642 REVIEW — field’s veterinary records. 
worth £47,000; and Mr. Field, senior, we should imagine, could not 
have left behind him any thing very considerably short of double 
that sum. 1 
John Field’s heart and soul was in his profession. Though from 
his mildness and amenity of manners, he appeared by nature by 
no means cut out for the hard work, and rough work, and cross 
work, of veterinary private practice, yet with such zeal and de- 
votion did he throw himself into it, that from the beginning he 
commanded success, and in the end fully obtained it. “ Actively 
engaged as he was,” says his brother, “ in the management of an 
extensive veterinary practice, he still would snatch minutes for 
recording any act or incident worthy of note; and but too often 
would rob himself of portions of that rest both his body and 
mind at the close of day so much needed, that he might reflect 
and enlarge upon any notes or casual remarks he had made in 
the course of his diurnal round of practice.” With the exception 
of half a dozen days’ hunting in the winter season, taken at times 
when his avocations allowed, and a short run-away excursion fora 
week or two’s change of air in the season when town was empty, 
John Field was never out of his business. His motto, as was 
that of his father, was, 
“ Nihil sine labore;” 
and faithfully and truly he acted up to it; for from six o’clock in 
the morning until ten at night he was to be found occupied in his 
professional duties. 
Eulogy of the man has led us away from our present object — 
the review of his posthumous work, or rather of a work compiled 
by his brother, out of such materials — papers, cases, notes, &c. 
&c. as he left behind him ; and they must have been pretty 
voluminous, since we find it stated in the Preface, that the fifty 
or more cases published, constitute “ not above a tithe of the 
whole.” The work commences with a paper on pleurisy, which 
we remember being read in 1828 before the Veterinary Medical 
Society. And, unless our memory have failed us, a warm and 
interesting debate took place on the occasion between John Field 
and Messrs. Goodwin, Henderson, Sewell, Youatt, and others. 
John Field contending that the character of the respiration and 
pulse, and the pain evinced by pressure on the sides, expressed by 
shrinking, and the utterance of a peculiar groan or grunt, followed 
by convulsive twitchings of the panniculus carnosus, were diag- 
nostics between pleurisy and pneumonia ; others maintaining the 
doctrines propounded at the time by Coleman, that cases of 
pure or simple pleurisy were rare, and that when they did occur 
it was in practice difficult or impossible to distinguish them. 
John Field was the first, publicly, to call in question the cor- 
