390 
TRANSACTIONS AT THE ALFORT SCHOOL, 
unsoundness : at least in the ground of the manege , and now 
for more than one year this success has maintained, although 
she has not discontinued giving two lessons of equitation 
daily. 
3. In fine, neurotomy is an excellent means of giving 
a finish to any operation on the foot, whenever it happens 
that such operation has left behind it lameness, the con- 
sequence of new conditions of structure and sensibility 
entailed upon the tissues through the inflammation under 
which they have been labouring. Thus, it is common to see 
horses going lame long after the cicatrization of a wound 
penetrating through the plantar aponeurosis, or after the 
healing of the wound necessarily inflicted in extirpation of 
the lateral cartilage of the coffin-bone, or after the extir- 
pation of a Iceraphyllocele , & c. In these cases of lameness 
lasting long after the cicatrization is accomplished, a great 
advantage may be obtained from the excision of the principal 
branch of nerve running to the painful part ; and neurotomy 
may be employed, under parallel circumstances, with so 
much the more certainty according as no error has 
crept in as to the cause and seat of lameness, and as the 
exact knowledge of these two circumstances renders it 
possible to localize the operation to a precise point, leaving 
all the other parts of the foot in their normal conditions of 
nervosity. 
In the announcement of this last principle we shall ter- 
minate this article : neurotomy having for its final aim the 
deprivation of sensibility, the property which protects them 
against exterior violence, —an operation, we may say, which 
will be the more perfect in proportion as it effects this object 
— viz., the extinction of pain, without doing more injury to 
the nervous system than is absolutely necessary. And this 
is the reason why inferior neurotomy (which is the ordinary 
operation practised) is to be preferred to the superior opera- 
tion, whenever the case will admit of it. — Bee. cle Med . Vet. de 
Mars , 1833. 
