Bracy Clark

Bracy Clark (1771 – 16 December 1860) was an English veterinary surgeon specialising in the horse.

Biography

He was the youngest son of John and Hannah Clark of Chipping Norton,[1] and was educated at the Quaker school of Thomas Huntley at Burford in Oxfordshire.[2] He was one of the first students enrolled at the newly established Veterinary College of London,[3] and studied under Charles Benoît Vial de Sainbel.[4] Sainbel died of unidentified fever in 1793 (later thought to be glanders); Clark disregarded the instructions to stay clear of the body, to produce a death mask.[5]

Clark made a continental tour around 1797, but wartime conditions meant he wasn't able to visit France. He was then in a London veterinary practice with William Moorcroft and Edmund Bond.[6]

Plate of genus Oestrus, from a 1797 paper by Bracy Clark in the Transactions of the Linnean Society.[7]

Clark specialised in conditions of horses' hooves, and in 1806 patented a new pattern horse shoe;[8] he was then in practice at Giltspur Street, London.[9] He wrote extensively about the hoof in a series of pamphlets and books. In his work on the hoof Clark concluded that great damage was done by the shoeing practices of the time, but his views were ridiculed by his contemporaries.[10] In those opinions he was following, however, the teaching of Edward Coleman, Sainbel's successor.[11] His writings on laminitis and bridles have been noted by modern writers on barefoot horses[12][13] and the bitless bridle.[14]

An advertisement for his books,[15] published in 1835, records that he was a Fellow of the Linnean Society, Member of the Institut de France and Ecole de Médicine, and of the Royal Societies of Berlin, Frankfort, Copenhagen, and Stuttgart. He was made an Honorary Member of the Natural History Society of New York in 1817.[16] He lived at 7, Taunton Place, Regent's Park. Carl August Dohrn, investigating the fate of part of the Linnean Collection that passed to James Edward Smith, described Clark in 1851 as the last survivor of Smith's friends.[17]

Works

Illustrations from Bracy Clark, A Treatise on the Bits of Horses Chalinologia (1835).

He was listed as a contributor to Rees's Cyclopædia. Articles attributed to him include "Anatomy of the Horse", "Bits", "Bleeding", "Blindness" etc.[18]

Notes

  1. James Hurnard, James Hurnard a memoir, chiefly autobiographical, with selections from his poems (1883), p. 9; archive.org.
  2. Thomas Hodgkin, Obituary of Dr. Prichard, Journal of the Ethnological Society of London (1848-1856), Vol. 2, (1850), pp. 182-207. Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3014122
  3. "Veterinary Science". Encyclopædia Britannica. 28 (11th ed.). 1911. p. 4.
  4. Warden, Linda. "Vial de Sainbel, Charles Benoît". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/24473. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  5. Lise Wilkinson (19 March 1992). Animals and Disease: An Introduction to the History of Comparative Medicine. Cambridge University Press. p. 116. ISBN 978-0-521-37573-3. Retrieved 24 April 2012.
  6. Theodore Andrea Cook, Eclipse & O'Kelly: being a complete history so far as is known of that celebrated English thoroughbred Eclipse (1764-1789), of his breeder the Duke of Cumberland & of his subsequent owners William Wildman, Dennis O'Kelly & Andrew O'Kelly now for the first time set forth from the original authorities & family memoranda (1907), p. 139; archive.org.
  7. Linnean Society Of London (August 2009). Transactions of the Linnean Society. Books LLC. p. 289. ISBN 978-0-217-64999-5. Retrieved 24 April 2012.
  8. No 2913 of 26 March 1806
  9. Philosophical Magazine. Taylor & Francis. 1806. p. 191. Retrieved 24 April 2012.
  10. "Equine hall of fame". Retrieved 23 April 2012.
  11. s:Horse shoes and horse shoeing: their origin, history, uses, and abuses/Chapter XII
  12. "A Tribute to Bracy Clark: It's the 200th Anniversary of Natural Hoofcare". Retrieved 20 April 2012.
  13. "Hoof trimming in horses". Retrieved 20 April 2012.
  14. "Metal-free horse" (PDF). Retrieved 20 April 2012.
  15. Multiple copies of the leaflet are held at the Sterling Library, Yale University. See WorldCat for details
  16. Charter, constitution, and by-laws of the Lyceum of Natural History in the City of New-York. Incorporated April 20, 1818 (1837), p. 24; archive.org.
  17. (German) Stettiner entomologische Zeitung vol. 12 (1851), p. 131; archive.org.
  18. Joseph Smith (1863). A descriptive catalogue of Friends' books: or books written by members of the Society of Friends, commonly called Quakers, from their first rise to the present time: interspersed with critical remarks and occasional biographical notices ... Joseph Smith. pp. 417–22. Retrieved 24 April 2012.

References

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