BROKEN WIND
—remains in its long-standing state of professional ambiguity; for, notwithstanding frequent dissections must have afforded every assistance to earnest investigation, yet no authenticated, well-established opinion has transpired, sufficiently attracting or corroborative to fix a criterion upon which scientific or public faith seem inclined to rely. Since the appearance of "The Gentleman's Stable Directory," (about fourteen years since,) a great variety of veterinary writers, and veterinary practitioners, have emerged from obscurity in the metropolis, as well as in different parts of the kingdom. One has defined broken wind to be "an inflammation, which continuing a length of time, throws a quantity of extravasated blood into the windpipe, where it occasions a kind of roaring": this was the opinion of an eminent veterinarian, delivered upon a horse cause tried before Lord Kenyon in the court of King's Bench. In this sublime description there certainly appears no brilliant or satisfactory elucidation. A recent writer says, "Broken wind is a disorder that a horse is subject to when he is suffered to stand too long in the stable without exercise; by which means he contracts gross and thick humours in such abundance, that, adhering to the hollow parts of his lungs, they stop his windpipe." So much for the "sublime and beautiful." A third attributes it to "a relaxation or rupture of the phrenic nerves, which cause the motions of the diaphragm." A fourth supposes "the disease to proceed from a morbid or obstructed state of the glands, and membranes of the head and throat, the enlargement of which prevents a free passage to the wind." Doctor Darwin, speaking of humoural asthma, attributes it to "a congestion of lymph in the air cells of the lungs, from defective absorption."
Others, harping upon the same string, constitute an echo of nearly the same sound: "In my ideas, a redundance of lymph being thrown upon the lungs, the quantity becomes too great for the capacity of the absorbent vessels; hence it stagnates, and choaks up the air conduits; and the theatre of its action being more confined, of course respiration must be more difficult and laborious." All which divested of the transposition of words, is the opinion of the present writer, promulgated in his Stable Directory, "that the disease originated in a sizey state of the blood, which at length becoming viscid and stagnant, occasioned obstructions in the first instance, lastly tubercles, by which respiration became imperfect, and one or both lobes of the lungs inadequate to the execution of their office." However literary speculators may differ in either opinion or description, no great diversity of opinion can happen upon the subject of relief; palliation may be obtained; perfect cure must not be expected.