ON TETANUS 
87 
present, and the animal’s spirits being gay, it was unwisely 
thought that the cure would be expedited by discontinuing the 
poultice and bandage, and applying simple tincture of myrrh to 
the wound once a-day. In forty-eight hours after this change of 
treatment, although the horse was quiet in a box on bran diet, 
without exercise, he had become exceedingly lame even in his 
walk; and instead of that wholesome or salutary tumefaction of 
the limb before described, the leg and fetlock joint was as fine as 
that of a race-horse after a gallop; the surface of the wound, of 
course, contracted and harsh, and not even a drop of pus under 
its incrustation; bowels costive, but the appetite good, and the 
pulse unaffected. The next morning he had confirmed tetanus, 
the membrana nictitans extending half over the globe of the eye, 
and a general rigidity of the voluntary muscles, accompanied with 
torpor of the bowels, although the day before he had taken an 
ounce of aloes : lameness less apparent, no secretion of pus from 
the wound , the injured limb vexatiously small , and not tender to 
the touch. 
As regards treatment , I would again wish to ask, whether, in 
this excited state of the nervous system, the veterinary profession 
has any known resources or curative means so well calculated to 
allay this morbid irritability in the early stage of tetanus as pro¬ 
fuse bloodlettings. I am of opinion that the avoidance of copious 
bloodletting till we are admonished so to do by an augmentation 
of the action of the heart, as the majority of the meeting appeared 
to recommend, and, using the language urged, “ husbanding the 
vital fluid,” would be to extinguish our best chance of cure; for 
by waiting the accession of such premonitory symptoms, the nerv¬ 
ous excitement would be found to have extended to the vital 
organs themselves, particularly the thoracic viscera. 
I have a crowd of facts to offer in illustration of these remarks, 
should they be desired at another opportunity ; and I should be 
glad if I could induce the profession to institute a more minute 
inquiry as regards a particular crisis or sudden turn of the in¬ 
flammation arising from local injuries with which we are some¬ 
times taken by surprise, owing to peculiarity of constitution or 
some unknown causes which it would be well for us to find out. 
It appears to me that, in a healthy suppurating wound, there is 
that reciprocal action between the minute vascular and nervous 
tissues which favours the secretion of pus both in quantity and 
quality; but that various causes or assemblage of circumstances 
may conspire to disturb this equilibrium, and cause the vascular 
capillary structure to drop the excited action, and the nervous 
tissue to take it up, and thereby acquire an undue ascendancy. 
1 also believe this nervous excitement to be another of the seve- 
