134 
MR. YOUATT S INTRODUCTORY LECTURE 
situation and habits, and by many absurd practices, and by too 
frequent and disgraceful brutality, he has entailed numerous 
diseases, and a premature death. 
The practice of the veterinarian must be founded on the same 
principles with that of the human surgeon ; and his mode of edu¬ 
cation ought to be the same. An accurate knowledge of the 
anatomical structure of his patients is as necessary to the one as 
the other. The veterinary surgeon has, however, not one patient 
only, the mechanism of whose frame, and the healthy function of 
whose organs, he must study; he has many—the horse, the ox, the 
sheep, the swine, the dog*. Shall we descend lower in the scale 
of being ? Why not ^ Have not even inferior animals the sus¬ 
ceptibility of corporal sufferance ? If we exact their services, 
and, when our interest requires it, their lives, is it not a duty 
from which no moral consideration, no false pride can relieve 
us, to make their lives as happy as we are able 1 The veterinary 
surgeon has many patients: their structure different; the func¬ 
tions of their various organs differently discharged ; the same dis¬ 
eases differing in character in each of them; the treatment still 
more different; and, in each, diseases peculiar to that animal; 
and, in consequence of this, there is required from him, and even 
more than from the human practitioner, great expense of time 
and study to fit him for the discharge of the duties of his pro¬ 
fession honourably towards his employer and reputably to 
himself. 
And, then, his patients are dumb. They cannot, it is true, 
impose upon him by false statements of symptoms; but they 
can relate no symptoms at all; and he is compelled to pay far 
closer attention than the human practitioner to the varying and 
too often bewildering indications of disease, and to exercise the 
greatest degree of tact and discrimination, such as diligent and 
anxious observation, and long experience, can alone supply, 
lest he should mistake the nature and character of the disease, 
and rob his employer and destroy his patient. In addition to 
this, his blunders are not, like some of the blunders of others, 
buried with his patient. There is a regular examination of every 
animal that dies under the veterinarian's hands; and if, as he 
may readily and pardonably do with his few advantages, he has 
mistaken the nature or seat of disease, no mercy is shewn to¬ 
wards him, but he is made to suffer in reputation, in mind, and 
in pocket too. 
He has a great deal more to do than the human surgeon has 
with the influence of food on the production and modification of 
disease—the mysterious agency of the atmosphere, and the 
effect of exercise and labour on the frame generally, and, par- 
