50 TETANUS — LOCKED JAW. 



agents succeeding in one in-rtance and failing in another; a fact 

 that has hitherto led us either to regard the asserted remedy 

 as useless, or to attribute its failure or success to an erroneous 

 source. In a word, by endeavouring to discover the real seat 

 and nature of two kinds or forms of disease which have hitherto 

 been confounded under the epithet idiojoatkic, it is manifest we are 

 in the road to very considerable amendment of our method of 

 treatment. 



We are informed from various sources, that tetanus has been 

 produced in horses by excessive heat, by excessive cold, by change 

 of temperature, by low wet pastures, by suppressed perspiration, 

 by over-exertion, by worms, by certain waters given to drink, by 

 certain kinds and descriptions of aliment, &c. Without calling any 

 of -which statements into question, 1 may observe, that, supposing 

 such cases do happen, they are evidently, all of them, but so many 

 instances of irritation of the nervous fibre, the influence of which — 

 the same as wound or lesion of the nerve — is, in the language of 

 Dr. Hall, " carried by exciter nerves to the spinal axis and reflect- 

 ed upon the motor nerves ;" and this irritation is capable of pursuing 

 " a retrograde course along the spinal marrow* ;" a wound in the 

 hind foot being not less capable than a wound in the fore of 

 inducing a locked-jaw. 



Mr. Abernethy was of opinion, that the injury, whatever it 

 might be, leading to tetanus, first produced disorder of the digestive 

 organs ; that that disorder occasioned derangement of the functions 

 of the spinal marrow, and, through it, of those of the system at 

 large, which latter derangement constituted tetanus. The inter- 

 vention of the influence of the digestive organs in the chain of 

 connexive irritation appears, then, to be the grand difference between 

 the theories of Dr. Hall and Mr. Abernethy. And on the side of 

 the latter we may range the opinions of two members of our own 

 profession, Messrs. Henderson and Karkeek, both of whom have 

 bestowed a great deal of practical observation upon the subject 

 before us. 



Mr. A. Henderson, V.S., London, who presented the Veterinary 

 Medical Society with a good practical paper on tetanus in 1832, 



* Diseases and Derangements of the Nervous Sj'stem, by Marshall Hall, M.D. 



