YORKSHIRE VETERINARY MEDICAL SOCIETY. 
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circumstances; we are too apt to ascribe an exaggerated and mys¬ 
tical significance to medicine. Whatever may be the particular line 
of treatment for disease, the influence of that treatment on the 
disease itself is less than the practitioner is apt to think. The 
great majority of diseases tend to get well of themselves, if only 
the delicate operations of nature are allowed full play. Treatment 
cannot change their nature, cannot expel them at once; cannot 
quench, materially shorten, or prolong their existence; in fact, I 
am inclined to the opinion that no medicine of itself ever did cure 
a disease (any more than splints and bandages can set broken 
bones) ; they may stimulate nature to quicker and more effective 
action or the reverse. When we contemplate the abominable adul¬ 
terations, and vile combinations of drugs, and call them medicines, 
we find they often destroy health and produce disease. Can we con¬ 
ceive a greater exaggeration than the homceopathist’s millionth 
part of a grain curing a malignant disease ? We strain all our 
faculties to the utmost, and call art and science to our aid in acquir¬ 
ing knowledge, and we thus use it when we have got it; we plough 
the ocean and girdle the earth with our ships, and sink a thousand 
human lives annually in deep sea graves to bring to our help drugs 
from other climes to cure disease, and we use them thus when we 
have got them. The thoughtful practitioner, with nearly a com¬ 
plete knowledge of the natural changes through which the disease 
passes from its beginning to its end, knows with tolerable preci¬ 
sion how far he can assist nature in her efforts to overcome it. 
Depend upon it, our intelligent employers believe it is our duty to 
know and to apply general principles as well as to know and apply 
medicine. Every veterinary writer of eminence lays it down as a 
rule that it is as much the practitioner’s bounden duty to bring his 
knowledge to bear in preventing the entrance or development of 
malignant diseases as in the arresting and curing them. Blaine 
says, “ There is, however, one point of medical treatment which is 
perhaps of even more importance than the cure of disease, viz. 
that of prophylaxis; this is of the very greatest importance.” I 
consider that when we are learning this lesson we are studying the 
highest truths in science. 
Glanders, farcy, and influenza in their various forms may be con¬ 
sidered the chief epizootics and enzootics to which the horse is 
liable. Influenza assumes several distinct aspects, differing in many 
essential particulars from each other; thus at one period we have a 
run of cases in which the leading characteristic is extreme nervous 
debility and prostration following immediately on the attack. 
This form of malady may continue for six or twelve months, and 
then subside without any evident or apparent reason, as though the 
cause had expended itself; we may be for years free from any 
disease partaking of an epizootic character, then all at once we 
have a number of cases with symptoms very different from the 
former, but still coming under the denomination of influenza; these 
cases may have a great tendency to oedema in the eyelids, closed eyes, 
with the anterior chamber containing lymph; the extremities much 
