Young James Herriot

by John Lewis-Stempel

  His parents must have believed that their efforts had been worth it. As always he had been a model pupil, and was marked ‘Ex[cellent]’ in Progress, Diligence and Conduct.

  His report card also clearly noted Alf’s reason for leaving.

  ‘Gone to Veterinary College.’

  ALL THINGS UNWISE AND WONDERFUL

  ‘Keep the animal’s bowels open and trust to God.’

  Lecturer, Glasgow Veterinary College

  THE PROFESSION OF veterinary surgeon may not be the world’s oldest, but the first domesticators of the dog, cow and horse undoubtedly had sages who took some form of medical care of their fur-coated charges, if only to pick out thorns from paws and stones from hooves. The practice of veterinary medicine was documented throughout the Ancient World: Chinese records from 4000 BC note the use of herbs for the healing of livestock; the Egyptian Papyri of Kahun (1900 BC) contain excerpts of a textbook detailing animal anatomy and diseases; a century later the Indians had veterinary hospitals; circa 1750 BC the legal Code of King Hammurabi of Mesopotamia listed a scale of fees for treatment of asses and oxen; both Hippocrates and Aristotle in Ancient Greece wrote about the treatments of sick animals; Urlagaldinna in Mesopotamia made a deliberate study of animal healing in about 300 BC, leading some to claim him as ‘The World’s First Veterinary Surgeon’.

  But it was under the Romans that the practice of veterinary medicine became commonplace. After all, the stocks-in-trade of the Romans were farming and warring, and both required animals. The Latin for ‘animal doctor’ was veterinarius, as patented by Columella, who wrote 12 volumes on agriculture and animal husbandry circa AD 42–68. (His treatment for scab in sheep was olive oil.) Prescriptions by Roman wise men like Columella and Cato would be used in farmyards until medieval times.

  Veterinary medicine, though, has mainly evolved from the treatment of the occupant of the Roman stable, not farmyard. In Ancient Rome the farrier was the most important animal healer; the all-conquering Roman Army required vast numbers of horses, and to ensure their battle-readiness, the farrier not only shod equii but maintained their health by following equine welfare codes. The glory that was Roman veterinary science was crowned by the publication of Vegetius’ Books of the Veterinary Art in AD 450.

  When the Western Roman Empire fell to the barbarians in 476, veterinary medicine entered a Dark Age. Although the countryside of Europe swarmed with self-proclaimed animal healers, from ‘cow-leeches’ (who tended sheep as well as bovines) to ‘hog-gelders’, the standard of their practice was epitomized by a medieval cure for constipation in oxen:

  A lively trout … was taken from the adjoining stream, and committed to the gullet of the patient, under the assurance that it would soon work its way through all impediments, and speedy relief be afforded.

  Neither the ox nor the fish survived. But no matter because, ultimately, survivals of beasts, like humans, was a matter for God. If the cow-leech or God failed, spells, astrology and charms were invoked.

  The most fortunate beasts in medieval times were those left untreated, because their peers were purged, bled, fired – or stuffed with trout – before dying. What useful knowledge did survive the Dark Ages, from effective herbs to observations on animal behaviour, was in the hands of apprenticeship-serving farriers, or ‘marshals’ as they were known in the time of chivalry.

  It took more than a thousand years to pass from Vegetius’ Veterinary Art to the next significant landmark in veterinary science. In 1598 Anatomia Del Cavallo (‘The Anatomy of the Horse’) by the late Bolognese aristocrat Carlo Ruini left the printers, with startlingly detailed and accurate woodcuts of equine anatomy. A few years later, in 1610, Markham’s Master-Peece, or, What doth a Horse-man lacke by Englishman Gervase Markham, appeared, providing hundreds of cures for illnesses both ‘physicall and chirugicall’, including descriptions of medications ‘which of mine owne knowledge I know to be certaine and most approved’.

  Markham’s book is typical in what was wrong – and right – with veterinary medicine at the time. A former soldier, the first person to import an Arabian horse into England, the champion of improved horse-breeding, Markham was neither fool nor fraudster. With 50 years’ experience in the ‘Horse-leech-craft’, he could with some accuracy detect what was wrong with an animal by observation – from its gait, its poise, its dung.

