390 VETERINARY SURGICAL THERAPEUTICS. 
Regeneration of nerves is slow. In general, as we have said before, the 
sensibility and motricity do not return for several months. 
In relation to the nerves that are incompletely divided, their complete 
section is no longer demanded. Consolidate the union of the two ends. 
with a stitch, immobilize the part under an antiseptic dressing, is the indica- 
tion to follow. 
II. 
NEURITIS. 
In man, simple contusions, burns, frost-bites, bony or articular inflam- 
mations, tumors, not infrequently give rise to neuritis. These are inter- 
stitial or parenchymatous, acute or chronic, descending or ascending. 
These last, in which are several groups, are yet badly known. In the- 
preceding chapter we have seen that the section of a nervous branch is fol- 
lowed with degeneration of the peripheric end and that it has no noticeable 
influence on the central stump. In ascending neurtiis, there takes place: 
in the central end, either a process similar to the wallerian degeneration. 
(parenchymatous neuritis) or an inflammation of the perifascicular con-. 
nective tissue, the lamellar envelop or the interfascicular connective tissue ; 
or again, the inflammation, both parenchymatous and _ interstitial, of 
the nerve. Some.troubles a a distance (paralysis, anesthesia, amyotrophy) 
-are explained by an ascending neuritis extending to the spinal marrow.. 
For animals, if neuritis may complicate traumatic lesions of nerves, it 
is rare, and experimental studies have added nothing to the very incom- 
plete data given by clinical observation. 
“T have tied nerves in ligatures more or less firmly,” says Vulpian. “I 
have squeezed them between two hard bodies, cauterized with various. 
substances (cantharidine, liquid ammonia, acetic acid), pierced them with. 
needles, without ever obtaining a true suppurative neuritis, beyond the 
points submitted to the experimental violence.”! Charcot tells us also- 
that experimental lesions, even the most serious, of the peripheric nerves,. 
produce with difficulty, in most animals, a neuritis of some duration. 
and like that which is developed, on the contrary, so easily in man after 
the slightest lesions.” 
Whatever may be the special resistance of animals to the inflammation. 
of nerves, pricks with crushing of the tubes, contused wounds or those made 
by foreign bodies, expose them more than clean sections, After the 
operation of neurotomy, when the wound has suppurated, sometimes a. 
} Weir Mitchell. Des /ésions des nerfs—Préface de Vulpian, p. XI. 
2 Charcot. Léstons sur les maladies du systeme nerveux, Pp. 13. 
