enough for a medical man, went dead against this opinion, saying that ordinary shoeing did no harm whatever—it was the ‘pounding’ of the foot on the road which produced disease in the foot. He apparently only owned one horse at a time, as he says ‘my horse,’ and he was not able to make him last long, for he says that he was continually obliged to be replacing him, because every one of them got laminitis, or what is sometimes called either founder or else fever in the feet—all three terms being used to signify the same disease. When questioned as to how he had his horses shod, he stated, ‘I tell my blacksmiths, when they put a shoe on, to heat it red hot.’ This, by itself, would quite account for founder; and it appears strange that a medical man should have been in such a red-hot hurry to expound such views, unless it was that, as a medical man, he thought to carry influence. However, if this was what he counted upon, he was singularly in error; for Mr. Bowditch, a practical farmer, one of those irrepressible Yankees who will persist in thinking for themselves, rose and said that formerly he had had the same trouble as the doctor with his horses, but that he had found out for himself that the only way to avoid founder was ‘to shoe the horse properly, that is putting on as little iron as possible; let it cover the toe of the foot, and let the frog come down so that it will take the jar of the foot.’ When asked, ‘Do you have your shoes put on red hot, as the doctor does?’ he answered that he made his blacksmith ‘put the shoe on only as hot
