506 
ON FIRING THROUGH THE SKIN. 
dexterity, tact, talent, and nerve of the experienced practitionei 
will be in requisition; for while he strenuously exerts himseli 
amid the struggles of his patient, he revolves in his mind the 
absolute necessity of his instrument reaching the surface of the 
disease itself; and yet, on the other hand, he has to consider the 
paramount necessity of avoiding a puncture of the capsule of the 
joint. 
With respect to the rationale of this method of firing, the kind 
of instrument as to shape, size, &c., the great variety of cases for 
which it is applicable, together with the fore-and-after treatment 
of the patient, I have as much to remark as would fill a volume, 
and which I purpose, ere long, to submit to the public. But I 
deem it necessary to state, that although my brother, Mr. Thomas 
Turner, Veterinary Surgeon, of Croydon, and myself, have prac¬ 
tised these deep cautery incisions successfully for a series of years, 
we have never allowed that success, in a single instance, to entice 
us oft" our guard, by venturing to perform this operation so far 
from home as to preclude the possibility or convenience of almost 
daily watching our patient, and therefore, by never having allowed 
that sturdy opponent, “inordinate inflammation,” to have gained 
a day's march on us, we can defy the world to say, that a single 
mishap has occurred to us from the severity of the operation, 
such as an opened joint, ora fatal termination, from excessive 
irritation or constitutional disturbance. 
. I fear, Mr. Editor, your patience is exhausted; but I have now 
only just arrived at the burden of my story, therefore I will come 
to the point by asking you, whether it is your opinion that this 
deep method of firing, as above detailed, may some day or other 
become admissible in the surgical treatment of human beings for 
many of those intractable scrofulous inflammations of the synovial 
membranes of joints, commonly called white swellings of the knee, 
hip-joint cases, &c. ? 
Of course I cannot pretend to any knowledge w hatever in such 
matters, only that I have been led to think on them from having 
carefully perused those splendid yet plain lectures by Mr. Law¬ 
rence. In the treatment of ulceration of the cartilages of joints, 
Mr. Lawrence remarks, page 485 of vol. ii of The Lancet, 
that your “great reliance must be on counter-irritation,” and that 
in the days of Hippocrates, the same principle was employed by 
the application of the actual cautery, and that Professor Rust, of 
Berlin, considers the hot iron as more efficacious than other 
means of employing this principle. 
Now r , Sir, I humbly suggest, that if such desperate cases have 
derived benefit from the days of Hippocrates down to Professor 
Rust's time, by only cauterizing or searing the surface of the skin, 
