SUGGESTIONS FOR ITS IMPROVEMENT. 
243 
disease itself — the modus operandi of remedial agents — the prac- 
ticability of all the greater operations — and the numberless 
animals which have been sacrificed, tortured, oftentimes without 
just reason, to attain these ends, and, by deduction, these various 
results applied to and for the benefit of man — it is but fair that the 
practitioners who have for their immediate pursuit the study of the 
structure, the diseases, and the best method of ameliorating such 
diseases among those very animals that have contributed so much 
towards the knowledge of the human branch of the art of medicine 
and surgery, should receive that attention to their views and 
researches which justly belongs to them. 
Let us look at the advantages which the veterinarian possesses 
for obtaining correct knowledge of morbid action, not as existing 
in one animal only, but in so many, different in constitution, in 
habits, and even in structure, yet all subject to the same laws of 
life, and, with all these modifications, still regulated by the same 
unerring laws both of health and disease : in fact, a series of 
links in the chain of which man forms the first and largest. 
The facilities which are at his constant command to examine the 
post-mortem appearances of all cases that have a fatal termina- 
tion, as also the opportunities, from the frequent occurrence of 
death from other causes, of noting the changes that may have 
been produced during active disease from which the animal has 
recovered, and b} r these means verifying the correctness of the 
diagnostic symptoms, as also of the propriety of the remedial 
means employed ; and to these may be added another important 
point, that is, these examinations can be, and generally are, made 
within so short a period after death, that no change of any import- 
ance can take place in any component part of the animal body; while 
the reverse is the case as regards man ; for, in addition to the diffi- 
culty of obtaining the opportunity, it is, when obtained, so long de- 
ferred that decomposition has set in, and this frequently to so great 
an extent, that it is often impossible to decide with correctness 
what is the result of disease and what arises from changes in- 
duced by decomposition*. 
Farther : the facilities for testing remedial agents, which cannot 
by any possibility be employed upon man without being previously 
tested ; for were a human practitioner to test upon man the effects 
of arsenic, bichloride of mercury, sulphate of copper, nux vomica — 
indeed, any of the poisons — he, in the event of any untoward effect, 
would lie under, and justly too, the imputation of murder. What 
human practitioner could have carried out upon man the effects of 
* This is no fanciful remark, for I have actually seen it occur that the 
changes of decomposition have been mistaken for morbid changes produced 
during life. 
