VETERINARY MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. 957 
author of the axiom, -which veterinarians take pleasure in repeating,— “ Ars 
veterinaria post medicinam secunda est.” 
With the final overthrow of the Roman Empire, medicine, among the 
other arts and sciences, shared the fate of civilisation generally, in the intel- 
lectual gloom which enshrouded the fate of man during the dark ages. The 
Arabs alone, who have all along been remarkable for a certain stationary 
amount of knowledge, especially as regards medicine, still continued to 
retain the skill they had acquired. 
In taking a parting glance of the healing art in these remote times, 
we find little of course to admire, and less to learn ; and no wonder, for 
the more discriminating men of these days saw and despised the empiricism 
of the practitioners by whom they were surrounded. Pliny relates that the 
Roman Republic was without physicians for more than six hundred years ; 
and Cato declared “ that corruption would be general when the Greeks had 
transmitted their sciences, and especially their physicians.” Petrarch, at a 
much later period, so late as the fourteenth century, writes to Clement the 
sixth, “ Holy father, regard as a troup of enemies this crowd of physicians 
with which you are beset and he adds, “ whole nations have done without 
them, perhaps they did better and lived longer than us.” 
The “ glimmer of light” reflected by the healing art, feeble as it was, had 
no doubt, however, been the instrument of some good in lessening pain, and 
even in curing some of “the thousand ills,” a conclusion warranted by an 
examination of some of the earliest writings, although the good had per- 
haps been, in a great measure, counterbalanced by the evil inseparable from 
ignorance and quackery. At all events, in extirpating the Roman class of 
physicians and veterinarians, in their general massacre, their mantle did not 
assuredly fall on their destroyers, the Goths and Yandals. 
The most important era in the history of the horse was undoubtedly the 
period when the present system of shoeing was introduced. The exact 
time when this improvement, or as may be said, discovery, took place, which 
Professor Coleman used to say was only inferior in importance to the dis- 
covery of the application of steam, and by whom it was introduced, is a 
matter very much of conjecture. It is mentioned that when the tomb of 
Childeric, King of Erance, who died in 481, was opened, there was within 
the coffin a piece of iron resembling a horseshoe, which had been pierced 
with four holes ; but this is no certain criterion to go by. The first authentic 
account on this subject is mentioned in the work of the Emperor Leo, in the 
ninth century, where it is distinctly said that the horses 5 shoes were fastened 
to the feet by nails driven into the hoofs ; and, again, in 1038, we are told, 
when Boniface Margrave of Tuscany went with his bride, his horses were 
shod with silver and nailed with the same metal. Horse shoeing was no 
doubt introduced into this country by William the Conqueror ; and the noble 
animal had then commenced his career of extensive usefulness for which his 
prowess and sagacity so well capacitate him. 
In advancing to the period of the middle ages, we cannot discover any 
improvement on the doctrines of Hippocrates in the medical art, although 
much was added, through the prejudices and superstitions of the times, 
which he would have discarded. During the early part of that period 
medical practice, such as it was, was in the hands of the monks and clerks, 
they alone being able to read Latin, the language in which the sciences were 
written. Up to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, England was supplied 
with physicians and surgeons from Erance and Italy, and their qualifications 
and mode of practice may be learned from the following quotation from a 
manuscript of this period in the Bibliotheque de 1’ Arsenal : — “In January it 
is not good to bleed, but you should take ginger as medicine. In March we 
should take rue as medicine, and drink sweet drinks ; we must not, how- 
xliii. 63 
