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

86 The Management and Treatment of the Horse,
honour among some gentlemen (spare the mark !)
that if
they have a screw which a respectable dealer will not
buy, they sell it to their friend. The horse soon goes
lame, and then the poor groom has to bear the blame ;
this is often the case with a horse suffering from
laminitis ; he is patched up, his shoes taken off, put on
wet clay, cooling medicine given, coronet blistered, and
after three months' run he is sold to some friend. Look
well to the foot of the horse ; if he has had laminitis the
hoof will be wrinkled like a cow's horn. Many people
when about to sell a horse that has had laminitis or its
companion symtomatic fever will get the smith to rasp
out the rings ; if the foot has been rasped up to the hair,
look upon it with suspicion, for laminitis is a disease so
dreadful in its manifestations, and attended with such
agony and excessive distress to the poor patient, that it
cannot fail to excite compassion for it from all who
witness a case of this terrible type. I can assure my
readers that I myself have been so affected that I would
not—nay, I could not—leave my patient until I was
satisfied that all had been done so far as knowledge lay
within my reach to relieve it at least of some portion of
its sufferings. . . . The first and most obvious
requisite for a practical groom is to possess the faculty to
diagnose a disease when he sees it, to distinguish it from
others manifesting similar symptoms, and forsee its
probable phases and results; and the author, know-
ing the difficulties he has had to contend with in his
search after knowledge concerning the horse, wishes to
place his experience in the hands of younger men, to
help them to surmount the difficulties and avoid the