LIVERPOOL VETERINARY MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. 263 
or mechanical effect upon the organ or tissue affected, producing what 
is called inflammatory action or perverted nutrition. Whatever ex¬ 
planation may be given or accepted as to how the diseased action is 
brought about in the respiratory organs, you are, from your own ob¬ 
servation and practical experience, I am sure, fully conversant with 
the manifold causes and symptoms of the malady. 
I cannot allow the present opportunity to pass without adding my 
testimony to the great advance we have made in our improved methods 
of ascertaining the progress or decline of diseased action by the uner¬ 
ring aid of that beautiful instrument, the thermometer, also by careful 
clinical instruction ; in fact, gentlemen, our clinical aids in chest diseases 
may be said to be the pulse, respiration, its painfulness and quickness, 
and the temperature as ascertained by the thermometer. All and each of 
these represent forces at work in the living body, all of which are now 
capable of being measured with great exactness, and such measurements 
show how closely such expenditure of forces is related to the excreta 
which represents the waste of tissues in health and disease. 
The subject I have now in hand—‘‘Is it advisable or advantageous to 
apply counter-irritation in acute disease of the respiratory organs ?” 
I should probably do more justice to this important consideration if I 
divided it under the following heads, viz.:—1. What is meant by the 
term counter-irritation? 2. How is counter-irritation believed to act? 
3. If it acts as before mentioned, when and how should it be applied? 
4. When should it be abstained from, and why ? 
First, then, What is meant by the term “counter-irritants?” These 
may be defined to be remedies of external application, by which we 
endeavour to remove or diminish the morbid condition of a particular 
structure by artificially creating a new irritation or determination in 
some other part more or less remote from the seat of disease; but since 
in its most comprehensive meaning it would embrace too wide a field of 
physiological and pathological inquiry, and include the majority of those 
changes which are induced by such internal remedies as cathartics, 
diuretics, and diaphoretics, &c., I have therefore inserted the term 
of “ external applications,” so as to define that the seat of irritation is 
transferred from an internal organ to the surface. The application of a 
counter-irritant for the relief of a labouring organ was doubtless sug¬ 
gested to the attentive observer by the occurrence of spontaneous trans¬ 
lation of disease from one part to another, and by the obvious and 
immediate relief so frequently thus afforded, as, for example, in the 
subsidence of pulmonary and enteritic irritation, on the appearance of 
laminitis, or a cutaneous eruption. 
The object, then, of a counter-irritant is to produce a salutary change 
in an inaccessible organ by effecting an artificial change in one within 
our reach, and to transfer morbid action from a structure more im¬ 
mediately subservient to life to a less essential surface in sympathy 
with it. 
In order to render such agents available in the case of disease, much 
judgment and nice discrimination are necessary. In the hands of an inex¬ 
perienced or rash practitioner the evil might be aggravated rather than 
relieved. 
Various substances have been proposed at different times to produce 
counter-irritation, such as mustard, hot or boiling water, cantharides, 
ammonia, turpentine, preparations of iodine, setons, rowels, plugs, issues, 
strong acetic acid, and the actual or potential cautery. 
I come now to the second part of my subject, viz.: How is counter¬ 
irritation believed to act. I was instructed at my Alma Mater in the 
