MEDICINES 443 



tendency to recover from, as well as to resist, disease is commonly spoken 

 of as the vis medicatrix naturae, and should be the prescriber's chief 

 reliance. Expectant treatment, or waiting for nature to assert its preserva- 

 tive influence on the life and well-being of each living creature, is more 

 adopted by the experienced physician than the amateur, who desires some 

 heroic remedy that shall cut short diseases, many of which pass through 

 successive well-known stages, and anything that would hinder the process 

 might prove fatal to the patients. The variolous diseases, for instance, 

 must pass through their various phases of incubation and eruption, papu- 

 lation, vesication, or pustulation, desquamation, and final recovery, which 

 latter cannot take place if the course of the disease be interrupted by 

 improper treatment. There are no remedies known even to the best 

 informed which will cure such diseases as variola, whether in man or 

 horses, and any treatment adopted should be of the expectant order. 

 Excessively high temperatures may be reduced by judicious administration 

 of drugs; constipation may be relieved or other special symptoms allevi- 

 ated; but the disease having a certain course to run, the patient must be 

 kept under the most favourable conditions as to food, clothing, diet, and 

 atmosphere. 



To prescribe for horses, a knowledge of their organs, the functions they 

 perform in health, and the nature of those departures from health which we 

 call disease, is absolutely indispensable. In addition to this we require 

 a knowledge of therapeutics, or the action of medicines, in order to employ 

 them successfully. 



This department of veterinary science has not made progress in propor- 

 tion to surgery, hygiene, and other branches of medicine. No sufficiently 

 accurate observations are recorded over a long period of the action of drugs 

 upon animals in health, but out of the collective experience of our best 

 veterinary surgeons a workable amount of knowledge has been evolved. 

 The horse owner who reads this remark will naturally wonder that the 

 schools have not taken the matter to heart, and devoted much more labour 

 to that side of the practice of medicine which always appeals most to the 

 layman. 



One of the obstacles to progress in our knowledge of the action of drugs 

 upon the horse in health is the Anti- vivisection Act, which makes penal the 

 administration of the simplest drugs by way of experiment, while permit- 

 ting many barbarous practices if done with the object of curing disease or 

 rendering animals more useful or profitable. 



Our knowledge of the action of drugs, we have said, is unsatisfactory, 

 and although we have borrowed largely from the older profession of human 

 medicine, we have an accumulated knowledge of an empirical kind which is 



