[BLANK_AUDIO].
My name's Andrew Gardiner and, with several of my colleagues, we're going to give
you an introduction to some aspects of
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.
We're hoping this background will help you to understand how
current day veterinary medicine got to be the way it is.
And where the discipline might go in the future.
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 turned out qualified vets.
That all really only began in the late 18th and early
19th centuries, so not really that long ago in historical terms.
Why did it begin then?
Well, what happened in the 18th century was a
period of history which historians refer to as the Enlightenment.
And the Enlightenment was a way of looking at the world, 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.
It really was one of the key moments in the history of human thought.
Collecting and comparing things was a major Enlightenment activity.
This is the period when all the great natural history museums were established.
And a subject that attracted particular attention was both a zoological.
And the medical one, and it
laid the foundations for modern veterinary education.
And that subject was comparative anatomy.
Comparative anatomy was as exciting and controversial in the
18th and 19th century as genomics is to us today.
It stretched the boundaries of what people understood about what it was to be human.
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 the development of the sciences of anatomy and pathology.
That took place in Edinburgh.
That scandal led to the passing of the
Anatomy Act in 1832, which made it possible for
doctors to legally and ethically obtain bodies for
dissection, so that knowledge and treatments could be improved.
It must have been an incredibly exciting time as new insights
into the body changed the way that people thought about disease.
Fast forwarding for a moment into the 20th century, we find
Edinburgh once more at the center of a major scientific advance.
Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be
cloned from an adult somatic, or body cell.
Was born on the fifth of July, 1996, at the Roslin Institute.
Sadly, Dolly had to be put to sleep on 14th February,
2003, because she was suffering from arthritis and progressive lung disease.
But her mounted body is still to be found
in the Royal Scottish Museum on Chamber Street in Edinburgh.
She's unarguably the most famous sheep in the world.
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 them.
And this is a discipline, which is called
comparative medicine or today sometimes knows 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 the advances in veterinary medicine can aid humans and vice versa.
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, the great stimuli for that was 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 led to the formation of veterinary schools.
So here's a few key dates in those early European veterinarian 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
its famous founder William Dick in section three of this MOOC.
The school is still known as the Royal
Dick School of Veterinary Studies for that reason.
But if formal veterinary training only
started 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 included farriers, shepherds, grooms, stockmen and others that
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 written records of veterinary treatment
are found in ancient documents from Egypt and India.
Fragments of the famous Kahun Papyri describing veterinary treatment in Egypt
were found in 1889 and are kept at University College London.
The first European text on veterinary medicine, Carlo
Ruini's 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, 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 as to 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 is that a
wide variety of people had, 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 make 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 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.
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.