248 
WALKER ON ADHESIVE PLASTER. 
have prevented, in great measure, that gentleman — who, for the 
mere lucre of gain, as also probably to render it less likely for him 
to have equals — admitting the improper, uneducated, and totally 
unfit men with which the profession was for so many years inun- 
dated. They were the only Examiners except the Teacher him- 
self; therefore it was in their power to have marked their sense 
of the nefarious proceeding, by the rejection of such as shewed 
themselves to be ignorami. 
Personally, I have many friends amongst the medical profes- 
sion, but it is not as a veterinary surgeon ; and it is this very 
intimacy which makes me feel the more acutely the position in 
which that profession stands, to which, in common with many 
others better qualified t{ian myself, I have devoted my life. 
The human medical profession cannot complain of our acting 
without precedent, for they themselves furnish us with strong ex- 
amples. The long-protracted contest between the physicians on 
the one hand and the surgeons on the other — one contesting for 
very existence, the other for supremacy — ending, as we well know, 
in the establishment of equality of rank. A similar contest is now 
actually going on between the pure physicians and surgeons on 
the one hand and the body of general practitioners on the opposite, 
and which can only end — as all such contests must — in the esta- 
blishment of equality of rights and of rank ; while I, for the body 
of my profession at large, only wish to contend for the rank of a 
secondary but INDEPENDENT body. Fourteen centuries since 
Yegetius well and succinctly expressed the true rank and import- 
ance of our art, — 
“ Ars veterinaria post medicinam secunda est.” 
April 1846. 
ON THE EFFICACY OF GLUE USED AS ADHESIVE 
PLASTER*. 
A LETTER FROM T. A. WALKER, ESQ., TO MR. PERCIVALL. 
Sir, — I n reading your Hippopathology , which afforded me much 
pleasure and instruction, I observed that, in page 76, you state it 
difficult to procure adhesion in wounds in horses from the want of 
any sufficient kind of sticking-plaster. I hope you will not think 
it intrusive if I state to you a method I have long pursued in such 
cases with perfect success. 
* It is now long since this letter was received. It has, indeed, from having 
been laid aside with other papers, been forgotten. It deserved better treat- 
ment.— P. 
