A concise account of veterinary surgery, its schools and practitioners, for the benefit of proprietors of domesticated animals. / By a Veterinary Surgeon.

Date:
1834
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A concise account of veterinary surgery, its schools and practitioners, for the benefit of proprietors of domesticated animals. / By a Veterinary Surgeon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ledge, for its discovery, would tend much to diminish the future recurrence of the disease. In many cases, a sick animal would languish for a while and ultimately recover. The restoration to health—effected by the preservative princi¬ ple common to all animals—would be attributed to the occurrence of some event observed shortly before decided convalescence. Remedies would now be thought of. Something that had been accidentally done or given to the animal that had recovered soon afterwards, would be remem¬ bered as something possessing the power of healing; and it would be tried upon the very next that became ill,—no matter how different the disease, or how incomplete the evidence in favour of the remedy. The presumed cause and the remedy might be both sufficiently absurd. If an animal were to fall ill immediately after an eclipse of the moon, or after being looked at by a stranger, the philosophers of those days would have no hesitation in saying and believing that either was the cause of the malady. If a patient had been observed to drink where it never drank before, or if it had done or suffered any thing unusual, and recovered soon after, the unusual circumstance, whatever it might be, would in time to come be a remedy, not only for that particular disease, but for every other; for no distintion had yet been made. In time, however, a differ¬ ence in the kinds of maladies would be observed. They would be named ; their duration and mode of terminating noted ; many would be confounded the one with the other, because only the external signs which indicate the existence of disease would be heeded; and in many cases these are pre¬ cisely the same. Remedies, though eagerly sought, would be seldom found. In the case already alluded to of an overloaded stomach, what¬ ever was intended for a cure would likely be given by the mouth, with the view of exerting its power upon the place where the disease was seated, or of reaching that which was doing the mischief: and after trying perhaps every likely and unlikely thing that could be thought of, a useful remedy might be at last discovered ; but not probably till many animals had been sacrificed in the experiment. It is only in a case of this kind that any thing worth knowing could be learned; and unless the disease for which a remedy had been discovered had but one stage, and could not be confounded with another in which the remedy would be pernicious, it would as often be wrongly as rightly applied. Little, it is obvious, could be acquired by mere observation of the living animal. Every attempt to remove disease would be nothing but an experiment which would have to be repeated with the same uncertainty of the result, on every patient, and on the same patient every time he was one. All the higher branches of knowledge are accessible only by obtaining possession of some that are lower, or some that appear to have no direct connection with them; and so it is with medicine, whether human or veterinary. Before diseases can be successfully treated, the laws of life must be understood, and these