208 NORTH OF ENGLAND VETERINARY MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. 
After being fairly established in practice veterinary surgeons, 
from the nature of their business, which often keeps them on duty 
from early morning till late at night, are apt to get into easy 
habits and thereby occasionally neglect to give the cases they are 
called to treat so close attention as they deserve, consequently 
they often miss the instructions nature’s healer could give of 
illness, and also thwart the assistance it would so freely tend to 
promote a cure. Physicians of all ranks are but helpers to this 
healer, and the more closely they study and humour its modes of 
action the more successful in practice will they be. Like many 
eyes in one head all should, as it were, be gathering knowledge to 
one centre and for one end. Associations like ours, when work¬ 
ing well, do this on a small scale; important objects are through 
them exhibited to their members, who, in viewing them from 
different points, and submitting the appearances they present, 
may enable all to deduce for the common good a something of 
which they knew not before. In this way meetings of this kind 
became useful, more especially when all the members freely speak 
their minds and make no reserve of what they know. We have 
all experienced the benefit of an occasional hour’s talk with a 
professional brother, when points of difficulty were freely dis¬ 
cussed. Were the meetings of all medical associations always 
conducted in a similar spirit their benefits would be incalculable. 
Did our profession act more in the spirit “ Union is strength,” 
and seek to concentrate the united powers of its members on the 
difficulties that surround it, many of the in would quickly vanish ; 
better prospects would open up before them, our science would 
be placed upon a higher platform, while we should rise in social 
rank, being more fully instructed, more highly respected, and 
much better paid. (Applause.) 
The Chairman then called on Mr. Nicl M. Barron to read his 
paper on the “ Diseases of the Udder in Cows.” 
The essayist first went briefly over the process of secretion and 
excretion, and then briefly touched on the anatomy and physio¬ 
logy of the mammary glands, after which he described the diseases 
to which these organs are liable, finishing the group with mammitis, 
which is perhaps the most important. 
TREATMENT OF MAMMITIS. 
Most veterinary writers agree in recommending bleeding in this 
disease as one of the first and principal means of cure, repetition 
of it as advantageous, and the giving at the very outset of the 
disease large doses of purgative medicine. My experience is 
decidedly against these recommendations, and I am somewhat 
chary of bleeding in any stage of this complaint. When the 
