668 
NEUROTOMY. 
awarded the honour of being the originator or introducer of a 
practice which has saved numbers of horses from premature 
slaughter; and while it has spared them days of unceasing pain, 
has restored a very great majority of them, at least for a definite 
time, on account of their serviceability, to the keeping and favour 
of their masters. 
The Rationale of Neurotomy is plain and simple. Lameness 
is the manifestation of pain. Deprive the part in pain of its sense 
of feeling, and the pain, with the lameness consequent on it, ceases; 
not to return until sensation shall return, and not necessarily even 
then. Neurotomy, therefore, as a remedy, differs from all other 
remedies, insomuch as the relief afforded by it is instantaneous : 
divide the nervous cord going to the seat of lameness, so as to cut 
off all communication between the part in pain and the sensorium, 
and comparing nervous action to what it in some respects so nearly 
resembles, the same effect is produced as when the wire of com- 
munication is cut proceeding from some electrical machine or bat- 
tery. Electricity, like nervous action, is at an end ; the electric 
battery is charged in vain ; the brain can no longer take cognizance 
of impressions or injuries inflicted on the neurotomized part. 
Suppose the seat of lameness to be the foot, the plantar nerve , 
being the trunk whence that organ derives its nervous branches, is 
the nervous cord to be cut to deprive the foot of sensibility : but 
there are two plantar nerves as trunks, one on either side of the 
pastern, and the division of but one of them will paralyze but the 
half of the foot of the same side ; consequently, to render both 
sides of the foot insensible to pain and lameness, both plantar nerves 
must be divided. This done, a horse may be cut, or stabbed, or 
struck any where below the division of the nervous trunks — or at 
least below where any branches are given off from the superior 
division of the nerve — with perfect impunity ; the dealer’s common 
test of a neurotomized foot being to prick the coronet with a pin : 
should the horse not flinch or catch up his leg, he is set down as 
“ a nerved one.” 
The reason is now plain why a horse, dead lame even before 
he be cast for the operation, becomes, from the moment neu- 
rotomy has been performed, quite sound. No change whatever 
has been effected on the disease which caused his lameness; 
nothing, in fact, in or about the foot or limb has been altered, save 
that the communicating sensitive cord has been cut in two, and 
sensitive action has in consequence ceased. Although, however, 
such alone appears as the immediate result of the operation, we find 
it was asked by Moorcroft, as indeed it naturally would by an in- 
quiring mind, if there were no 
Remote Effects from Neurotomy to be looked for — 
