The Broad shoe is a shoe with a web of quite twice the thickness of the animal’s ordinary shoe, and has this web gradually thinned from the toe backwards until at the heels the shoe is at its thinnest (see Fig. 119).

The excessive thickness of the shoe serves two purposes.  It allows of the requisite amount of slope being given to the web, and so enables the animal readily to throw himself back on to his heels, a position in which, as we have already indicated, he obtains the greatest ease.  It also minimizes to some extent the effects of concussion.

[Illustration:  FIG. 119.—­SEATED ROCKER BAR SHOE (BROAD’S) FOR TREATMENT OF LAMINITIS.]

With forced exercise, as practised by Mr. Broad, this shoe is first applied, and the animal afterwards made to walk upon soft ground, or even upon the roadway, for a half an hour to an hour and a half three times a day.

For our own part, we consider the shoe to be almost if not quite superfluous, so far as its influence upon the progress of the disease is concerned.  We therefore dispense with it, and have the animal exercised in his ordinary shoes.  To do this, the patient has sometimes to be severely flogged into taking the first few steps.  After that progress gradually becomes easier.

It has been said to be cruel.  In so far as we knowingly, and of set purpose, occasion the animal pain, cruel it undoubtedly is; but it is cruelty with an aim that is truly benevolent, and the object of our benevolence is the animal upon whom the cruelty is practised.

One word of advice is needed.  The forced exercise must be commenced early.  In the later stages, when the stage of congestion has passed from that to the acuter stages of the inflammation and the outpouring of the inflammatory exudate, then forced exercise cannot be safely commenced.  The loss of adhesion between the pedal bone and the horny box, which we know to be then existent, negatives its advisability.

By many it is advised to always remove the shoes.  From what we have already said, it will be seen that this is not our practice.  But one argument in favour of so doing appears to us to carry weight, and that is that ‘dropping’ of the sole is probably prevented from becoming so marked.  That condition, however, is entirely dependent upon the changes occurring within the horny box.  It is bound to occur with the animal shod or unshod, and to reach a stage when only contact with the ground prevents its further descent.  The complication then sometimes following—­namely, penetration of the sole by the bone, is not prevented by having the shoes removed.  It may, in fact, be thus rendered more likely.

Internal treatment consists in the exhibition of suitable febrifuges and the administration of a dose of aloes.