LETTERS TO A STUDENT. 
577 
specified ; but that was because I had no intention, and I have 
none yet, of saying any thing about these matters. The obscu¬ 
rity, the error, and the impertinence I cannot explain ; and as 
for the insinuations about loose screws, I can only say, that I do 
not feel particularly grateful to any man who makes them. I 
trust I may think it far from friendly. 
The cases I mentioned did not all occur in my own practice. 
I was sometimes called, not to give a draught, but to treat that 
which a draught had produced. Nevertheless, if it be important 
that I should be regarded as the author of all the evil, let it be so. 
I am content to rest my defence upon the impossibility of giving 
a couple of pungent or disagreeable draughts to each of two 
hundred horses without producing bronchitis in seven or eight of 
them. I affirm that no man can do this, take what care he will. 
If there be any body to say that he has done it; that he has 
given four hundred draughts to horses, and never produced bron¬ 
chitis, he will do the profession a service to let us know how he 
has managed it. Or if there be any one who even thinks, and 
says that he can do it, he may let us hear him say so before the 
public. There can be no reasonable objections to that. Though 
he only imagines what he could do, he must have cause for his 
imaginations; and perchance his opinion, though a mere opinion, 
may do us some good. 
But to go about from stable to stable, and from person to 
person industriously lamenting the ignorance and rashness of 
some people, and bewailing the disrespect which they bring upon 
themselves and their brethren, is a paltry trick, worthy only of a 
skulking coward and a practised liar. If my last letter exhibits 
any thing deserving special reproof, the proper method is to write 
a reply, and publish it in the same Journal: and, as the reply 
would be easily made, requiring no ability, no truth, no virtue of 
any kind, I entertain hopes that some such thing may yet come 
to light. But if it should not, I dare say the disappointment 
will not break my heart. Affected superiority is still at liberty 
to sneer as knowingly as it can, and canting hypocrisy to whisper 
its hints for the good of the public; only when people laugh at 
them and despise them, they need not say that is my fault. 
Now for the treatment of accidental bronchitis. You are not 
to suppose that your patient is in no danger because he does not 
cough and quicken his breathing after a draught; for he may 
shew no sign of the accident until next day. But when a consi¬ 
derable quantity enters the trachea, the horse generally coughs 
immediately, and sometimes a little runs from his nostrils when¬ 
ever you let down his head. Upon listening at the point of the 
sternum you hear the fluid gurgling. 
