ANIMAL PATHOLOGY. 
302 
the whole body, and gave him the most dreadful pain. A surgeon 
who was consulted advised that the external popliteal nerve 
should not only be divided, but that a tolerably large portion of it 
should be cut out. Eighteen lines of theYierve were excised. The 
patient, to whom sleep had been almost a stranger, sunk into re- 
pose, and said, when he awoke, that a thorough revolution had 
taken place in him, and that he was no longer the same man. 
The spasms occasionally returned for awhile, but in another 
place, and with less intensity ; the interval between them gradu- 
ally increased : and, at length, they disappeared altogether. This 
is the first case of which 1 am aware of the excision of a portion 
of the trunk of a nerve in the human being for the relief of 
pain. 
Mr. Moorcroft studies the Foot of the Horse . — There are re- 
cords, however, of its earlier introduction in veterinary practice. 
Mr. Moorcroft, for awhile the colleague of Professor Coleman 
at the Royal Veterinary College after the death of St. Bel, was 
devoting his powerful energies to the discovery of the causes and 
cure of lameness in the fore foot of the horse. It was a subject 
worthy of him : it involved the interest of the proprietor, and 
the comfort of the slave. He found that, partly from the faulty 
construction of the shoe, but more from the premature and cruel 
exaction of labour, the horse was subject to a variety of diseases 
of the foot, all of them accompanied by a greater or less degree 
of pain, often of a very intense nature, and ceasing only with 
the life of the patient. 
Contraction . — He studied the nature, and cause, and conse- 
quences of contraction— usually the effect of other injury or dis- 
ease ; but when existing in a great degree increasing, if not 
perpetuating, all other mischief. He thought, however, that he 
was approaching towards some improvement in practice, for he 
was able to remove the contraction of the feet in many cases'; 
and in all he could say, with tolerable certainty, whether he 
should succeed or fail. 
Navicular Disease . — He found a more formidable foe in what 
was then improperly called coffin-joint lameness. The coffin- 
joint, or that between the os pedis and low’er pastern, was never 
primarily, and with very few exceptions not at all, involved. Mr. 
Sewell afterwards called it “ joint-capsule lameness/’ a term 
still more objectionable from its being so indefinite. Mr. James 
Turner first gave it its proper name, “ navicular joint disease,” 
and likewise gave the first satisfactory explanation of its precise 
seat and character. It is inflammation of the synovial mem- 
brane, either of the flexor tendon or the navicular bone, or both, 
where the tendon plays over that bone ; and it is accompanied by 
