James Law, Teacher of Veterinary Medicine

Donald F. Smith, Cornell University

Posted May 5, 2014

The people who established successful veterinary colleges in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were visionary, resolute, self-reliant and bright. All were able to withstand great periods of uncertainty and unanticipated challenges.

Some of these pioneers were entrepreneurs and others were scholars. All were teachers. But for one man, James Law of Cornell, his many accomplishments in clinical medicine, epidemiology, and public health were accompanied by his passion to teach and mentor the next generation of veterinarians, veterinary scientists, and comparative pathologists. His principal goal, it seemed, was to have his legacy live through his students.

James Law’s story can be found in earlier postings at this site.1,2 A graduate of the Edinburgh Veterinary College, Law was one of the handful of founding faculty when Cornell began instruction in 1868. Throughout his 40-year-professional life at Cornell, Law’s students can be considered in several clusters, each cohort having an impact on animal health, and in some cases, a major impact on human health as well.

Though he was relatively young to have achieved faculty status, having graduated just 11 years earlier, he had availed himself of post graduate instruction in medicine (London) and veterinary medicine (Alfort and Lyons, France), as well as having taught veterinary medicine in both Edinburgh and London. Not only did he have a deep intellect, but he was a magnificent and prolific writer. He was also a builder, a person who saw what needed to be done, and did it.

When Cornell went for several years before filling the chair in agriculture with a suitable professor, Law stepped in to help fill the gap. This, along with his desire to have agricultural students develop an understanding of livestock health, represented a substantial portion of his teaching activities in the early days of the university.

Among the group of non-veterinary students whom Law taught were three who would become so distinguished as to affect the course of comparative medicine and veterinary science. Theobald Smith entered Cornell in 1877 and was granted a degree in natural science four years later. He then returned to his hometown of Albany for medical school and was awarded the MD two years later, before returning to Cornell for graduate work. During his subsequent career in Washington, he was the principal scientist behind the discovery of the organism that was named Salmonella, after Smith’s boss, Daniel Salmon. He later moved to Harvard and Princeton where his work distinguished him as the foremost comparative pathologist of the period. His legacy lives at New York City’s Rockefeller University where one of the primary buildings bears his name.

Cooper Curtice was a classmate of Smith (BS, 1877). He received his veterinary degree from the Columbia Veterinary College in New York City, and his MD in Washington. Like Smith, he worked for Daniel Salmon at the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) and also in Albany, New York, where he had an important role in developing techniques to eradicate tuberculosis. His greatest accomplishment was his elucidation of the life cycle of the tick that became important in the control of Texas fever in cattle.

Leonard Pearson, who was to become the third dean at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine, was another of Law’s most accomplished undergraduate students, receiving his BS in Agriculture before moving to Philadelphia where he was awarded the VMD in 1890.

James Law’s rigorous standards for admission to the veterinary degree program, and his insistence that the veterinary curriculum be a full four years of study, proved to be a major roadblock for most aspiring veterinarians. Indeed, and as noted above, neither Curtice nor Pearson stayed at Cornell for their BVM (Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine, the educational equivalent of the DVM), choosing instead the shortened curricula at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania. Hundreds more aspiring veterinarians went north to the Ontario Veterinary College in Toronto, where they could enter veterinary college without a high school diploma and become veterinarians after only two semesters, consisting of six months each, of instruction.

Daniel Elmer Salmon

(©Cornell University)

Only four men received their veterinary degrees from Cornell in the first decades of Law’s program. The most famous of these was Daniel Salmon, who entered Cornell when instruction began in 1868. As noted in a story written here last fall,3 Salmon’s 22-year tenure as head of the BAI left such an indelible legacy on both animal and public health that he is generally considered one of the most important veterinarians of the 19th century. A concise summary of his accomplishments was written by Greg Cima in his series on great veterinarians for the profession’s 150th anniversary.4

The other consequential veterinary graduate in those early days was Dr. Fred Kilborne, who also spent much of his career at the BAI with Salmon and Smith. His role in establishing the fact that the tick transmitted Texas Fever led to a seminal paper published in the Bureau’s 1893 annual report, and a prominent place in the history of animal health, specifically, and the transmission of infectious agents through an intermediary host, more generally.5

When the State of New York passed legislation, in 1894, to establish the New York State Veterinary College as the first contract college at Cornell―it was ten years before the College of Agriculture was established by the State―James Law’s dream of publically-funded veterinary education was realized. He assembled a group of faculty, three of whom he had taught as undergraduates at Cornell, and they began instruction in 1896.

One little known fact about Law is his willingness to admit women into the veterinary curriculum. His first female student, Stella de Liancount Berthier, arrived from England in 1905 on the steamer, Luciania, at the request of Professor Hobday of the Royal Veterinary College in London. Though she was a successful student, her interest did not extend beyond companion animals. She wrote at least two letters complaining to Law about the preponderance of large animals in the curriculum before abandoning her studies and returning to England. A second woman, Florence Kimball from Connecticut, commenced her studies two years later and became Cornell’s first women DVM graduate.