  Where Markham’s knowledge failed him was in the workings of an animal’s body, which he held, like centuries of farriers and marshals before him, to be determined by ethereal, spirit-like ‘humours’ and ‘temperaments’.

  Markham’s book was a fixture in the library of the world’s first veterinary school, which was founded in Lyons, France, in 1762 by M. Claude Bourgelat, director of the city’s Academie Royale d’Equitation. Bourgelat was an Enlightenment rationalist who believed that medicine should be based on observation and experimentation. He was also an ecuyer, a master of horses, who ensured that the syllabus of the ecole veterinaire concentrated heavily on equine matters. The students Bourgelat sought for his enterprise were ‘ordinary farriers’, and the only requirement for admission to the new school was the ability to read and write, evidence of baptism and a certificate of good conduct. There was no lower age limit; in 1762, an 11-year-old child was in the same class as a 30-year-old man.

  The horse would dominate the teaching of veterinary science until the 1930s, when Alf Wight was at Glasgow Veterinary College, for reasons both good and bad.

  The horse was the most valuable animal in both town and countryside, so worth spending money on when ill. And the horse was ubiquitous, the principal method of transport and locomotion in civilian and military life. Shetland ponies worked in coal pits, mules pulled barges, Clevelands pulled stagecoaches, Norfolks were between the traces of ‘cabs’, Highlands were under pack, thoroughbreds carried post boys, Dales ponies carried shepherds, Chapman ponies carried commercial representatives (‘chapmen’) – the horse was man’s second best friend. Down on the farm, the increasing sophistication of agricultural machinery – epitomized by Jethro Tull’s seed drill – saw the horse replace the ox because the horse was faster and did not require a tea break to chew the cud.

  The other reason that the horse dominated the curriculum of veterinary colleges was snobbery. Working with horses was bad enough, but working with any other form of animal was beyond the pale.

  When M. Charles Vial de Sainbel, a junior professor at Lyons, journeyed across the Channel with a plan for ‘An Institution to Cultivate and teach Veterinary Medicine’ in Britain, he made sure to locate it on high ground because marshy ground terrain ‘exhales very unwholesome and putrid vapours’. This was in 1791 near St. Pancras Church, Camden, London. With due account for the translator’s difficulty in translating Sainbel’s rapid French – his command of English is best described as ‘fractured’ – there is no miscomprehending Sainbel’s belief in the age-old explanation that evil ‘humours’ caused diseases. ‘Animals are more frequently attacked by epizootic, endemic and contagious diseases than the human species,’ he wrote, ‘because we are protected from these casualties by our houses, clothing and manner of living.’

  Sainbel was already something of a celebrity in England, having performed the post-mortem on Eclipse, the undefeated thoroughbred champion racehorse (‘Eclipse first and the rest nowhere’ as the era’s racing pundits declaimed) in 1789. And so when M. Sainbel opened the door of the London Veterinary College, no fewer than 14 students signed up. The London Veterinary College offered a three-year course, after which successful students received a diploma describing the holder as ‘qualified to practise the Veterinary Art’ (no science yet). Subjects studied were: Anatomy, Physiology, Conformation and External Diseases in Year One; Surgery, Materia Medica and Medical Botany in Year Two; Pathology, Epizootic Diseases, Hospital Practice and Shoeing in Year Three. As a good disciple of M. Bourgelat, Sainbel made sure to put the horse at the top of the curriculum.

  In an attempt to keep the riff-raff out of the profes
sion, Sainbel laid down strict rules of behaviour. All resident pupils had to attend a place of worship; entry and exit were to be by the gate and not over the walls; and the porter was not to allow ‘either drinking or gaming’ by students in his lodge.

