138 WOUND TREATMENT 



ances for the subjugation of the enemy whose assaults 

 it is the special provision of the surgeon to repel. An 

 ignorant operator may easily become, himself, a more 

 dangerous ''lesion" than some of those which we pre- 

 sume to treat. The man who can cut into the living and 

 usually hypersensitive flesh of suffering animals, with- 

 out knowing what tissues or organs he is attacking, 

 what arteries he is likely to sever, what nerves to wound, 

 what organs to lacerate, what functions to paralyze — 

 such a man, if he be found, should simply be subjected 

 to an odium which should ostracize him from honorable 

 and equal association with other of his species, besides 

 being held criminally amenable to the law providing 

 penalties for the perpetrators of cruelty to animals. 



These reflections may be unnecessary, but it is all too 

 true that our domestic animals too often become the 

 victims of worse than brutal masters, who take advan- 

 tage of their helplessness and inferiority to inflict upon 

 them cruelties so gross and aggravated that right-feeling 

 men are often compelled to blush to call them fellows. 

 It is no excuse for this that it is done through the 

 agency of a pseudo-surgeon ; such a plea merely doubles 

 the number of the wrongdoers. 



With the skill of the expert anatomist must be asso- 

 ciated, of course, the necessary mastery of therapeutics, 

 and a familiar knowledge of special and general path- 

 ology, and all should be supplemented by a knowledge 

 of the theory and practice of the farrier. 



The science and the application of the laws of hygiene, 

 so generally, indeed almost wholly, ignored by our fa- 

 thers, and so largely a discovery of the present time, 

 should never be overlooked or depreciated by the gen- 

 uine surgeon. The fullest attention to the theories and 

 applications of what may be denominated the science of 

 antisepsis, now so universally and unintermittently an 