By the time Law retired in 1908, he had graduated well over 100 veterinarians, and his reputation as one of the most consequential educators in the history of veterinary medicine was fully established.

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1 Smith, Donald F. James Law: He Helped Establish a University and Founded a Veterinary College, Part I. Perspectives in Veterinary Medicine. April 10, 2014
2 Smith, Donald F. James Law: He Helped Establish a University and Founded a Veterinary College, Part II. Perspectives in Veterinary Medicine. April 11, 2014
3 Smith, Donald F. Daniel Elmer Salmon, First DVM. Perspectives in Veterinary Medicine. October 2, 2013.
4 Cima, Greg. “LEGENDS, America’s First DVM. Daniel E. Salmon Helped Reduce Disease in Animals and Humans.” JAVMA News,.244, volume 5 (March 1, 2013).
5 Leonard, Ellis. A Cornell Heritage. Veterinary Medicine. 1868-1908. (Ithaca, New York: New York State College of Veterinary Medicine, 1979), 155.

Dr. Smith can be reached at dfs6@cornell.edu

The story is also at www.veritasdvmblog.com

Andrew Smith and the Ontario Veterinary College

By Donald F. Smith

Posted April 5, 2014

Among the most successful private veterinary colleges on the late 19^th century, Andrew Smith’s Toronto Veterinary College heads the list. It surpasses the two Chicago colleges and Kansas City Veterinary College in number of graduates and, though it is hard to quantify quality, Toronto also had its share of high-impact graduates. Most importantly, when Andrew Smith affiliated his college with the University of Toronto in 1897, he in essence guaranteed its future transition from a for-profit equine college to one that would be sustained once the horse disappeared from the urban scene. Its successor is the Ontario Veterinary College in Guelph, Canada, a well-recognize center of excellence for veterinary education and research on the North American continent.

Like McEachran whose illustrious career was the subject of a recent story published here on April 4th, Andrew Smith was a 1861 graduate from the Royal Dick College in Edinburgh, Scotland. Smith and McEachran vied for the lead veterinary position that was established by the Board of Agriculture of Upper Canada (Upper and Lower Canada would be renamed Ontario and Quebec after Confederation in 1867). With the increasing value of livestock and the need for someone to safeguard against disease and also to develop a school to train veterinarians, the principal of the Edinburgh College chose the more dignified and less-headstrong Smith over the his rival. Both men were academically-sound, but Smith was more practical, “whose interest in education was with the veterinary art, not the science of veterinary medicine.”[1]  McEachran, an early proponent of the germ theory of disease, was a strong advocate for the science of veterinary medicine and, “perhaps long before it was practical, for higher entrance requirements, for a three-year course, and for a close affiliation with the medical faculty and with research scientists." [2]

Smith vs McEachran embodied the age-old antinomy [3] that persists to this day: art vs science, practice vs theory, pragmatist vs principled.  Feeling that Smith would be better qualified to manage the people and resources for a new college, he was chosen over McEachran for the new position in Upper Canada, and began practicing equine medicine in leased buildings in Toronto in January 1862. 

Smith's first veterinary lectures were delivered the following month and were open to the public. In 1864, the lectures had developed into a course which consisted of two six-month sessions over two years (similar to the British model). To complement the infirmary that he ran for equine clients, he added anatomic dissection facilities for the students. His first three graduates in 1866 were allowed to place “V.S.” after their name, making them distinct as veterinary surgeons from farriers and others with no formal training. [4]

Almost immediately, Smith’s for-profit college was successful. There being virtually no academic prerequisites, would-be veterinarians enrolled in huge numbers. And the curriculum wasn’t just for Canadians, as hundreds of US citizens flocked across the border to be trained by Smith, then returned to practice. In doing so, they hopped over James Law’s program at Cornell University, from which only four veterinarians graduated between 1868 and 1896. McEachran, who had been a close personal friend of Smith, taught with him for a couple of years, then parted ways and opened a rival college in Montreal.  Smith successfully withstood pressure for a more rigorous curriculum until 1906, when he finally announced that the course would be extended to three years. Two years later, the college (now the Ontario Veterinary College) became a provincial institution and he retired. For almost half a century, Andrew Smith ran the college in a way that reflected his personal views of admission, curriculum and practice more than any other contemporary figure in veterinary education. He graduated over 3,300 students. By comparison, McEachran graduated about 300 in the same time period, and James Law (Cornell) fewer than two hundred.

Andrew Smith's famous image embodied in his memorial medal,
awarded annually to Ontario Veterinary College graduate
(Photo by the author)

It is easy to be a critic of Andrew Smith’s unwillingness to embrace a more scientific aspect of veterinary medicine, and I have certainly been among that group at various times in my career. However, as I have studied the history of veterinary medicine, I have become more understanding of the reality of antinomy, whether it be land grant vs private college, research vs service or, as in the case of Andrew Smith, the practitioner vs the scientist.