  One of the sponsors of M. Sainbel’s college was the far-thinking and influential Odiham Agricultural Society. They had a vested interest: diseases down on the farm were running rife in the eighteenth century. Something had to be done. Between 1711 and 1769, 10 million cattle in Europe had died of rinderpest. Unfortunately, the eighteenth-century veterinary profession was only interested in horses. A boost for the college – and the death knell for the old-style of farriery as horse-doctoring – came about in the year 1796, when the Committee of General Officers of the Army reported that, due to the heavy loss of horses caused by ‘the total ignorance of those who have at present the medical care of them’, it was of the opinion that the veterinary college afforded the ‘greater improvement’ in equine care.

  To this end:

  A person properly educated and having received a certificate from the medical committee of the Veterinary College shall be attached to each regiment having the name of Veterinary Surgeon, that the appointment is by warrant for not less than seven years, and that the Veterinary Surgeon shall have the same pay as a Quarter Master of Cavalry viz. 5s 6d per diem.

  It was the first official use of the phrase ‘veterinary surgeon’ in Britain, and the first graduate of the London Veterinary School to be commissioned into the army as a veterinary surgeon was John Shipp. He joined the 11th Light Dragoons on 25 June 1796 – the date now recognized as the Foundation Day of what subsequently became the Royal Army Veterinary Corps (RAVC). Those who have served in the RAVC include a certain Brian Sinclair (the real-life model for ‘Tristan Farnon’ in James Herriot’s books), a captain in the RAVC in the Second World War.

  Little in the syllabus of the London school would have been of use to John Shipp, but especially not to his horse. In order to increase revenues, the London course was shortened to three months, so more students (and their fees) might pass through the mill, and it was determined that a tavern was a suitable location for exams for graduation – which were oral. On taking over the reins of the college, the new principal, Edward Coleman, issued ‘Instructions for the use of Farriers attached to the British Cavalry and the Honourable Board of Ordnance’, which included the following treatment for ‘staggers’, the erratic gait caused (usually) by low magnesium in the blood:

  The horse should lose at least four quarts of blood, and repeated every four hours during the first twelve … The top of the head should be blistered (the hair being first cut close), one ounce and half of the laxative powder … should be given immediately, or even two ounces if the horse be large. The hair should be cut off from the hoof to the fetlock joints, and boiling water poured on the part; this should be repeated twice in the day. Clysters [enemas] of warm water and salt should be given every two hours (one pound of salt to five quarts of water). If the horse do not purge in thirty-six hours after the first powder has been given, repeat the dose, as before.

  In addition, two rowels – leather patches with a central hole, pushed under the skin through an incision, to allow drainage of ‘humours’ – were to be placed under the horse’s belly.

  Inside, the first veterinary colleges were glorified forges. James Castley saw William Dick, the founder of the Edinburgh vet school, lecture in the 1830s, but the scene would pass for Glasgow veterinary college at its establishment in 1863:

  One could wish to see Mr. Dick’s lecture-room look somewhat less like the appendage of a forge; but then he never has to lecture to ‘empty benches’.

  You may fancy to yourself a room of no very great dimensions in an old and apparently long untenanted house in Clyde Street. You enter it from the street door, and are immediately struck with the delightful confusion which seems to reign within.

  Skeletons of all descriptions, ‘from a child’s shoe to a jack boot’ – from a horse to an ape, not ranged in ‘regular order all of a row’, but standing higglety pigglety, their ranks having been broken by the professor’s table, and their heads looking in all directions, as if thrown together by chance.

  Over the professor’s ‘devoted head’ is seen suspended a portion of inflated and injected intestine, with its mesenteric expansion dangling in the air, something like a lure for flies; whilst all around the room, and especially in the corners, are heaped together vast quantities of diseased bones, and other preparations, seemingly without order, and without arrangement.

  Here we see no numbered specimens – no classification of morbid anatomy – no description book – all of which would tend to give the collection a pretty effect. Yet the lecturer has not only sufficient, but abundance for his purpose: his table is always covered with choice preparations.

  That portion of the house which is set apart for the audience … is fitted up with rough deal planks, set upon as rough props; the seats rising tier above tier, until your head touches the top of a very dark coloured ceiling.

