VETERINARY MEDICAL LEGISLATION. 
403 
ORIGINAL ARTICLES. 
VETERINARY MEDICAL LEGISLATION, 
A Paper read before the N. Y. State Veterinary Society by R. W. Finlay, V.S. 
Mr. Chairman and Gentleman : 
I wish to invite your attention this evening to a few points 
worthy of our consideration regarding the proposed bill to be 
presented to the Legislature this coining session, in behalf of 
the preservation of the health and welfare of the people at large 
by checking disease in its incipiency instead of, “ as is the custom 
practised,” waiting for epidemics or epizootics to exhibit their 
fatal grip on communities. That the step contemplated is much 
needed and a move in the right direction against evils that exist, 
whose magnitude is not fully appreciated by the people or their 
representatives at Albany, constituting Health Boards, is partly 
due to the fact that in many cases the position is at best a political 
one, receiving a very limited supply of time and money sufficient 
to properly investigate matters of so vast import, and partly be¬ 
cause this very lack of the essential requisite limits the amount 
of concentrated knowledge obtainable. That the subject under 
notice has long agitated the minds of the foremost thinkers in the 
veterinary profession may be amply proved by an examination of 
our medical literature. 
The educated veterinarian is a sanitarian in the literal sense 
of the word, protecting the people by efforts directed towards 
checking the diseases among the lower orders of animals that are 
communicable to the human family. In the discharge of this 
part of his professional duties, he has been in the past singled out 
by empiricism, whose shafts have been hurled principally through 
men trying to fill the position of the true veterinarian, but whose 
knowledge of disease was as vague, and whose attempts at the 
relief of suffering were as unsatisfactory as those of the ancients 
as compared with the present brilliant successes in surgery, med¬ 
icine and chemistry. These assaults, directed through jealousy 
and bred in ignorance, against a profession struggling through its 
