Made into four pills, two to be given at night, and the other the following morning. If these medicines should not be handy, give a large purging ball of aloes, to be followed by a full dose of salts. When the inflammatory action is not sufficiently high to demand depletion, warm bathing, friction and keeping the dog wrapped up in blankets before a fire will generally afford relief. If the pain appear very severe, it will be necessary to repeat the baths at short intervals: great attention must be paid to the state of the bowels: if a diarrhoea supervenes, it must not he checked too suddenly, by the use of astringent medicines, but rather corrected by small doses of oil and magnesia. If constipation attended with colic be the character of the affection, small quantities of oil and turpentine in connexion with warm enemata will be the proper remedies. If paralysis should occur, it will be found very difficult to overcome, but must be treated, after the reduction of inflammation, upon principles laid down under the head of this latter affection. Blisters to the spine, setons, electricity, [acupuncturation], &c.
Treatment of chronic rheumatism — warm baths are useful, and warm housing absolutely necessary, attention to diet, and an occasional purge of blue mass and aloes, together with electricity, acupuncture, rubefacient applications to the spine, &c. — L.
A
bath — perchance a bleeding — a dose or two of the castor-oil mixture, and an embrocation composed of spirit of turpentine, hartshorn, camphorated spirit, and laudanum, will usually remove it in two or three days, unless it is complicated with muscular sprains, or other lesions, such as the
chest-founder
of kennels.
This chest-founder is a singular complaint, and often a pest in kennels that are built in low situations, and where bad management prevails. Where the huntsman or whippers-in are too often in a hurry to get home, and turn their dogs into the kennel panting and hot; where the beds are not far enough from the floor, or the building, if it should be in a sufficiently elevated situation, has yet a northern aspect and is unsheltered from the blast, chest-founder prevails; and I have known half the pack affected by it after a severe run, the scent breast-high, and the morning unusually cold. It even occasionally passes on into palsy.
The veterinary surgeon will be sometimes consulted respecting this provoking muscular affection. His advice will comprise — dryness, attention to the bowels, attention to the exercise-ground, and perhaps, occasionally, setons — not where the huntsman generally places them, on the withers above, but on the brisket below, and defended from the teeth of the dog by a roller of a very simple construction, passing round the chest between the fore legs and over the front of the shoulders on either side.
The pointer, somewhat too heavy before, and hardly worked, becomes what is called chest-foundered. From his very make it is evident that, in long-continued and considerable exertion, the subscapular muscles will be liable to sprain and inflammation. There will be inflammation of the fasciæ;, induration, loss of power, loss of nervous influence and palsy. Cattle, driven far and fast to the market, suffer from the same causes.