The large majority of grooms and coachmen who are in charge of horses, never like to see a veterinary surgeon within their stable walls, except when they want to shift on his shoulders the responsibility of the approaching death of a sick horse which they have vainly tried to cure by means of their own nostrums. The cause of this impatience to receive professional advice has long been a mystery to me. Formerly, I was accustomed to put it down to fear lest the attendance of the veterinarian might curtail the amount of "perks" to be obtained from bills for medicine run up by the stableman. But since I have found that this antagonism is shared by French, German, Italian, and even Russian stable autocrats, whose all round 10 per cent. is in no danger of interference, I have attributed it to the jealousy of ignorance, especially as I have been told by grooms and coachmen of many nationalities, that they know quite as much about the treatment of sick horses as any veterinary surgeon. As they have not gone through the course of study required for obtaining the diploma of the R.C.V.S.; they are manifestly incapable of forming an accurate opinion on the value of such instruction. Besides, if the medical and surgical attainments of veterinary surgeons were not superior to those of grooms and coachmen, who are required to possess no educational qualification of any kind, why should it be necessary, as it undoubtedly is, for veterinary students to devote years of hard theoretical and practical study in order to pass their examinations? I feel that I am specially well qualified to form a sound opinion on this subject; for after having spent a large portion of my life in owning, training and riding horses, and in teaching my grooms their stable duties, I became convinced from experience that I could never hope to obtain a thorough knowledge of horses, either sick or well, without studying them scientifically. I accordingly entered the New Veterinary College, Edinburgh, and took out my diploma in due course. During the three years I remained there, I certainly saw a hundred times more practice than I had witnessed in all the previous years I had lived among horses. My subsequent experience proves to me that the time and money which I spent at that college was the best investment I have ever made.

The antagonism which stablemen feel towards veterinary surgeons is a survival of a recent past, in which anyone was at liberty to call himself a veterinary surgeon, and the course of study at the veterinary colleges was of a trivial character. Empiricism not having been leavened with science in those days, veterinary surgeons valued themselves more on the possession of secret recipes than on their capacity to reason out the causes of disease. No wonder then - say 60 years ago - that grooms and coachmen considered that they knew how to treat the ailments of horses quite as well as the local shoeing smith who called himself a veterinary surgeon, or as the man who had passed through the London College or that presided over by the late Professor Dick. Since then, the veterinary profession has obtained its charter, and has proved itself worthy of it by the enormous progress it has made in learning. Time, however, is needed to remove the taint of previous ignorance, and the prejudice which fathers have handed down to their sons in the stable. In olden times, veterinary surgeons taught grooms to value medicine rather than advice, and even at the present day, there are some who encourage quackery by the use of pink drinks, blue lotions, and similar articles pour epater les pentes. No wonder that grooms, knowing that they can get similar drugs from so-called veterinary chemists, often imagine that they can treat the diseases of horses as well as qualified men. The proper attitude of a veterinary surgeon towards a stud groom or coachman in charge, is that of a doctor towards a hospital nurse, who receives directions free from mystery. To make the parallel complete, men in charge of horses should have special instruction, so that they might be able to intelligently carry out the course of treatment laid down by the veterinarian. Until head stablemen are educated up to this point, we cannot hope for much improvement in the care of sick horses.

I believe that those veterinary surgeons who object to disclose to laymen the procedure they adopt in the treatment of a case, are generally actuated by the idea that if they were to do so, they would be taking the bread out of their own mouths on future occasions, by making the laymen as wise as themselves. Here again comes in the fallacy that medicine is all important in the treatment of disease; the fact being that the great merit in a physician is his ability to find what is the matter with the patient. The more employers and stablemen recognise the fact that advice is of far greater value than medicine, the more will they esteem the services of veterinary surgeons and the better will their horses thrive. A wise owner will have his horses periodically inspected by a veterinary surgeon, without whose orders no medicine of any kind should be given in the stable. He may then rest assured that the less medicine his animals receive, the more efficiently are they looked after by their professional attendant; for prevention is better than cure.