THE TEACHING OF PRACTICAL SURGERY. 
869 
were educated in a veterinary school they apply the alleged 
more reputable title of veterinarian, but when the certificate of 
college education is defective, and what practical knowledge 
the man possesses has been acquired by his own unaided effort, 
or with the aid of a similarly uneducated graduate, the above 
differentiation between veterinarian and quack becomes badly 
strained, and suggests that we may have among us quacks with 
college diplomas, but since within a decade a prominent mem¬ 
ber was ignominiously expelled from the United States Medi¬ 
cal Association for stating that a large percentage of veterinar¬ 
ians in this country should feel honored by the appellation of 
“ horse doctor,” it is perhaps wise to not follow this line of 
thought farther. Nor is it just. The self-educated veterinarian 
deserves praise whether he has a diploma or not, and the uned¬ 
ucated practitioner is none the less pitiable or odicus by hav¬ 
ing a diploma. 
A certificate of graduation from a veterinary school should 
at the present day be logically regarded as including a practical 
knowledge of surgery, and the school which fails to impart it 
robs the student, insults modern education, and degrades veter¬ 
inary science. 
Teaching practical veterinary surgery offers serious obsta¬ 
cles, which under their environments may be insurmountable 
to some schools, but while this may enlist our sympathies it 
does not alter the duty of the school to the student, profession or 
public,. Neither need we apologetically say of the recent past, 
that the colleges did the best they knew or could afford. We 
face the present and future. We are rapidly pacing through 
an important transition period, from conjecture to knowledge, 
from empiricism to science, from theory to practice. 
Within ten years more the ignorant, uncouth, unclean quack 
will have disappeared, except as a rare curiosity. The ordi¬ 
nary non-progressive veterinarian of to-day will be the charlatan 
of 1910, and between him and the front rank of the profession 
will exist a wider gulf than he now pictures in lurid colors be¬ 
tween himself and the quack of to-day. 
