Young James Herriot by John Lewis-Stempel

Author:John Lewis-Stempel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446416228
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

PART TWO

THE WORST VETERINARY COLLEGE IN THE WORLD

‘A momentous day! This morning, I started in the Veterinary College. Crowd of new fellows waiting outside; seasoned veterans swaggering in; stamping of feet in lecture room; big thrill when I went into a room full of dead animals; there’s some queer fish here. Those were my first impressions.’

Alf Wight, diary, Tuesday 26 September 1933

THE GLASGOW VETERINARY College was conceived in the city’s Sauchiehall Lane in 1862 when James McCall FRCVS started giving formal classes in veterinary medicine for Edinburgh students living locally. The student roll numbered ten. McCall had formerly been Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the Edinburgh school, but had profoundly disagreed with William Dick on what to do about the Rinderpest cattle plague sweeping lowland Scotland. Dick believed that Rinderpest could be treated, telling the Cattle Plague Commissioners, ‘I commence … by the administration of mild purgatives, followed by stimulants, and after that, tonics … where the disease has been a little more advanced … a dose of oil … lime water and tincture of opium.’ He added that, with a change in the weather, the disease would disappear.

McCall, meanwhile, believed the only valid option was the destruction of infected cattle. To literally distance himself from Dick’s views (which, as McCall divined, were fallacious), McCall moved to Glasgow where, in between acting as surgeon to the area’s railway contractors, he was unable to resist founding his own veterinary school. Unlike Dick, McCall allied himself to the RCVS; McCall’s school and ‘The Dick’ were ardent, and sometimes tetchy, rivals henceforth. No mean politician, McCall found friends in useful places, including Joseph Lister, who held the chair of surgery at Glasgow University and who reputedly conducted some of his early experiments in antiseptic surgery in McCall’s premises.

In 1863, with a Royal Warrant in his hands, McCall moved the now formally established Glasgow Veterinary College to premises at 397 Parliamentary Road, off Buchanan Street. Here McCall lectured for three hours a day, sometimes by evening gaslight, and the facilities included a surgery, shoeing forge and rudimentary hospital. The first two vets received their qualifications in April 1865, with the examining body being the Highland and Agricultural Society.

With the job description of veterinary surgeon increasingly extended to include the duties of inspector of meat and milk, the demand for vets grew and the school thrived, with student numbers reaching over fifty. The college attracted a number of distinguished teachers, notably Professor George Armatage. Dissatisfied with the ‘grovelling mediocrity’ of the veterinary profession, Armatage was an early enthusiast of the longer training of students, together with rigorous examinations. He also believed that entry into the schools needed to be by proper selection procedures, telling the first veterinary congress in Britain, held in the Freemason’s Tavern, London in May 1867, ‘I hold it to be indispensable that the veterinary surgeon should always be the gentleman … by education and training.’ Within a decade, Armatage’s desires had become realized, and the RCVS had organized preliminary and practical examinations for students, with the latter being done at McCall’s own farm.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.