It is necessary those who have not been accustomed to the management of horses under so serious an operation, should know, that, from the great length of the intestinal canal, a horse requires a considerable decree of cathartic stimulus to insure excremental expulsion. When the contents of the larger intestines are become indurated by long retention, little work, and a want of exercise, there is then a kind of constitutional tendency to constipation, when, of course, more disquietude or pain will be experienced by the subject, than when the body is in a more favourable and less costive state. The intestines (when extended) exceeding thirty yards in length, and laying compressed in a horizontal position within the frame, and in so small a compass, is the principal, and almost only, reason to be advanced, why the combination of purgative ingredients continue from eighteen to twenty-four hours in the frame, before the fæces are sufficiently softened for the operation to begin.
Exclusive of the various disorders to which horses are subject, requiring a course of physic upon their first appearance, or at their termination, (as may be collected from the works of those who have written professedly upon the subject,) there are many instances, in which PURGING may be very advantageously brought into use, as a critical PREVENTIVE to DISEASE, although there may, at the time, be but little external cause to believe such morbidity is impending. Horses constantly standing in a stable upon full and good keep, with but very little work, and short exercise, generate blood freely, and lose a very trifling proportion of the constantly accumulating contents of the frame, by either perspiration or evacuation. Thus then the vessels, as well as the carcase, become so evidently overloaded, that the whole labours under the rigidity of one universal distension; constituting a preternatural stricture upon the body and its extremities, by which the system of _secretion_ and _excretion_ is partially or universally affected, and the regular routine of the ANIMAL ŒCONOMY proportionally deranged. Under this concise, but explanatory, definition of repletion, and its effects, will be found the necessity for occasionally unloading the body by proper evacuants, and relieving the vessels from the unnatural stricture which reduces the elasticity of the solids, and retards or obstructs the easy circulation of their contents.