LETTER TO SIR ASTLEY COOPER. 453 
neiice^ may raise their heads upon a level with their cotemporary 
surgeons, on the score either of professional knowledge or private 
respectability. We have several gentlemen among us who are by 
education human as well as veterinary surgeons—members of 
the college in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, as well as of the more humble 
one at St. Pancras. We have one gentleman who was apprenticed 
to the late distinguished successor of John Hunter, Mr. Wilson, 
at a very high premium, and who, on account of his medical 
attainments, was taken by the hand by Mr. Brodie, and is now, 
for the same reason, associated with him and other eminent metro¬ 
politan surgeons. We have another, who studied two years at 
St. Thomas’s Hospital, who was a cotemporary pupil with Messrs. 
Key, Morgan, and Bransby Cooper, but who, because he has 
since he became a surgeon, with pretensions equal to any pos¬ 
sessed by those gentlemen, devoted his time to the study and prac¬ 
tice of the veterinary art, is not eligible as a veterinary examiner, 
whilst the very next election will probably bring into that situation 
one of those very persons, his three old cotemporary hospital 
pupils ! * If, Sir Astley, there is common reason or common j ustice 
in all this—if you will persist, in the face of such noonday con¬ 
viction, in proclaiming us as unfit to examine students in that art 
which is exclusively ours, because we alone possess the know¬ 
ledge to practise it, then you are not the man I take you to be, 
nor are you the man you formerly were. 
When I cast my eye. Sir Astley, over those paths by which 
you have, step by step, worked your arduous way to the pinnacle 
of fame and fortune—when I recollect what you were, and behold 
what you are, and then withdraw within myself for a moment to 
reflect on the means through which you have been enabled to arrive 
at so great an end, I can hardly dispose myself to think that it is 
you who have been mainly instrumental ” in heaping obstacles 
in the path of the humble but deserving veterinarian. You may 
well imagine, when I see so great and so good a man, as I have 
always regarded yourself to be, busy at such ignoble work as this, 
that my mind begins to misgive me, and I apprehend that I have 
been deceived, or (what I would be inexpressibly rejoiced to find 
was the case) that you have. I say, I should be exceedingly re¬ 
joiced at this, because I feel convinced that the bandage would 
no sooner be taken from your eyes, than reason would again en¬ 
lighten them, and prompt you to hasten to obtain us that redress 
which delusion had persuaded you until that moment was neither 
merited nor required. 
* I do not bring forward these two cases to the disparagement of many 
other equally, and perhaps more meritorious individuals in the profession; 
but because they in particular bear wcdl on this part of my argument. 
