In Memoriam: Dr. Lloyd Davis, Pioneer of Veterinary Clinical Pharmacology

Dr. Lloyd Davis passed away on Saturday, September 4. He was a pioneer in the field of veterinary clinical pharmacology. He was a founding fellow of the American Academy of Veterinary Pharmacology and Therapeutics and served as the organization’s first president. The AAVPT established an award and lecture in his honor.

In 1972 he and colleagues published a seminal paper that demonstrated for the first time that dose regimens cannot be extrapolated from one species to another, which had been a common practice before then.

Dr. Davis earned his veterinary degree from The Ohio State University in 1959 and his PhD degree in pharmacology from the University of Missouri in 1963. He served on the faculties at Missouri, Ohio State, the University of Nairobi, and Colorado State before joining Illinois in 1978.

In 2007, Dr. Davis was one of 20 notable faculty members featured in a series of street banners that celebrated the diversity of scholarship and achievement at the Urbana campus.

On this occasion, he remarked, “Pharmacology has been well represented at the college over the years… Pharmacology provides the scientific basis for rational drug therapy, and the specialty of clinical pharmacology established the safety and efficacy of drug usage by means of the clinical trial. We constantly must guard against the return of quackery in veterinary medicine by following scientific principles in the selection of drugs for the treatment of our domesticated animals.”