DIMINUTION OF SENSIBILITY.. 
303 
The Difficulty of the Subject. — I do not mean to tell you, 
gentlemen, that spinal lesions, so strictly in accordance with the 
symptoms during life, are always to be found. In the majority 
of cases they are perfectly satisfactory to the practitioner and to 
the physiologist. In a few cases, loss of voluntary motion is 
accompanied by increased and agonizing sensibility during life. 
This you will often^st observe in the horse ; his struggles, his 
cries, and his universal perspiration, will tell you too plainly 
what he suffers. Here you will find injection of the membranes 
of the cord, or of the substance of it, and confined to the upper 
surface — while perhaps the inferior column will be pulpy. An old 
and hardly-worked horse will almost invariably present lesions of 
chronic spinal meningitis ; indeed, during life, he will scarcely 
labour under any inflammatory affection in which he will not shrink 
when the hands are hardly pressed upon his loins. 
Ramollissement of the Spinal Cord. — The most frequent 
change in the spinal cord connected with diminution, either of sen- 
sitive or motor power, is ramollissement , or softening. I cannot 
give you any clear and definite account of it, for it differs in almost 
every subject. It is the change of the pulpy medullary matter to 
a liquid of various consistence, sometimes of the natural colour of 
the spinal marrow, or whiter, or tinged with red, or of a dirty 
brown, occasionally mixed with a serous fluid, at other times evi- 
dently mingled with pus or with blood. Sometimes the softening 
is complete, but the cellated membrane remains ; at other times, a 
* small medullary band connects the anterior sound portion with 
the posterior one ,* and, again, this and the cellated, and the 
investing membrane, have, in a few 7 instances, disappeared, and 
nothing was left to connect together the distant portions of the 
sound cord but the dura mater. 
Sensation and voluntary Motion still remaining. — Then comes 
another puzzling fact — through a certain extent the whole of the 
spinal cord is gone, or, at least, there is no connexion but by 
means of the dura mater, and yet sensation and voluntary motion, 
the one, or the other, or both, may be somewhat impaired, but 
still they have palpable and useful existence. I must not draw 
my illustrations of this from the human being, and I have not 
many resources in veterinary records, for few, until of late years, 
few have been the veterinary surgeons who have acknowledged, or 
at least framed, their post-mortem examinations and their lan- 
guage according to that which in every school but theirs was 
acknowledged to be the true structure of the spinal cord. 
Singular Case. — I have, however, a case by means of which I 
can, to a certain extent, illustrate the subject. It is taken from 
the records of the Alfort school. A horse fell ; all attempts to 
