The American Reformed Cattle Doctor: Containing the necessary information for preserving the health and curing the diseases of oxen, cows, sheep, and swine, with a great variety of original recipes, and valuable information in reference to farm and dairy managementDadd, George H.
Science
The American Reformed Cattle Doctor: Containing the necessary information for preserving the health and curing the diseases of oxen, cows, sheep, and swine, with a great variety of original recipes, and valuable information in reference to farm and dairy management
Dadd, George H.
Veterinary medicine
The author has been, for several years, engaged in a warfare against the
use of the lancet in the treatment of the various diseases of animals.
When this warfare was first commenced, the prospect was poor indeed. The
lancet was the great anti-phlogistic of the allopathic school; it had
powerful, talented, and uncompromising advocates, who had been
accustomed to resort to it on all occasions, from the early settlement
of America up to that period. The great mass had followed in the
footsteps of their predecessors, supposing them to be infallible. Men
and animals were bled; rivers of blood have been drawn from their
systems; yet they often got well, and men looked upon the lancet as one
of the blessings of the age, when, in fact, it is the greatest curse
that ever afflicted this country: it has produced greater losses to
owners of domestic animals than did ever pestilence or disease. A few
philanthropic practitioners have, from time to time, in other countries,
as well as in this, labored during their life, and on their death-bed,
to convince the world of the destructive tendency of blood-letting in
human practice; but none that we know of ever had the moral courage to
wage a general warfare against the practice in the veterinary
department, until we commenced it. We have met with great success, and
have given the blood-letting gentry who practise it at the present day
("just to please their employers or to make out a case") a partial
quietus: in a few more years, unless they abandon their false theories,
their occupation, notwithstanding their pretensions to cure _secundum
artem_, will, like Othello's, be "gone." But we are not writing for
doctors. Our business is with the farmers--the lords of creation. The
former are mere lords of pukes and purges; they, like the farmers, have
the materials, however, to mould themselves into men of common sense;
but the fact is, they are hide-bound; they want a national sweat, to rid
their systems, especially their upper works, of the theories of Sydenham
and Paracelsus, which have shipwrecked many thousands of the medical
profession. They shut their eyes to the results of medical reform, and
cling, with all their soul, and with all their might, worthy a better
cause, to a system that "always was false."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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