687 
MEMOIRS OF A VETERINARY SURGEON. 
THOUGHTS IN THE SICK BOX. 
By Thos. Greaves, M.R.C.V.S., Manchester. 
Disease, in all its varied and mysterious aspects, confronts 
the general practitioner at every turn, and not unfrequently 
startles and arrests his attention as he is following the even 
tenor of his way, by some case assuming a strange and more 
than ordinary character, thus demanding from him much 
serious reflection. He finds, also, that disease differs con¬ 
siderably in its features in one locality from what it does in 
another; and that this, too, is true of affections of the same 
organs. Again, he cannot fail to have observed that disease 
has differed in its various phases, whereby a change of its 
type has been engendered during the last twenty or thirty 
years, and that it requires now a very different method of 
treatment. The practitioner of the one epoch and the one 
locality has all his ideas disarranged; and when carefully 
watching and comparing these characteristics with each 
other, he finds himself perplexed, and his most favorite treat¬ 
ment unsuited. The experienced and observant practitioner 
will have become so perfectly familiarised with the various 
phases of the diseases which are most predominant in his 
own locality, his mind will have conceived the true principles 
of combating them, by leading him to adopt the most suc¬ 
cessful method of treatment, in short, to excel in certain 
particulars of practice, that I hold it to be, in all such cases, 
his duty to record the views he entertains and the method 
of treatment which the peculiar circumstances of his posi¬ 
tion may have suggested to him, and which he has thought 
out and followed up to a remarkably successful issue; as 
Pope says— 
“For the worst avarice is that of sense.’' 
I verily believe there is no mind so limited or unenlightened 
from which we may not gather some fruit well worthy to be 
garnered up in our memories, and I look upon it as a sad pity 
that there are those amongst us who may very well be called 
the silent practitioners, who lay up a store of learning and noble 
thought, who fill their brains with well-selected and useful 
facts, but for the want of registering them during their acqui¬ 
sition, and recording them for the benefit of their fellow prac- 
