206 
AN INTERESTING CASE OF MELANOSIS. 
involved while the skin continued sound, and gives the strongest 
assurance that any operation would be comparatively slight. A 
child might have removed this tumour, if he had only dared to 
cut; at all events, it is not too much to say, a butcher with 
half an hour’s teaching could have performed the impossibility of 
its extirpation. 
The Professors, and Mr. Mavor, jun., when giving their judg¬ 
ments, regarded the enlargement as a simple tumour; that it 
might prove melanotic did not enter into their ideas of possibility. 
It had formed one of the contingencies which I was prepared 
to meet; and because so highly organized a structure as the skin 
was perfect, I felt assured of the condition of the less vital mem¬ 
branes, that were like a cloth spread out underneath. Had the 
growth been upon muscles, between and among which it could 
possibly have dipped, I should not have talked so confidently 
of operation; but where it was, it seemed to invite the knife, and 
I have to learn what it was which made the removal an im¬ 
possibility. 
One of the means proposed to obviate the necessity of an opera¬ 
tion was the use of iodine. The agent may be powerful over 
glands ; but even then it is not always attended with success. 
Over abnormal deposits, I have yet to learn that it possesses any 
advantage beyond what the common blister can bestow; to which, 
being itself an irritant, iodine closely in such cases approximates. 
The history given with this case told that a vesicant had caused it 
to enlarge; and more minute inquiry would have ascertained that 
iodine already had been .tried, even if reason did not suggest, to 
one who talked of possibilities, the probability that so customary 
a practice had been employed. Had the advice given been fol¬ 
lowed, further injury only would have been done; for the sea does 
not contain the iodine sufficient to have decreased the swelling to 
which it was ordered to be applied. 
The seton, however, was the worst possible measure that could 
have been proposed. Compared to the knife, even supposing 
there had been no constitutional disease, but a tumour of a firm or 
solid character to treat, it was such a resort as ignorance alone can 
justify. I can conceive no condition under which a seton could 
have been warranted. Supposing there had been a sac containing 
pus, the length of time it had been confined, and the hardened 
nature of the swelling, left no room to conjecture it was not 
inspissated; but whether it was or not, if there was imagined to 
be fluid of any kind, why, having such a notion, was it not 
evacuated, and the sac destroyed] Such would have been the 
work of a few minutes, during which the horse need not have 
been cast; and in a month, at most, the wound would have healed 
