GENERAL PRINCIPLES 19 
eral medical profession is old, it is crowded, it has 
been generally regulated, and in addition it lends 
itself to certain kinds of question which would 
hardly be applied in veterinary practice (such as, 
Is faith cure ‘‘the practice of medicine?’’). The 
consequence is that almost all the legal points 
have been considered with reference to the gen- 
eral profession, and there are relatively very few 
‘‘reported’’ cases relative to veterinary practice. 
The cases reported in the papers, as a rule, are 
not legally ‘‘reported cases,’’ and they have of 
themselves practically no value as precedents. 
They are simply verdicts in lower courts, and if 
appealed they might be reversed by the higher 
court. They are therefore very unsafe to depend 
upon. They are not properly judicial decisions, 
but so far as the law is concerned they are simply 
the opinions of one man in each case; and that one 
man may be thoroughly incompetent, in spite of 
the fact that he may have been elected to his posi- 
tion by a majority of his neighbors for friendly 
reasons. 
It therefore follows, that in seeking for the legal 
principles applicable in the practice of the veteri- 
nary profession we may display few cases in which 
a veterinarian was involved, but we must depend 
upon similar cases in other lines. 
