114 VETERINARY SURGICAL OPERATIONS 



manifest popularity amongst veterinarians. It is still re- 

 garded as the standard treatment of many lameness-produc- 

 ing lesions, wherever veterinary surgery is practiced. It is 

 alike the weapon of the empiric and scientific practitioner. 

 It is urged by the practitioner and sometimes demanded by 

 the client, but it finds its greatest popularity in cities where 

 the value of a horse depends upon its ability to work and not 

 upon its salableness. It is very often demanded by the own- 

 ers of race horses whose value depends upon speed. 



The firing of horse's legs reached its highest popularity 

 in England, where it is practiced as a precaution against pos- 

 sible injury. Hunters and thoroughbreds imported to Amer- 

 ica from England are frequently found to have been fired, 

 evidently for no other reason than that of preventing them 

 from straining or wrenching the flexor tendons. 



INDICATIONS. — Rationally, firing is practiced only as 

 a cure for lameness due to some local inflammatory disease 

 of joints, bones, sheaths, or tendons. When the inflamma-' 

 tion has become chronic or has left a structural alteration in 

 its trail, and after other less severe methods* of treatment 

 have failed, firing is practiced as a severe counter-irritant 

 and to prolong the period of rest. The benefits of the opera- 

 tion lie largely in the fact that a protracted rest becomes 

 necessary, owing to the severe local inflammation it produces 

 in the skin and subjacent tissues. Kept from arduous work, 

 the lesion will heal. Resolution of local inflammations is 

 also favored by the rest or immobilization of the affected 

 part. The strained tendon submitted to a severe firing is 

 kept partially out of commission during the domination of 

 the pain in the fired skin; and a hock joint fired for spavin 

 is scarcely flexed from the same cause and thus gives the in- 

 flammatory process the opportunity to effect the desired 

 ankylosis. Firing also excites local nutritive activity to the 

 benefit of the slow, chronic, persistent morbid process, es- 

 pecially when the pointed iron is carried directly to the dis- 

 eased tissues. 



The claim that line-firing supplies a permanent support- 

 ing envelope to the flexor tendons in the form of ribbed 

 cicatrices around them laterally and posteriorly, is defended 

 by some veterinarians, while others deny that this effect is 

 ever obtained from-firing. It is barely possible that promi- 

 nent cicatrices extending around the tendons do have some 

 such action, but that they effectually protect them against 

 future injury is rather far fetched. Firing of ordinary sever- 

 ity does not permanently destroy the elasticity of the integu- 



