148 LAMINIT1S — ACUTE FOUNDER — FEVER IN THE FEET. 
moment you go in his box ; for, instead “ of throwing his feet 
forward in a seemingly burlesque manner and bringing them down 
as oddly on the heel,” as Blaine so quaintly expresses it, you will 
see him stepping on his toes and almost knuckling over to avoid 
coming on the setons. In the course of five or six days, if the case 
is progressing favourably, leave off your poultices, and have the 
feet stopped up, dressing your setons daily for ten days or a fort- 
night. A striking peculiarity in the discharge from the setons 
occasionally is, its intensely foetid character. Imagine the worst 
thrush you ever put your nose near ; — it is a perfect nosegay to this 
discharge. 
I do not have the shoes meddled with for a fortnight or three 
weeks ; for I cannot imagine any thing more punishing than the 
concussion produced even by raising the clenches while the sen- 
sible laminae are so intensely inflamed. In three weeks or a 
month, your patient will be fit for light work ; nor does a run at 
grass appear at all necessary to complete the cure, although, of 
course, there can be no objection to its being had recourse to. 
But these frog setons, for they are the remedy, — is their appli- 
cation good in principle as well as practice I Why, when acute 
founder was considered to be a fever in the whole internal parts 
of the foot, and those parts were considered homogeneous, this 
might be doubtful ; but when we define acute founder to be an 
inflammation of the sensible laminae, and know that the structure 
of the sensible frog differs from it as much as that of the liver does 
from the lungs, then we at once allow their application to be 
physiologically correct, on the axiom that counter-irritation can 
never be set up too near the seat of disease. In some chronic 
diseases of the foot the value of the frog seton has been fully 
ascertained ; and the similarity of Nature’s own remedy, thrush, 
would authenticate its application in many more but much earlier 
stages of disease. “ But you follow up your setons by active 
depletory means, are you correct then in attributing so much to 
them as you appear to do I” I think so, for two reasons : one is, 
that active depletions alone have so often failed to cure the dis- 
ease ; and the other, that in those cases arising from metastasis, 
bleeding was quite out of the question, and the action of the bow- 
els could only be reproduced by the mildest possible measures ; 
in them, therefore, the frog-seton was, indeed, the sheet anchor. 
And now, I may as well candidly confess, I take no credit 
whatever for originality in this mode of treatment. The setons — 
the specific remedy, if a specific remedy there be — I saw applied 
while I was yet a pupil ; but so strong was the impression made 
on my mind by the extraordinary effects they produced, that I 
have never lost sight of them, and, in return, they have never 
