HISTORY OF VETERINARY SCIENCE. 
21 
Foundation of the first Veterinary School in 1762. 
In France it was, in the year 1762, that was founded, under 
the ordinance of Bourgelat, the first school specially destined to the 
dissemination of the principles of veterinary science and art. 
This event, considerable as is its importance, remains all but un¬ 
noticed by historians; they register the date of it without com¬ 
mentary. Nevertheless, it deserves a high place in the annals of 
our country, seeing what a deep and durable civilizing influence it 
has exercised over the minds of the agricultural classes. 
At the time when the finance minister, Bertin, obtained from 
Louis XV the edict to found a veterinary school in France, our 
country people were living in the deepest ignorance. The bright 
lights spread abroad by the encyclopedists had but yet enlightened 
the heads of French society; the lower members remained im¬ 
penetrable. 
Without the means of acquiring the merest elements of vete¬ 
rinary knowledge, our simple farmers had preserved in all their 
purity the erroneous traditions of former ages. 
The slaves of a gross fatalism, they saw in the disorders of their 
cattle nought but a scourge inflicted through the anger of some 
hidden powers which their hallucinated imagination represented 
to them as ever active in doing them harm ; and, as a consequence 
of such singular doctrines, to conjurations and exorcisms, and ex¬ 
piations of all kinds, it was that they had recourse to arrest the 
progress of the evil which spread among them desolation and ruin. 
Such was the state of knowledge in most parts of the country 
at the time when veterinary schools were instituted. 
Their first care was to summon around them, and receive 
within their sanctuary, the sons of blacksmiths, who by right of 
inheritance possessed the privilege of preserving and putting into 
practice the traditions of the fanciful therapeutics of their fathers. 
Initiated into reasoning, into sound doctrines and intelligent 
chirurgical practice, these young men, metamorphosed under the 
study of science, all elementary as it yet was, spread themselves 
over the country ; as ardent to combat and dissipate error, as they 
would have been to have propagated it had they remained in their 
native ignorance. 
The benefits resulting from these new missionaries were not 
tardy in coming to light. Armed with a right method of obser¬ 
vation, they were not long in discerning, in the midst of crowds of 
hurtful influences, operations on the animal orgasm, though ignorant 
of the simplest laws of hygiene, those whose preponderating action 
gave rise to epizootic and contagious diseases; until one by one 
