396 
TWENTY-SEVENTH ANNUAL MEETING 
ates are unable to write a prescription properly, and even show a deplorable ignor¬ 
ance of the meaning of the signs and symbols used in prescription-writing. He 
proposes to remedy this by adding an examination in pharmacy and prescription¬ 
writing to the matriculation examination of the schools. I do not agree to this, 
as I think that the course of study in the veterinary schools themselves should 
deal with and remedy the defect. 
In an article entitled “ Veterinary Education in America,” which appeared 
in the Amekioan Veterinary Review for January, 1890, Dr. Tait Butler, of 
this committee, has said much which I have left unsaid, and I can only add a 
fervent amen! to what he writes. 
In addition to educating the student, we must pay a little attention to the 
advancement of the practitioner. Because a young man has obtained his degree 
as a veterinarian is no reason for selling his library, and as a general rule he 
does not know any more the day after he graduates than be did the day before. 
A diploma is simply a certificate of having gone through a certain course 
of study, and successfully passed a required examination; it merely marks 
a narrow landing on the long stairway of life; and if a man’s future is to be a 
success in the greatest measure, he must continue to be a diligent student and 
careful observer. Every veterinary surgeon must keep abreast of the medical 
advances of the times; he should take both of the American veterinary journals, 
one of the English veterinary magazines, and if he can read French or German he 
should take a French or German veterinary magazine—or both, as the case may 
be. In addition to this he ought to subscribe to a first class medical periodical, in 
order to know what is being done in the sister profession. He should not only 
subscribe to these journals, but he should read them carefully and intelligently 
after they come. 
Because your teachers or professors told you a thing was so when you were 
a student, fifteen or twenty years ago, do not think it is so to-day, or that your 
instructor would say it was, if he has kept up with the times; for in many ways 
medicine has made great advances during the past decade or two, and most 
writers on pathological subjects are ready to acknowledge that many things 
which they wrote a few years ago are wrong to-day. 
The great discoveries of Pasteur, Koch and other investigators have revealed 
new truths as to the etiology and character of many diseases, which even if sus¬ 
pected by some, remained unproven until the modem methods of studying bac¬ 
terial maladies were introduced. The progress made in the application of anti¬ 
septic and aseptic methods in surgery is also of quite recent origin, together with 
the knowledge of the parts played by different germs in the various suppurative 
and septic processes. 
Our veterinary text-books are way behind the times on all these recent dis¬ 
coveries, and will have to be rewritten in the near future, or their places will have 
to be taken by more modern works. 
The Chairman of this committee last year, in his annual report, spoke of the 
tendency in medical schools to substitute recitations from standard text-books 
for the didactic lecture—the students studying up a chapter or two in various 
text-books daily, and then having recitations on what they had read. I am of the 
opinion, however, that the didactic lecture should remain a feature of the course 
