138 NEURECTOMY 



Neurectomy is properly a last resort in lameness and 

 should not otherwise be performed. It has two great and 

 ever present dangers. If the part deprived of sensation is 

 too badly diseased to bear the weight and resist the insult 

 resultant upon its being called upon to do its normal or 

 even an extra amount of work, it must ultimately give way, 

 the bones become fractured, the tendons separate from the 

 bone, the intra-ungular tissues lose their integrity, and the 

 hoofs become detached (exungulation) or other degenera- 

 tive changes take place as a result of causing a part to do a 

 work for which its condition unfits it. 



The second great danger occurs from wounds or other 

 traumatisms to the tissues distal to the operation when the 

 .unnerved parts are not rested as they would be in natural 

 conditions when injured, and as a result reparative changes 

 are prevented and supplanted by retrograde processes with 

 ultimate death of the part and of the animal. 



In other words, sensory neurectomy robs an organ or tissue 

 of the enormously conservative force of pain. Pain causes 

 the animal to rest the affected part, protects the painful 

 tissues against disintegrating and destructive insults and 

 favors restorative processes ; robbed of this protective in- 

 fluence of pain by the severance of the sensory nerves, the 

 diseased tissues are without their natural protection. 



Nerves are generally accompanied by satellite arteries 

 and veins which are always liable to be wounded during the 

 neurectomy and are more embarrassing because of the 

 hemorrhage clouding the operation field and inviting error 

 than dangerous because of the loss of the blood itself. It 

 is essential to a good operation that the hemorrhage be kept 

 under control throughout so that each tissue will stand out 

 in relief and the nerve reveal it's identity in addition to its 

 location, size and relations, by it's intensely white, nacrous, 

 striated character. The test of compressing the nerve in 

 order to identify it by the resultant pain is unsurgical and 

 unnecessarily cruel. 



