Almost any practitioner of veterinary medicine, with whom you may care to discuss the matter, can point to case after case, in his own practice, in which a spavin, or a ring-bone, that had been cauterized or otherwise operated upon with failure, had yielded to a course of topical iodine applications. In some instances, a cure of this sort causes a practitioner to lose faith in operative measures for the correction of the conditions in question. Usually, however, it impresses upon him, with added force, the thought that he has not fully acquired the knack--either along practical or scientific lines--to select his cases properly. Could he be sure that a given case would yield to applications of iodine preparations, he would much prefer to treat it that way; but he is not often sure. He has learned that there are certain cases, although to all appearances, as far as he is able to tell, not differing from other cases of the same nature, will yield to actual cautery; he has learned, also, that certain cases will yield to local applications of certain iodine preparations. But he finds it difficult to select these cases for the respective forms of treatment in the general run of his practice. That he may be better able to serve his clients, and that he may even more highly appreciate the therapeutic worth of iodine in some of its forms of preparation, I have made some clinical observations, in my own practice, which I shall record in the following chapters, and which, I believe, will help to solve this problem for him. While it is not possible to pick out every case in which iodine applications will give the desired result, it is not an exceptionally difficult matter to select the great majority. It is the opinion of most veterinary practitioners, who have the ethics of their profession at heart, that the treatment of certain well-known pathological conditions of the articulations, by means of the actual cautery, is one of the most disagreeable features of a veterinary practice. It is one of the things that most veterinary practitioners are trying to get away from; it smacks more of quackery and dark-aged farriery than anything else that the veterinarian is obliged to do. When, on top of this, we view this form of treatment from the angle of the humanitarian, we fail to understand why otherwise able and enlightened practitioners will resort to it under any conditions. True, there are apparently a few forms--a very few--of equine lameness that will yield to no other form of treatment. Note, I have said _apparently_ there are some. I believe, in fact, that any case of lameness located in an articulation is curable, _if it is curable at all_, by means other than burning the area with a red-hot iron. While most of us, in practice, do fire cases of articulation lameness, I believe that we do so for the reason that frequently it is _for us_ the easiest way to terminate the conditions connected with the case. And I