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INTRODUCTION, 



Veterinary science and its votaries are unfortunately not generally — in 

 this country at least— held in the esteem, and have not attained to that 

 position of popularity their importance and usefulness so justly deserve. 

 We are the most conservative of people, and hold on alike to our " glorious 

 constitution " and our " stupid prejudices " with the tenacity of our Eng- 

 lish bulldogs. Probably, as we have half swallowed the pill of compulsory 

 education, and as it is sure to go down altogether with the jolting of time, 

 the British owners of the unparalleled number— as shown by agricultural 

 statistics— of over fifty millions of the finest stock the world can show, 

 may in the course of another generation begin to question the propriety of 

 a system of wholesale drugging at haphazard, and to doubt the wisdom of 

 trusting the health and lives of their stock to the traditional ignorance and 

 heirloom mysteries of the farrier, the ostler, and the cowman, instead of 

 the skill of the trained veterinarian. 



The honourable craft of horse doctoring has undergone many vicissitudes. 

 In the earliest times medicine was studied and applied by the same practi- 

 tioner to the relief of diseases of all animals associated with man as well as 

 to man himself, and among the ancient writers of both Greece and Rome 

 considerable advance was made in the study of veterinary science. But 

 with the fall of the Eoman empire this science, like others, fell into decay, 

 and appears to have remained neglected for many centuries. 



In, I believe, the fifteenth century, when the practice of shoeing horses 

 with iron began to be more generally adopted, the practice of horse physic 

 was revived, and was handed over to the farrier, or ferrier, or shoeing- 

 smith, as the name implies, being taken from the Latin ferrum (iron). 

 Such an inconsistency as making the shoemaker the doctor might be natu- 

 ral to the dark ages, but that it should be persevered in with unyielding 

 stupidity by the intelligent British horse owner of the latter half of the 

 nineteenth century is a mystery I leave others to solve, as it is incompre- 

 hensible to me. The fact, however, is unquestionable, that by the vast 

 majority of stock owners, the qualified man is set aside in favour of the 



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