Changing times

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The editorial in the issue of The Veterinary Record published 100 years ago today was titled  ‘Some changes in our profession’.  In it the author links the noticeable decline in equine veterinary work to the development of ‘motor traction’ but also notes that:

“new channels of work are opening up to us in compensation…The two chief substitutes are canine and feline practice and preventive medicine.”

The editorial then describes the ‘immense’ expansion of work with dogs and cats in the last thirty years, how almost every practice now treats these animals and how the knowledge of canine and feline  diseases and treatments  has grown.

Looking at the statistics on horse ownership in the decade prior to 1912 we can see just how much impact the growth in motorised transportation had.  In 1904 there was an estimated 145,000 horses in London, many of which were owned by the London General Omnibus Company for use in its fleet of horse drawn buses.  By 1911 the LGOC was selling off horses at a rate of 100 a week and ran its last horse bus in September of that year.

Given that scale of change it was inevitable that veterinary surgeons had to look for other sources of income and the increase in the keeping of dogs, in particular, as companion animals offered one such opportunity.  However the interest in the care of small animals began 50 or so years earlier and  had been increasingly reflected in the literature from the mid 1800s.

Frontispiece from Mayhew's Dogs: their management

Frontispiece from Mayhew’s Dogs: their management

In 1847 Edward Mayhew wrote two articles in The Veterinarian relating to dogs and cats, then in the following year in an article he disclosed that canine work formed the bulk of his practice.  His book Dogs: their management, published in 1854, could perhaps be seen as the start of a new focus for the profession.

Further books followed eg John Woodroffe Hill’s The management and diseases of the dog (1878) and John Henry Steel’s A treatise on the diseases of the dog (1888).  The first specific text on small animal surgery was Frederick Hobday’s Canine and feline surgery (1900).

These changes were also reflected in the subjects of theses submitted for the award of RCVS Fellowship – from 1893-1911 there were 5 theses on small animals topics, between 1912-1931 the number almost trebled.

Moving forward nearly a 100 years statistics in the 2010 RCVS Survey of the veterinary profession show that 72% of the time of veterinary surgeons working in clinical practice is spent working with small animals.

 So the  1912 editorial was correct in its prediction that small animal practice would continue to increase and in its confident assertion that:

“we have become of real use to a section of the community very much larger than the horse-owning one and shall continue to be so.”

My lords, ladies and gentlemen…

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Tonight the RCVS President will welcome to the College a group of those who have helped it run smoothly over the last year. Invitees to the President’s Reception include examiners, those involved with the Practice Standards Scheme, members of the House of Lords and House of Commons, presidents of the veterinary and veterinary nursing associations and many others without whom the College could not perform its key functions.

It’s an annual social event that many look forward to, but looking back in the records we find that the first presidential social event happened on the 14 December 1854 (a year after the RCVS acquired its first permanent home) when William Field welcomed over 150 guests to a ‘converzasione’  in 10 Red Lion Square.

The Veterinarian* gives a full account of what appears to have been a grand affair.  The guests were from a wide variety of backgrounds including members of parliament, artists, fellows of the Royal Society, surgeons, physicians … and even a few vets!  Famous names included Sir Edwin Landseer, Michael Faraday, Edwin Lankester, and the Honorable Arthur Kinnaird

Many of the guests brought artefacts with them so that

“on the walls were hung many valuable paintings by Sir E. Landseer,  J. Ward, R.A. and others.”

And the tables were

“covered with microscopes, stereoscopes and photographic drawings.”

There were objects from the museum of the Royal Veterinary College, “including several of unusual occurrence, such as ossification of the brain, heart, lungs, liver, spleen, &c.”  And, in what would appear to be an early precursor of a poster presentation at a conference, “Mr James Turner suspended in the library tablets containing an account of some new ‘pathological facts’ connected with tetanus, as disclosed by the scalpel.”

Statues, ivory carvings and exotic plants from the Royal Botanic Gardens completed the scene.

So what was the point of having all these artefacts and people in one room?  It appears it was to stimulate discussion between the veterinary and medical professions.  The author of the piece gives a clue of its importance to the fledgling RCVS when he writes:

“Such associations cannot fail to promote the best interests of our profession …The free intercourse which…takes place between the members of it and the higher division of medical science…all tend to awaken thought, to stimulate further investigation, and to expand the mind…[and] a more intimate union of the two professions is thus effected.”

The event was so successful that it was repeated three months later… with different objects and different people.

These days the objects on the tables tend to be glasses of wine and canapés, but the opportunity to meet colleagues from across the profession, and from those organisations working closing with it, continues to be important.

*The Veterinarian 1 January 1855 pp 44-47