VETERINARY SURGEONS AND GROOMS. 411 



having spent a large portion of my life in owning, training 

 and riding horses, and in teaching my grooms their stable 

 duties, I became convinced from experience that I could 

 never hope to obtain a thorough knowledge of horses, either 

 sick or well, without studying them scientifically. I accord- 

 ingly entered the New Veterinary College, Edinburgh, and 

 took out my diploma in due course. During the three years I 

 remained there, I certainly saw a hundred times more practice 

 than I had witnessed in all the previous years I had lived 

 among horses. My subsequent experience proves to me 

 that the time and money which I spent at that college 

 was the best investment I have ever made. 



The antagonism which stablemen feel towards veterinary 

 surgeons is a survival of a recent past, in which anyone was 

 at liberty to call himself a veterinary surgeon, and the course 

 of study at the veterinary colleges was of a trivial character. 

 Empiricism not having been leavened with science in those 

 days, veterinary surgeons valued themselves more on the 

 possession of secret recipes than on their capacity to reason 

 out the causes of disease. No wonder then say 60 years 

 ago that grooms and coachmen considered that they knew 

 how to treat the ailments of horses quite as well as the local 

 shoeing smith who called himself a veterinary surgeon, or 

 as the man who had passed through the London College or 

 that presided over by the late Professor Dick. Since then, the 

 veterinary profession has obtained its charter, and has proved 

 itself worthy of it by the enormous progress it has made 

 in learning. Time, however, is needed to remove the taint 

 of previous ignorance, and the prejudice which fathers have 

 handed down to their sons in the stable. In olden times, 

 veterinary surgeons taught grooms to value medicine rather 

 than advice, and even at the present day, there are some 

 who encourage quackery by the use of pink drinks, blue 

 lotions, and similar articles pour tpater les pentes. No wonder 



