On Mismanagement of Farm-Horses. 



541 



5. Want of Medical Skill in Professional Attendants. — It is 

 difficult to estimate the amount of evil arising from want of me- 

 dical skill in professional attendants. Such want of skill may 

 operate injuriously in almost every disease. It may be shown 

 either by injudicious treatment, or by failing to employ proper 

 treatment — it may consist either in doing positive harm or in fail- 

 ing to do good — it may do too much, or not enough. In short, 

 there is no error, great or small, into which want of skill may not 

 lead the practitioner. And to refer, however briefly, to all the 

 circumstances and diseases amongst horses, in which want of skill 

 is sometimes shown, would be to notice almost every affection 

 to which the horse is liable. It will, however, we believe, be 

 more in accordance with tlie intention of the proposed head if 

 we confine our observations to the mistakes and errors which 

 most frequently occur amongst persons of some professional 

 standing. 



Want of medical skill in the treatment of disease is sometimes 

 shown in the employment of unsuitable remedies, and also in the 

 injudicious use of proper remedies. This, we believe, is often 

 the case with bloodletting in inflammations of the respiratory 

 apparatus. In many such cases the medical attendant is not 

 called in until the second or third day — until the intensity of 

 the inflammation has passed away. The patient, however, is 

 examined, and the case pronounced to be pneumonia, pleurisy, 

 or bronchitis. If the practitioner be one of those who treat dis- 

 eases merely according to their names (and there are still too many 

 such), he immediately abstracts blood, on the ground that bleed- 

 ing is placed first among the remedies for such diseases, and is 

 moreover the sheet-anchor for the cure of inflammation." A 

 more intimate acquaintance with the phenomena of such inflam- 

 mations would, however, have taught the practitioner that the 

 treatment adopted, although very suitable for the early stages of 

 the disease, could be of no service in the latter stages, when 

 effusion had taken place, and the more acute inflammation had 

 been thereby overcome ; and that such treatment could only 

 retard recovery, by debilitating the patient to no purpose. It 

 appears to us that the great majority of veterinary surgeons are 

 in general much too fond of bloodletting, and often practise it 

 where it can do no good, and may do much harm. As above 

 stated, they often err in employing it when the time has passed 

 for its being of any use. This and similar errors depend in great 

 part upon a morbid love of intermeddling, and a determination to 

 do something — faults, however, for which the veterinary prac- 

 titioner is not always accountable, since his employers are seldom 

 content to leave matters to the curative powers of nature, think- 

 ing that the more physicking, bleeding, and medical treatment 



