76 WEST OF ENGLAND VETERINARY MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. 
and must have entailed on its author an immense amount of labour 
and expense ; in return for which I hope that every member of the 
profession will take a copy, to encourage him to go on with the 
other works he is compiling. 
It must have been a great satisfaction to Mr. Fleming to see the 
Times, November 18, in its review on his work on £ Shoeing ; * and 
Pitzwygram on ‘ Horses and Stables,’ acknowledges that there is 
such a thing as veterinary science, and that veterinary surgeons can, 
and may venture to assume a position in the literary world. 
On taking a retrospective view of the profession, I find that we 
are marching onwards, but slowly ; and it will continue so, until 
more members are induced to take a greater interest in its advance- 
ment. 
As our Secretary could not prevail on any other member to read 
a paper, I was induced to promise one on the Pathology and Treat- 
ment of Navicular Disease, it being a disease more frequently 
brought under the notice of town practitioners than all other lame- 
nesses put together, and I am not acquainted with any work in 
which the pathology is correctly and definitely given. I therefore 
purpose to fill up the hiatus, and place before you between two and 
three hundred wet and dry morbid specimens, the whole of w T hich 
have been dissected by myself or under my own superintendence, 
and the history of a great many of them I know well. By making 
sections of the navicular bones, the disease is shown both in the 
wet and dry specimens more clearly, and will prove to you the cor- 
rectness of the theory I am about to advance ; for without a correct 
pathology, practice must ever be uncertain and unscientific. 
This disease was supposed to be first described by Mr. Turner 
in 1816. 
Osmer 1 distinctly mentions it : — “ I have seen many instances of 
sudden lameness brought on horses in hunting and in racing by a 
false step, which have continued lame their whole lifetime ; aud 
upon examination, I have found the ligaments of the nut-bone 
(os naviculare) rendered useless for want of timely assistance and 
knowledge of the cause ; from hence the cartilages of the same have 
been sometimes ossified, and the bones of the foot have been some- 
times wasted and sometimes enlarged, it being no uncommon thing 
to meet a horse whose feet are not fellows, the natural form of the 
injured foot being generally altered hereby; and nothing can con- 
tribute more to such an accident than the unequal pressure of the 
foot in our modern concave shoe.” 
Elsewhere he speaks of the erosion of the cartilage of the navi- 
cular bone, and the symptoms indicative of this foot disease ; and 
long before this period, contracted hoofs, arising from undue paring 
by the marechal, and lameness resulting therefrom, were, as we have 
seen, often mentioned. But the unknown author of the “ Grand 
Marechal, Expert et Francais,” published at Toulouse in 1701, not 
only gives us this information, but actually describes the neuro- 
tomy operation for the relief of this lameness, the discovery of 
1 Fleming on * Shoeing.’ 
