312 CAPSED HOCK. 



setons through them, the trocar or seton-needle will be sure to 

 betray the change the parts have undergone in the additional force 

 required to penetrate their several tissues. 



Even when operations of the kind are undertaken under different 

 circumstances, they are very apt in the end to leave behind them 

 changes (should they not be already in existence) such as I 

 have been just describing ; though the immediate and pretty certain 

 result of making a wound into a capped hock is suppuration or 

 abscess of the cavity. This it is that makes the puncture of 

 capped hock a dangerous experiment, the suppurative action 

 not only on occasions creating a great deal of alarming inflamma- 

 tion and swelling in the limb, but giving rise sometimes to consti- 

 tutional irritation as well. I have known a pint and a half of pus 

 to be collected within the morbidly enlarged cap, owing to abscess 

 induced by the operation of setoning. This is what we call 



Abscess of the Cap, a case I have no recollection of having 

 seen happen but under circumstances of treatment, and mostly after 

 operation. In such a condition of hock and limb as abscess com- 

 monly engenders, the features of the case become, as a matter of 

 course, materially altered. Pain and lameness will now be the 

 consequence of inflammation and swelling. Instead of having to 

 treat the hock alone, we are called on to administer to the entire 

 limb, and perhaps to the system of the body as well. And after we 

 have been fortunate enough to allay all irritation, to reduce the 

 swollen limb to its natural size, and to bring back the hock to statu 

 quo, still is there likely to remain, and permanently so, a good 

 deal of callous enlargement and deformity of the parts diseased, 

 as well of other parts in their immediate vicinity. 



The internal, tendinous, synovial Cap of the Hock now 

 and then participates in the disease, though never in itself the primary 

 or principal seat. Knowing, as we do, what susceptible structures 

 bursse are, it is not to be expected that any great amount of inflam- 

 mation should exist in their immediate vicinity without some sym- 

 pathy on their part ; and therefore we have a right to suppose — 

 indeed, to infer, as far as proof can through manual examination be 

 afforded us — that no great deal of lesion befals the outer cap without 



