American Veterinary Review. 
MAY, 1896. 
EDITORIAL. 
The Profession in Ieeinois. —One State after another has 
« 
been added to the list of those securing legislative enactments 
for the protection of the public and the legitimate practitioners 
from the imposition of pretenders and frauds, who not only be¬ 
guile the people of their money without adequate return, but do 
the honest members of the profession a great deal of harm by 
destroying confidence in and producing contempt for the profes¬ 
sion as a whole. It is, therefore, of the most vital importance 
that each State should have enacted laws which shall limit 
this class of empirics and charlatans as much as possible—check¬ 
ing their propagation, at least—to the end of obtaining in time 
their utter extinction. It is not the competition of such men 
from a dollars-and-cents point of view that the veterinarian need 
fear so much, as the degradation and contempt which they heap 
upon the profession by their acts of rascality and their exhibi¬ 
tions of ignorance, producing in the minds of those who should 
be believers in the dignity and nobility of a learned science dis¬ 
trust of the whole body without making the distinction of qual¬ 
ification. Then if it be recognized that such legislation is 
essential to the life, the progress, and the perpetuation of the 
veterinary profession, the next thing to be sure of is that such 
legislation be secured. Every State which acknowledges the 
existence of a profession of veterinary medicine has her asso¬ 
ciation, and these associations have performed the duties of 
drawing the veterinarians together for purposes of education, 
fellowship and mutual protection. They are, then, the proper 
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