38 
AN INTRODUCTORY LECTURE ON SURGERY. 
pulse was 120, and hard, considering the great depletions he has 
undergone — the countenance haggard — he paws and walks about 
as before — the appetite is entirely gone. Continue opiates and 
enemas. I despaired of my patient, and communicated my senti- 
ments to the owner accordingly. 
20 th . — He died this morning. On dissection I found all parts of 
the body healthy but the kidneys, which were in a putrid state. Half 
the right kidney was in a state of suppuration. The cause of the 
complaint is not exactly known, but it is supposed to have ori- 
ginated from an injury or strain, as the colt got out of his pasture 
the day before he was observed to be ill. In reference to the 
treatment adopted by the-would-be-practitioner, it would have been 
more judicious to have bled freely, and omitted the nitre in his de- 
coctions ; the disease might then have been combatted by me 
when called in. 
AN INTRODUCTORY LECTURE ON SURGERY. 
Delivered by the late SlR Astley COOPER, Bart . 
[Among our loose papers we found this lecture. It appeared, 
coming from a man so eminent in human medicine, and such a 
patron all his life of veterinary, too good to consign to the 
fire ; we, therefore, publish it. It may serve as a refresher to 
minds long estranged from school, and a stimulus to such as are 
yet in leading-strings.] 
SURGERY may be said to consist in the application of remedies 
to external disorders and in the performance of different operations. 
The science has two divisions ; — principles and practice. The 
principles are the rules laid down by surgeons of experience for 
the proper practice of their profession ; and they are grounded on 
observation of disease in the living body, examination into changes 
caused by it in the dead, and on experiments on live animals. 
By the first we become acquainted with the symptoms, the causes, 
and the remedies ; by the second, with the nature of the altera- 
tions in the structures in which it has been seated, and how under- 
gone, teaching us whether the disease is curable or incurable ; by 
the third, we are enabled to watch and trace the means Nature 
adopts for the cure of disease, the process by which parts are re- 
stored being the same in man as in animals. But, as example is 
more edifying and impressive than precept, let us explain all this. 
