Contagious and Epizootic Diseases. 73 



from them better things. The editors of powerful news- 

 papers, wlio can surely never have given five minutes' 

 sober and intelligent consideration to the question, join in 

 this cry, and quite recently Mr. Clare Sewell Kead, M.P., 

 in an agricultural address, bewails that " veterinary science 

 can only advise them to kill." Now in view of all that is 

 set forth above, our readers must see that all this talk is but 

 the fruit of ignorance and slander, and that for the plagues 

 of animals we are to-day in a better position to offer pre- 

 ventive measures than is the practitioner of human medi- 

 cine for the pestilences of man. 



It is true that we cannot exercise omnipotence and extin- 

 guish infection with a word, nor can we mail to any point 

 a much desired, and very 'generally believed in, panacea, 

 which will cure the victims of all contagia from ringworm 

 to rinderpest. But we can in suitable cases procure such 

 conditions of life and such power of resistance in the animal 

 economy as will render the assaults of given plagues harm- 

 less. 



As veterinarians, however, and as citizens, it is not for us 

 to advocate especially those measures which would protect 

 the individual animal or the individual herd at the cost of 

 danger to the hei'ds around them, when more radical, and, in 

 the end, cheaper measures can be availed of to obviate all 

 necessity for these partial and dangerous methods of pro- 

 tection. Veterinarians have been freely slandered for an 

 alleged desire to feed luxuriantly from the public treasury. 

 The wonder is rather that more of the profession have not 

 pandered to the public prejudice, and advocated and engi- 

 neered public culture establishments from which the vari- 

 ously modified virus could have been sent out everywhBre 

 at a. handsome profit. Have our detractors ever thought 

 of how many millions it would cost yearly to inoculate the 

 hogs of the United States as a protection against swine- 

 plague ? And of how many millions more it would cost to 



