in recent strains and injuries, where already there was too much heat and inflammation going on in the part. No sweating however, we should apprehend, is ever produced by it, but an anomalous excitement of an unpleasant character, attended with a peculiar and disagreeable smell, given out apparently by the part so treated. Acids, particularly the mineral acids, do not appear to have any F
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