THE 
VETERINARIAN. 
VOL. IX, No. 102.] JUNE 1836, [New Series, No. 42. 
ANIMAL PATHOLOGY. 
By Mr. You att. 
LECTURE VI. 
Diminution of Sensibility. 
WE shall have still fewer plain and palpable facts to guide us 
while considering the phenomena of diminished sensibility in 
the inferior animals than we had during our review of the indi- 
cations of morbidly increased feeling; we must, therefore, proceed 
with caution, lest these lectures should become a mere tissue of 
analogical, and, probably, delusive reasoning. 
A diminution or absence of feeling, is, in the human being, 
a frequent precursor of loss of motor power, or an accompaniment 
of it, or existing independently of it. Of the first we know but 
little. We have not been sufficiently attentive to the expression 
of pleasure or of pain in our quadruped patients to be aware of, 
or perhaps it is impossible that we ever should be aware of, that 
feeling of creeping or numbness which so often ushers in the 
loss of power over the voluntary muscles. In the majority of 
cases there is probably nothing of this in the brute ; the approach of 
paralysis is usually in him too rapid and the attack too violent 
to admit of this precursor stage. 
Spinal Lesions attending the Loss of Sensation or Motor 
Power. — As to the connexion between, and co-existence of loss 
of feeling and voluntary motion, our records afford us many 
interesting and satisfactory illustrations of it ; and especi- 
ally since we have begun — even the veterinarian has slowly 
begun — to adopt that theory of the spinal cord, and of the 
nervous system generally, which will immortalize the name of 
Bell. I will quote from others here, and from those few of 
whom thoroughly understood, and some of whom did not, and do 
not to the present day, believe in this system; and who most 
certainly did not dream how incontestably they were proving it 
while they were relating a few anatomical and pathological facts. 
vol. ix. r r 
