NEUROTOMY. 196 



Arguments against Neurotomy. Having shewn what 

 success has attended the performance of neurotomy under favour- 

 ing, or, to speak more correctly, under fitting and proper circum- 

 stances, I should be doing injustice to my reader by setting the 

 operation before him in a light falsely dazzling, were I to withhold 

 from him the recital of occurrences which from their aspect and 

 termination have seemed to warrant others in bringing them for- 

 ward as so many failures, and facts upon which arguments might 

 be securely grounded against neurotomy. There is no more sure 

 way, in the end, of bringing any new remedy or operation into 

 discredit than that of setting forth all its virtues and good qualities 

 to the entire exclusion of its bad ones : in the long run, failures 

 will be certain to make themselves known, and the result of such 

 disclosures is likely to be, that what at first was thought and said 

 to be perfection itself, is now declared to be good for nothing, or 

 absolutely bad, perhaps; it being in the one instance as much un- 

 fairly decried as it was in the other unduly extolled. Such has 

 been the case with neurotomy. Its promoters and abetters, some 

 influenced by fame, others by gain, set it forth at the outset in 

 brilliant and shadeless colours, and thus succeeded in raising it to 

 a great height in public estimation ; so that, when reverses did 

 come, its fall proved all the greater. Still had it sufficient buoy- 

 ancy, sufficient real merit, to recover from such sweeping con- 

 demnation; and now, once more, is it restored by all reflecting 

 veterinarians to that place in their catalogue of remedies which it 

 ought to have occupied from the first, and which it is not likely 

 now to suffer displacement from. 



The InsuCCESS of Neurotomy, principally from causes which 

 will be pointed out, may be shewn in various ways. Horses can 

 be brought forward who have experienced no benefit from it ; nay, 

 cases can be related in which horses have thrown off" their hoofs in 

 consequence of it. The foot deprived of its power of feeling is as. 

 liable to receive injury as, perhaps more liable than, one that 

 retains its sensibility. Either from being pricked in shoeing, from 

 picking up a nail in the road, from a wound from a flint stone or a 

 piece of glass lying in the road, or a bruise from the opposite foot, 

 or a festered corn, or some other like cause, the senseless foot re- 



