484 
T. B. RODGERS. 
a dead horse. If the operation be insisted on, go through as 
carefully as possible, or if you have a hand like a ham get 
some one else to do it for you. 
From a surgical standpoint I believe the proper operation 
would be to incise the flank, high up, using rigorous antisep¬ 
sis, but I am afraid to carry out my conviction. 
There has been a tall amount of lying about this operation 
with regard to the percentage of abdominal cryptorchidy, the 
death-rate from operations, etc., and it is time we raised a pro¬ 
test against the statements made in society meetings and in 
the journals. I castrate horses, I spay bitches, and some of 
them die. I have friends, eminent surgeons, and they tell me 
they have the same experience. I perform neurotomy, I lose 
feet; my lockjaw cases die, my cases of milk fever die ; and 
yet, if I must believe all I hear, Jones never loses a colt or 
bitch, Smith has done a fabulous number of neurotomies and 
lost no feet. Brown has forty-five recoveries out of forty-eight 
cases of tetanus. Robinson saves forty successive cases of 
milk fever—liars, every mother’s son of them—and the truth 
is not in them. Now if Jones means that all his colts and 
bitches lived until he got off the premises, he may lay the 
flattering unction to his soul that he is not lying. If Smith 
means that he performed a lot of neurotomies in a clinic and 
they went out of the gate with all four hooves on, all well. 
Brown’s lockjaw cases, perhaps, were like the scarlet fever 
cases of a homoeopathic physician I used to know—he never 
lost a case; sometimes an inconsiderate boy or girl died from 
acute albuminaria, or convulsions, or from heart failure; and 
infants passed into the subsequently from congestion of the 
brain, but lose a case of scarlet fever, never. Robinson (of 
course his name was not Robinson), told me that he had forty 
successive recoveries in parturient apoplexy. I told him that 
he made about forty mistakes in diagnosis, or lied; brutal! 
but not undeserved, and I think the time has come to call a halt 
on these reckless misstatements. 
I have operated on a few cases where scrotal hernia com¬ 
plicated castration, all save one did well (he died from tetanus), 
and I noticed that the operation was followed by very little 
