The management and treatment of the horse in the stable, field, and ...

136 The Management and Treatment of the Horse,
cake gruel to drink. At four o'clock she seemed much
better, so I gave a four-drachm physic ball and left. At
eleven o'clock next day all the bad symptoms had dis-
appeared. She would eat nothing, but drank small quan-
tities of gruel, purging took place in twelve hours and
continued for twenty-four, after which she gradually
recovered. My attention was not directed to the character
of the food until nineteen days afterwards, ond when I
visited the place where the grass had been cut from, it was
a complete thicket of flowerless branches and roots of
ranunculacee, the characters of which I was unable to
determine ; from the absence of flowers and fruit, I was
convinced that the food in question was largely composed
of common buttercup, which the hungry, exhausted animal
had greedily devoured. That the ranunculacee possess
acrid properties no one will deny, and that they are capable
when taken in large quantity of inducing vomition in the
horse may be fairly inferred. No other article of provender
with which we are acquainted being capable of producing
similar symptoms, even when the stomach is filled to
repletion, and when rupture occurs through any other
kind of food, there is never the same train of symptoms
as are observed in all cases of ranunculacee poisoning."
The author has during the last few years met with many
cases similar to the one above quoted, and has always
adopted, the same mode of treatment with the exception
of administering one pint and a-half of linseed oil instead
of a physic ball, and if there seems much irritation of the
throat and coughing, stimulate the throat with white oils
or Gregory's Versico Sudorific.