From Glanders to Genomics: Looking Back at a Century of Progress in Veterinary Medicine

by Dr. Ted Valli

Welcome to the year 2000! As the great 20th century philosopher and poet George Santayana wrote, “We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will become the past, and we must respect the past, remembering that once it was all that was humanly possible.” Thus, it is only fitting to capitalize on this auspicious beginning by taking a respectful look at where our profession and its education began. 

At the turn of the century, the horse was the primary means of transportation and the primary focus of veterinary practice and education. Veterinarians were, in that sense, the auto mechanics of the day. As a result of the advent of the automobile, 33 of the 45 veterinary schools in the United States had closed by 1930. My alma mater, the Ontario Veterinary College, lays claim to the title of oldest school in North America in continuous operation. In 1905, about half of all U.S. veterinarians were OVC graduates!

"Abortion, for instance, is a germ disease; the germ is found in the mother’s blood, afterbirth and bowels of the foetus, and such conditions can only be corrected by the hypodermic injection of such medicines as will destroy and eradicate  the germ and thus restore the animal to a healthy condition.

We make mention of this to illustrate that the treatment and prescriptions for these diseases are the subject of much scientific study, and cannot be successfully handled except by a man of much experience and practice."

— From the Introductory Chapter of Practical Home Veterinarian, 11th ed., by David Roberts, D.V.S., © 1912.

Chicago once boasted two veterinary schools, but both closed in 1920. The Chicago Veterinary College in 1889 graduated Dr. David Roberts, who succeeded his brother Evan as Wisconsin state veterinarian and whose book, Practical Home Veterinarian, I quote above to illustrate state-of-the-art veterinary care 80 years ago. This book covered everything from asthma to glanders to wind galls (enlargements of the synovial bursa). 

The early veterinary curriculum was a two-year program that devoted much time to anatomy. The Flexner Report of 1910, which established that human medical study should consist of two years of basic sciences followed by two of clinical experience, strongly influenced veterinary education. This report resulted in the elimination of poorer, two-year schools of both medicine and veterinary medicine. 

Veterinary medical education also took a page from human medicine in espousing that students should learn at the bedside, with physical contact with the patient. Sir William (1849-1919), a fellow Canadian who was one of the founders of Johns Hopkins University and one of the most influential physicians in history, championed this hands-on approach. Sir William, or “W. O.,” as he was called, was an early proponent of the belief that there is only one medicine, which can be applied to various species. At one time a professor of physiology in Montreal’s veterinary college, Sir William recommended that the veterinary faculty be called the “faculty of comparative medicine.” 

At the beginning of the 20th century, surgery, aided by such recent advances as radiographs, aseptic technique, and anesthesia, had a greater knowledge base and record of success than medicine. Medicine came to the fore after World War II. Remember, it was not till the 1880s that bacteria were first identified. Understanding of pathology grew rapidly, but medicine and an understanding of the specificity of drugs lagged behind. The development of sulfonamides in the late 1930s and penicillin in the early 1940s ushered in the era of specific therapy. Soon thereafter an expanded array of vaccines was added to the arsenal at our command in fighting disease.

After World War II, veterinary colleges entered a period of growth and sophistication. Animal disease control became more important, and we saw the eradication of tuberculosis, brucellosis, hog cholera, and other scourges of livestock. Very soon pseudorabies may join that list. 

In the 1960s veterinary specialty boards arose. Veterinarians entered areas never before imagined: laboratory animal medicine, exotic animal medicine, environmental toxicology, and comparative medical research, to name a few.

The latest medical revolution has been in information technology and genomics. With the aid of computers, it is now within our reach to decipher the genetic code, to write out the sequences of 3 billion chemical base pairs in human DNA. Our own Dr. Barbara Kitchell, heading the oncology team at the College, is working with the dog genome to see how normal and cancerous cells differ at the genetic level.

As we look back, we see that veterinary schools—particularly those at land-grant institutions—began shifting their attention from horses to food animals after World War I, and not until the 1950s did most veterinary schools acquire small animal facilities. We should note that these shifts in emphasis did not come about as a result of clairvoyant strategic planning by schools, but rather by pressure from animal-owning clientele. 

Will our teaching programs prove in time to be more visionary than those at the schools that went the way of the horse-drawn carriage? I see our teaching expanding at both the basic and applied frontiers of medicine. Our students must now understand disease and therapeutics at the molecular level to remain at the forefront of biomedical innovation. At the applied end we must advance our ability to identify and treat aberrant behavior in animals as is done by psychiatrists for humans. 

Some ideas are timeless. I leave you with two pieces of advice given to new veterinary graduates in 1935 but still applicable in the 21st century: “If you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything harmful” and “Bleeding always stops.”