382 
TWENTY-SEVENTH ANNUAL MEETING 
we have, numbers and value considered, the healthiest live stock population in 
the world. 
This being the fountain head from which the nation’s live stock supplies are 
to be drawn, the freedom of this area from serious diseases has an inestimable 
value from a monetary and sanitary standpoint, and directly influences the 
health and wealth of the nation. 
To no one can these questions prove of more direct interest than to our pro¬ 
fession, and especially to your society which, as now constituted, is largely made 
up of veterinarians representing that part of the country which consumes a large 
part of our live stock products. 
There must be a strong reciprocal interest between the older and better or¬ 
ganized profession of the East, and the younger and now numerically equal 
body of Western veterinarians. Although the growth of our profession through¬ 
out the country has been rapid, almost beyond belief, you are now for the first 
time in the midst of the most phenomenal part of the entire body which, prac¬ 
tically the creation of the past decade, has within ten years increased by nearly 
or quite 1500 per cent., a growth heretofore unequalled in any profession in any 
land at any age. 
This young, rapidly grown, and to some extent poorly equipped veterinary 
profession must in the future be to a great extent the guardian of the health and 
worth of this vast animal population, among which widespread and fatal dis¬ 
ease would mean financial ruin to those engaged in breeding and rearing live 
stock, would cripple one of our important sources of national wealth, and 
through those diseases communicable from animal to man, or those which ren¬ 
der the flesh of affected animals unfit for human food, would jeopardize the 
health of the whole people. 
Recently we were astonished and alarmed to find that a serious outbreak of 
pleuro-pneumonia existed in this city, from which great numbers of live cattle 
are shipped not only to all parts of the nation, but to many foreign countries. 
As this insidious and destructive disease could not be tolerated here, the State at 
once took measures to suppress and eradicate it, and the nation in due regard 
to its interests relaxed for a time its work with other infected areas of impor¬ 
tance, and heartily joined the State in the prompt and now apparently effectual 
eradication of the disease at this peculiarly vulnerable point. 
So when, in 1887, equine syphilis was reported as existing to a serious ex¬ 
tent for the first time in any English speaking country, in one of our principal 
horse-breeding centers from which we annually export large numbers of valu¬ 
able breeding animals to every part of the nation, there was a demand and 
necessity that it be controlled and extirpated, and as a result it has not been seen 
or heard from since in that section. 
In this region during the past few years the cattle have suffered more ex¬ 
tensively from actinomycosis than perhaps in any other country, and the State 
Board of Live Stock Commissioners of Illinois having recently taken the stand 
that the flesh of animals so affected is unfit for and dangerous as human food, 
we will soon witness in our courts one of the hardest fought legal battles in the 
history of veterinary sanitary science, one which will probably be quoted in the 
future as a precedent in dealing with this disease. 
