VETERINARY PROBLEMS. 25 



try might have the benefit of anything that the most ad- 

 vanced science of the present day can suggest. We are 

 trying to grapple with these great problems intelligently, 

 as becomes enlightened Americans in the last quarter of the 

 nineteenth century. We have quietly fitted up a laboratory 

 with all the facilities which are considered essential for the 

 very best class of work ; we have an experiment station, 

 with stables, and sheds, and pens, and animals, to make 

 thorough tests of every step in our progress. While we 

 appreciate the excellent work that is being done in other 

 countries, we have sufiicient faith in our own country and its 

 institutions to believe that just as good work can be done 

 here as in any part of the world, and that it will lose nothing 

 in value from being done bv Americans. 



Our work in the past has been devoted, to a great extent, 

 to the demonstration of the germs which are responsible for 

 some of our most destructive animal plagues. It was a nec- 

 essary work and one which has consumed much time ; but 

 it must be remembered that we were workine; on the border- 

 land of science, over problems that have defied the most 

 acute investigators during all the past history of medical sci- 

 ence. This work was contested step by step ; but the appli- 

 cation of the germ theory to our most important diseases 

 has been made and denionstiated, and this demonstration is 

 so plain that the most skeptical have been convinced. The 

 demonstration that these diseases were due to living germs, 

 and the subsequent study of these organisms, has appeared to 

 many to have no practical bearing on their prevention and 

 treatment. After all, says one doubter, you have only added 

 another micro-organism to the long list already known ; and 

 what care I, says a veterinarian, whether the germs of swine 

 plague are spherical or rod-shaped, I only want to know how 

 to prevent and cure the disease. But such men forget that 

 the science of physiology would have been impossible until 

 anatomy was understood, and that physiology is equally es- 

 sential to scientific medicine ; they forget that the diseases of 

 the stomach could never have been successfully treated until 

 we had learned, first that there is a stomach, and secondly, 

 what are its functions in the animal economy. The science 

 of medicine does not stop with anatomy and physiology, but 



