QUACK MEDICINES. 341 



in the world, and that they actually enjoyed being humbugged. 

 These people now have a fad of lending their names and fur- 

 nishing photogravures of themselves to the manufacturers of 

 these medicines, and allow them to write up the most 

 wonderful cures of themselves by the use of these quack 

 nostrums. 



At the present day we can hardly take up a newspaper 

 without finding a page, more or less, devoted to these adver- 

 tisements, and containing from one to three or more cuts of 

 good, healthy looking people who claim to have been cured of 

 some terrible malady, or complication of diseases, by the use of 

 certain medicines therein advertised. 



It should require no argument to show how dangerous is 

 the indiscriminate use of powerful drugs when compounded by 

 parties who, quite likely, never had the slightest opportunity 

 of acquiring a medical education. No wonder such persons 

 cannot cure by their remedies diseases deemed incurable by 

 the veterinary medical world. 



After all there is no quack on earth equal to an opinion- 

 ated groom, and every one,, nowadays, holds himself a groom, 

 who is intrusted with the care of a horse, even if he does not 

 know how to clean him properly or to feed him so as not to in- 

 terfere with his working hours. 



An experienced and level-headed man is a treasure in any 

 stable, but the worst sort of a nuisance is one of those fellows 

 who has no more idea of a horse's structure or of his constitu- 

 tion than he has of the model of a ship, and who is sure to 

 have a thousand infallible remedies for every possible disease, 

 the names of which he does not know, or their cause, origin, or 

 effect ; and if he did know their names he is incapable of dis- 

 tinguishing one from another. 



He applies his remedies at haphazard, wholly in the dark as 

 to their effects on the system generally or in this particular 

 disease. Of course nine times out of ten he applies them 

 wrong and aggravates many fold the injury he affects to be 

 able to relieve. 