  Not long after Castley saw Dick in his veterinary school, the humble cow forced itself upon the reluctant attention of the horse-preoccupied veterinary profession. It took a disaster to do it. In 1839, an article appeared in The Veterinarian by Mr Hill, veterinary surgeon of Islington Green, warning of a disease attacking cows in London dairies. The clinical signs were ‘inflammation and vesication’ of the mouth and ‘a continual catching up and shaking of one or other of the hind-legs’. People initially called the disease ‘the vesicular epizootic’ or ‘malignant epidemic murrain’, before settling on ‘foot-and-mouth disease’. It ripped through the country, and a despairing Royal Agricultural Society of England agreed to subsidize a ‘Pathological Chair of Cattle’ at £200 per annum at the London school. The job advertisement required a person ‘of some education – of more talent – of long experience in cattle practice, not past middle of life, and all his faculties unimpaired’. Twenty-nine-year-old James Beart Simonds, the first incumbent of the chair in Cattle Pathology, had all the attributes. He carried out a crucial transmission experiment. He wiped a handful of hay over the face of an infected animal, then fed the hay to a healthy cow – in which the disease appeared: ipso facto, the disease could be spread by contact between beasts. Simonds’ experiment also showed that diseases in farmyard animals could be controlled by culling or movement restrictions, even if they could not be cured.

  The calls on Simonds’ expertise came thick and fast, but two cases, 20 years apart, were landmarks in veterinary history. In 1847, a sheep farmer in Datchet invited Simonds to view ‘a peculiar eruptive disease’ in his sheep. Simonds, on visiting the farm, diagnosed sheep pox, and traced the outbreak to Merinos imported from Saxony. At Simonds’ behest, the government eventually passed an act of parliament in 1848 ‘to prevent the Introduction [to Britain] of contagious or infectious Disorders among Sheep, Cattle, horses and other animals’. And in 1865 a Mrs Nichols called Simonds to her dairy in Islington, London, where large numbers of cattle were dying. Simonds quickly diagnosed cattle plague, the first outbreak in Britain for nearly a century. From personal experience on the Continent, Simonds knew that treatment was useless, and again recommended, in the absence of a known cure, a ‘stamping-out’ policy, the restriction of movement and the cull of infected beasts. His drastic recommendations found no favour with the cattle trade or a government given to laissez faire. The veterinary profession was sent to sit in the corner. The Archbishop of Canterbury prayed for help from the Almighty: ‘We acknowledge our transgressions, which worthily deserve thy chastisement … stay, we pray Thee, this plague … shield our homes from its ravages. Amen.’ Only after 400,000 cattle had died did the country heed Simonds’ advice, and in February 1866 the Cattle Plague Prevention Act was rushed through Parliament. Cases went from 18,000 a week to eight a week in nine months. The veterinary profession was the saviour of the nation.

  Or, at least, no longer the na
tion’s pariah. The vet’s rise up the ladder in public favour was helped by a flood of Victorian-era inventions and discoveries that enabled the veterinarian to treat animals more effectively, from the stethoscope (1816) to the hypodermic syringe (1845) and Pasteur’s confirmation of artificial immunity (1881).

  The British had also begun their obsession with furry animals that is the head-shaking wonder of the world. Despite, or even because of, the fact more people lived in the city, a fascination with animals grew exponentially during the Victorian century. Visiting zoological gardens, bird-watching and butterfly-collecting all became popular pastimes. As did the keeping of pets. The Veterinarian published its first article on cat diseases in 1841. And so began the irresistible rise of the family pet to dominance of the twenty-first century vet’s caseload.

  An appreciation of the wonders of Nature went hand-in-glove with a dislike of cruelty to animals. Between 1800 and 1835, 11 bills against animal cruelty were introduced into the House of Commons, and set up in their wash were the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824 (later the RSPCA) and the Scottish Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1839, both of which worked especially hard to improve the lot of horses, including installing drinking troughs and checking the condition of pit ponies. Horses, though, would still be worked to death: in Victorian Glasgow a horse pulling an omnibus could expect to work for just four years before being turned into cat or dog meat.