22 
HISTORY OF VETERINARY SCIENCE. 
these diseases, attacked in their generating sources, became re¬ 
stricted in their ravages. 
The annals of time chronicle with a sort of wonderment the suc¬ 
cesses achieved over the entire surface of the earth by pupils sent 
forth from our schools ; and soon did their reputation run so high, 
that they were found inadequate to the demand made on them, 
insomuch, indeed, that in order to supply the wants of the local¬ 
ities, so importunate for the benefits conferred by the new science, 
the schools were forced to withdraw some of their young adepts 
from their studies, in order to disperse them over the country before 
they had received complete initiation. 
In this way, and in a few years, became developed, through a 
happy experiment, the practicability of the scheme conceived by 
Bourgelat. 
First Organization of Veterinary Schools. 
While the first pupils sent out from the schools were ^actively 
employed in propagating the principles they had therein imbibed, 
the schools, on their part, laboured with a perseverance equal to 
the obstacles they had to surmount to establish veterinary science 
upon a solid and permanent basis. It was a difficult work, re¬ 
quiring for its accomplishment nothing less than the genius of their 
founder. 
That we may have a conception of the difficulties besetting 
this undertaking, we must return to the period when Bourgelat 
first attempted to put his scheme into execution. At that 
time almost every thing was to be created. The anatomy of do¬ 
mestic animals, barring that of the horse, was yet unknown. 
Their physiology had no existence. 
The history of the diseases of horses, such as were the traditions 
of it handed down by the farriers of the by-gone age, amounted to 
no more than a vast chaos, in which the few truisms observation 
had elicited became eclipsed by the innumerable errors with 
which they were intermingled. 
The writings of those celebrated hippiatrists, the two Lafosses, 
contemporaries of Bourgelat, had but commenced to dissipate this 
chaos. 
The pathology of other animals had not even been sketched. 
The materia medica was but an incongruous jumble of the most 
unaccountable formulae, in which substances the most dissimilar 
and the most opposite in their properties found themselves asso¬ 
ciated under no other laws than the caprice or the beliefs of their 
inventors. 
On the modus operandi of such medicaments there existed but 
hypotheses or dreams. 
