[Introductory lecture] : Glasgow Veterinary College.

  • Clark, F. W., Sheriff.
Date:
[between 1800 and 1899]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: [Introductory lecture] : Glasgow Veterinary College. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

    8/16 (page 6)
    Sollysel, and this was translated into English or rather Scotch by Sir William Hope. From that time numerous treatises appear all over Europe, all having for their object to rescue the veterinary art from obscurity, and bring it into the form of a science. Several of these writers, such as Gibson, Bracken, La Fosse, and Osmer, were medical men of eminence. They did much to free the veterinary art from blind empiricism. Yet their practice and iDrescriptions, though vast improvements on those of their day, are tinged with cruelties and puerilities at which an ordinary strapper would now stand amazed. At this we need not be aston- ished. Those were the days when medicine and surgery, even as applied to the human patient, were of such a kind that we do not marvel that so few were cured, but that any one escaped alive from the hands of the learned faculty. At length, as ordinary medicine began to improve, veterinary science followed in its wake. In Italy some veterinary colleges, of which little is known, were in existence in the beginning of last century. But it was not till 1761 that the first veterinary college was founded in France, at Lyons, under the well-known Bourgelat. This was followed by the now celebrated school of Alfort, founded in 1766. In 1792 the Veterinary College of London was founded, Charles Vial de Sainbel and Delabere Blaine being the first profes- sors ; and the work of the latter, which has passed through numerous editions, is still highly prized. Since then Veterinary Colleges have been formed in every European capital and in many of the principal cities. In Scotland, Professor Dick founded a Veterinary School at Edinburgh, and in Glasgow our worthy Principal has succeeded in establishing this College, which has already become an honour to the kingdom, and for which a great future is, I doubt not, reserved. (Loud applause.) Veterinary medicine has now reached a position to which even in the most bril- liant days of Greece and Home it certainly never attained. It is no longer a mere art; it has become a science, and a science of vast range and vast importance. It has passed out of the stage of empiricism. Its professors are no longer content to do or prescribe what they have seen done or prescribed before. They wish to know the reasons of the practice they adopt; they wish to interrogate nature by experiment and observation; they seek to collect and arrange facts over the widest areas and by every variety of means, and they labour to evolve from the materials so