158 
W. Y. WILLIAMS. 
the dissecting room. It matters not whether one school teaches 
its students as much in nine months as another does in eleven 
months or no, the fact remains that the time is shamefully and 
indisputably too short, and that when a college faculty certifies to 
the public that such students are fully qualified to practice veter¬ 
inary medicine and surgery, the members of that faculty assert 
that which they themselves do not fully believe. 
We believe that public sentiment now demands an advance in 
the requirements of these “old” schools, and that they should be 
assisted with substantial financial and moral support by the gov¬ 
ernment and by stock owners, as a joint protection of our live 
stock and professional interests. With well endowed and finan¬ 
cially independent colleges, we want the most modern appliances 
and conveniences, good material for clinical study and really live 
professors and lecturers—not old fossils like one we know, who 
has apparently never advanced a peg since graduation, and to-day 
practically teaches his classes that the proper time to puncture a 
horse to relieve tympany is after death, so as to reduce the danger 
of traumatic peritonitis to a minimum; and if there should be a 
corner in linseed oil, opium and turpentine, we can’t imagine 
what he would do for a colicky horse, unless he would wait for 
the corner to break. 
The only lecturer on veterinary sciences salaried by the State 
of Illinois is said to reside, possibly sometimes moves, and is sus¬ 
pected of having a being, forty miles distant from where, a few 
months ago, there existed a serious outbreak of maladie du coit, 
the first well authenticated outbreak, so far as we are aware, of 
this malady in any English speaking country, and yet that pro¬ 
fessor failed, so far as we can learn, to show sufficient enterprise 
to travel forty miles to see this rare and interesting disease, but 
continues lecturing upon the subject, following erroneous descrip¬ 
tions and ideas of English writers, who had never seen the disease, 
which he could have corrected by actual observation; but the best 
marked cases are now destroyed and a golden opportunity for pro¬ 
fessional investigation has passed by unavailed of. It is said, 
also, that this same professor, although invited to do so, failed to 
see for himself or induce his students to see the recent serious 
outbreak of pleuro-pneumonia in Chicago. 
