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My name's Andrew Gardner, and with several of my colleagues,
we're going to give you an introduction to some aspects of the unique and
colorful history of veterinary medicine..
During the week we'll look at some key moments in veterinary medicine's
development.
We'll examine some rare documents and objects on animal medicine and
find out how these can help us understand current day practices.
We'll also look closely at how veterinary education developed in Edinburgh itself,
a city renowned for its medicine and anatomy.
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so where did it all begin?
I think the first thing to point out is that organized veterinary education
is really quite a new thing, at least in historical terms.
By organized veterinary education, I mean the arrangement of specialized schools and
colleges that turn out qualified vets.
That all really began in the late 18th and early 19th centuries,
not really that long ago in historical terms.
Why did it begin then?
Well, what happen in 18th century was a period
of history was which historian refer to as the enlightenment.
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And the enlightenment was a new way of looking at the world which emphasized
certain principles which hadn't really been used before.
Principles such as classification, order, and so on.
And in fact, the word science, was in some senses, invented in the enlightenment.
So during the 18th century, people began to look at people, and
other animals in different ways.
And this was the phase when veterinary medicine actually developed.
That really was one of the key moments in history of human thought.
Collecting and comparing things was a major enlightenment activity.
This is the period when all the great natural history museum were established.
And a subject that attracted in particular attention was both a zoological, and
a medical one.
And it laid the foundations for modern veterinary education.
And that subject was comparative anatomy.
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That of course,
all culminated in the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859.
And Darwin himself had begun medical studies in Edinburgh in 1825.
The famous body snatching stories and films about Burke and
Hare who dug up freshly buried corpses from the graveyards in Edinburgh.
To supply anatomy dissection rooms was a notorious aspect of a development of
the sciences of anatomy and pathology that took place in Edinburgh.
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So 18th century comparative anatomy and
21st century genomics are actually linked in quite interesting ways.
They're both concerned about humans and animals and the similarities and
differences between between them.
And this is a discipline which is called comparative medicine or
today sometimes known as one medicine.
And it really breaks down barriers between species which in some senses are quite
artificial.
To vets who treat so
many different animals, you can see that the human being is just another animal.
So that advances in veterinary medicine can aid humans and vice versa.
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Back in the 18th century, then, we had comparative anatomy and
the other side of the equation is agricultural improvement.
And when both these things came together,
we got the development of the European veterinary schools.
And one of the great stimuli for that is a very important disease that we'll be
talking about later on the week called rinderpest or cattle plague.
And it was the need to understand more about this disease,
the need to do something to bring it under control that really set things in motion.
Which lead to the formation of veterinary schools.
So here's a few key dates on those early European veterinary schools.
The first one was opened at Lyons in France in 1762.
In Britain, the two oldest vet schools were opened in London in 1791,
and then in Edinburgh in 1823.
And you'll hear much more about Edinburgh Veterinary School, and
it's famous founder William Dick in section three of this book.
The school is still known as the Royal Dick's School of Veterinarian Studies for
that reason.
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But a formal veterinary training started only 223 years ago.
What happened before?
Who looked after animals in all the centuries before 1762?
The answer to that is quite a wide variety of people.
These include furriers, shepherds, grooms, stockmen and
others who knew about animals and gained expertise in treating them.
And some of these people were very highly skilled.
And farriers in particular amassed a huge amount of knowledge and
expertise on animal treatment, especially horses.
And as you'll hear in session three,
the founder of the Edinburgh School was himself a farrier, as was his father.
Throughout the whole of history, in fact, people have treated animals.
Sometimes the same people treated both animals and humans.
And who knows? Maybe we'll return to that in the future.
But the earliest records of veterinary treatment
are found in ancient documents from Egypt and India.
Fragments of the famous Kahun Papyrus describing veterinary treatment in Egypt
were found in 1889 and are kept at University College, London.
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The first European text on veterinary
medicine [FOREIGN] Anatomy of the Horse was printed in 1598.
So what changed in the 18th century was that a new group of people emerged and
began to specialize in animal treatment.
They received a broadly similar education.
They began to talk to each other and communicate using books and journals.
And they began to collect together in what became a profession
that was exclusively aimed at treating animals.
The use of books and journals was crucial to the developing veterinary profession.
In fact, delving into journals such as the Veterinary Records, which is still
a leading publication today, gives us a glimpse of how the profession changed.
It certainly doesn't tell us everything about what life was like for
a 19th century veterinary surgeon.
No single historical source can do that.
But, it gives some clues through case reports,
correspondence pages, job adverts, and
editorials about how the emerging profession began to organize itself.
And define its role in society.
But the new professional veterinarians didn't have the field
entirely to themselves.
What had happened throughout history was that a wide variety of people had
treated animals.
They just didn't simply give up because a new group had come along.
What the new vets had to do was to demonstrate that their methods were
actually better.
That they were the more effective, and efficient animal healers.
And that certainly didn't happen overnight,
in fact it took rather a long time.
In Britain, it took us up to 1948 for the veterinary profession
to obtain an exclusive monopoly on the treatment of animal disease.
Up to that point, the middle of the 20th century,
there was really quite a large variety of people treating animals.
And they were legally entitled to do so.
The only thing that they couldn't do was to call themselves veterinary surgeons.
So they might call themselves an animal doctor or canine physician or whatever.
As long as they didn't use the term veterinary surgeon,
they could continue to treat animals.
That all changed after 1948 when it then became became illegal for
non-veterinarians to treat animals.
And if we look at other countries, you can see a similar kind of pattern emerging
that the profession works to establish itself and
then develops a professional monopoly.
Just like all other professions in order to provide the services to animals.
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So that's how we came to be where we are today in terms of
the workings of the profession.
What we're going to do in the next section is delve into the historical archives
ourselves.
And look at some objects and images and books that give us some sort of insight as
to what it was like to study to be a vet in the 18th and 19th centuries.
And what the profession actually did at that time.
Dr Jessie PatersonBSc (Hons) Agricultural Chemistry, PhD, PgDip
Kay AitchisonBSc Agriculture (Hons Animal Production Science)
Prof Susan RhindBVMS, PhD, FRCPath, PFHEA, MRCVS
Dr Gurå Therese BergkvistBSc Hons (Vet Sci), BVM&S, PhD, MRCVS
Rachel WhittingtonBVSC MRCVS
Dr Catriona BellBVetMed, PhD, PGCAP, MRCVS
Dr Andrew GardinerBVM&S, Cert SAS, MSc, PhD, MRCVS
