CHAPTER XV. 
OPERATIONS. 
Tue veterinary art is by no means rendered more successful by the 
cunning of its stratagems. Many of its objects are accomplished after 
the rudest and the most primitive methods. Not one, perhaps, is more 
THE PRESENT MANNER OF CASTING A HORSE FOR OPERATION. 
coarse than the present method of casting or throwing an animal previ- 
ous to an operation. The reader has only to ask himself what condition 
the body must be in when, with the sight blinded, it is suddenly jerked 
to the earth; and how far it is fitly prepared by so violent a practice to 
be submitted to the knife of an operator? 
There are few operations in veterinary surgery which a person of 
moderate nerve and average intelligence might not himself perform. 
The author has seen gentlemen with titles, and others holding high rank 
in the army, indulge in the strange pleasure of singeing living flesh with 
the heated iron. But he has never beheld horsemen handling the knife. 
The latter would better become their hands than the first severe and dis- 
figuring instrument, which, however useful it may have been found in 
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