On the education and training of the veterinary pupil : the present state of veterinary medicine and veterinary literature : and on the art of horseshoeing and its relation to the veterinary profession / by W. Haycock.

  • Haycock, William.
Date:
1866
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the education and training of the veterinary pupil : the present state of veterinary medicine and veterinary literature : and on the art of horseshoeing and its relation to the veterinary profession / by W. Haycock. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    successfully cultivates this branch of our profession will at the same time determine the true relation which exists between the disease-producing power of drugs and their curative power in disease. This latter field of inquiry is, perhaps, the most import- ant of all, for, just in proportion that it is successfully explored, so will our art become a positive science, and be placed as such in the annals of the world. We require men to work for the advancement of veterinary me- dicine, and to those who desire so to work power will be given. Every member of our profession may be supposed to own a talent of some kind, and all talents are given to use wisely. Every man, says Emerson, is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. The veterinary8urgeon,bythe practice of his profession, is fed, clothed, and housed, and he, therefore, in time, becomes largely indebted to the profession, which he can only repay but by freely contribut- ing to its progress and advancement. To pay this debt, gentlemen, is strictly in accordance with the true use and purpose of man. Tub Cattle Plague.—The next topic I shall bring under your notice is the all-absorbing one—The Cattle Plague. 1 shall be brief, however, in my remarks respecting it. The origin of the disease is a question which has been keenly debated, but, neverthe- less, still remains in doubt and obscurity, many observers contend- ing that it was imported from Revel along with a cargo of cattle thence, and landed in Hull in the month of July, 18G.5 ; while others, of equally veracity and clearness, deny this, and assert with equal vehemence that the origin of the malady is to be attributed to the excessive heat of the past summer, and to other causes of an atmospheric nature which they do not explain. The medical journals have vied in disseminating innumerable fancies respecting its nature, and the newspapers in disseminating recipes and the names of drugs which never fail to remove the malady, but which somehow never do remove it, and beyond all possibility of doubt never ca?i remove it. Physicians and surgeons, eminent and obscure—veterinary surgeons, old and young—have also vied to cure the disease, but, I am sorry to say, with little or no success. The materia medica has been ransacked in vain, and the only remedies which appear to maintain their ground against all invaders are the pole-axe, warmth, patience, and water gruel ; while quacks, cow-leeches, druggists, butchers, and amateurs of every grade and degree, are reaping such a harvest as the most sanguine of them very possibly never hope to reap again. Tlie opinions of those who are emphatically declared to be the highest medical authorities,''^ respecting the pathological nature of the cattle plague, as usual, have differed, and do differ, most widely in their opinions. First, We were told it was the real steppe murrain, genuine as imported ; then it was regarded as a very aggravated form of the foot-and-mouth disease ; then it became enteric typhoid disease; then cholera in association with enteric typhus. Now some one professes to have discovered that it is
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