Sure, I would have liked Smith to have been more willing to add a greater degree of rigor to his admission standards and curricular offerings. However, the sheer numbers of his graduates, and the positions that some of them attained in academia and practice, cannot be scornfully swept aside. Whom among us cannot celebrate the accomplishments of the great veterinary anatomist, Septimus Sisson (V.S. 1891); or the three sons of the legendary Edward Thomas Hagyard who graduated from Toronto between 1875 and 1888, and continued the legacy of what would become incomparable Hagyard Equine Medical Institute in Lexington, Kentucky.

The Toronto Veterinary College was renamed the Ontario Veterinary College and it moved 50 miles west to the rural town of Guelph in 1922 where it partnered with Agriculture and, later, Home Economics. Degrees were conferred through the University of Toronto until 1964 when the University of Guelph was formally inaugurated as a degree-granting institution.

The veterinary profession in North America derived a great deal of its influence and excellence from the three Edinburgh-educated Scots who arrived in Canada and the US in the 1860s, and Andrew Smith deserves an equal part of the legacy with his two more scholarly peers.

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[1] Gattinger, F. Eugene. A Century of Challenge. The History of the Ontario Veterinary College. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Canada, 1962. P18.
[2]  Ibid.

[3] Two equally valid concepts that are mutually exclusive and essentially considered irreconcilable.
[4] A.M.Evans, "SMITH, ANDREW," in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 13, University of Toronto/Universite Laval, 2003, accessed March 28, 2013, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/smith_andrew_13E.html. 

A Dual DVM/MD Program is Established in Montreal, Canada

By Donald F. Smith, Cornell University

Posted April 4, 2014

See also https://www.veritasdvmblog.com/dual-dvmmd-program-established-montreal-canada/

Montreal, Quebec

Veterinarians can now become physicians with just one year of extra study!! To emphasize the growing understanding that human and veterinary medicine are complementary and that they are founded upon the same scientific principles, the dean of the Montreal Veterinary College has joined forces with a leading physician who has just returned from a tour in Europe. The two renowned academics also share the same avant-garde philosophy of medical teaching. With the veterinary dean’s consent, Canada’s foremost physician, will initiate a research program in comparative medicine and also develop a joint teaching program for medical and veterinary students.

Under the program, veterinary student instruction in physiology, pathology, chemistry and microscopy will be shared with physicians from the McGill University Faculty of Medicine.  In these courses, the content will be the same as that for medical students, and the examinations will be identical.

Students who complete the veterinary curriculum in good standing will be able to take one additional year in the McGill medical curriculum and will qualify as physicians as well as veterinarians.[i]

As you may have guessed if you read this far, the above report is not contemporary. Rather, it is from the 1880s when novel strategic thinking about the health sciences was more prevalent that it is today. And it was only made possible because it was between two of the most brilliant and opportunistic medical minds of the late 19^th century.

The physician of the duo was William Osler, then still at McGill (before he went to Philadelphia and from there to Baltimore where he helped establish the Johns Hopkins Hospital). Osler was America’s first comparative pathologist and he even convinced the dean of the Montreal Veterinary College to rename his institution the Faculty of Comparative Medicine.

The veterinarian is someone whose name few will recognize. Many more people know the reputation of his classmate, Andrew Smith, who also graduated in 1861 from the renowned Edinburgh Veterinary College.  Others will know of Cornell’s first veterinary professor, James Law, also a contemporary student from Edinburgh. This third member of the distinguished Scottish trio, and the man with whom Osler felt such a close affinity, was Duncan McNab McEachran.

Duncan McNab McEachran

(Photo from Dictionary of Canadian Biography, see reference 1, below)

Though McEachran was probably the most brilliant of the three veterinarians, and certainly had the career with the greatest versatility, the college he founded in Montreal would only last until 1903 when the continued decline in public funding, and McEachran’s continued insistence on very high academic  standards, led to fewer and fewer students. Though he arranged for teaching sections in both English and French (actually that was another challenge because of the need for faculty in each language), the enrollment continued to fall until McEachran was forced to close. 

Nonetheless, a total of 315 students graduated from the college that many considered one of the best, if not the best, veterinary institution in North America at the time.

McEachran had a multifaceted career in additional to his role as an educator.  He developed the first animal quarantine system for Canada at a time with increased transatlantic movement of livestock was increasing and foot-and-mouth disease was present in Britain. In 1876, he was appointed the chief livestock inspector for Canada and set up quarantine stations that later become a model for the US system. Four years earlier, New York City authorities had invited McEachran to find ways to combat the severe influenza outbreak in horses that had paralyzed the city in what was often referred to as the great equine epizootic of 1872.

By the 1890’s, McEachran branched into controlling tuberculosis through tuberculin testing.  Twenty years before the practice was accepted, he recommended a system for producing and distributing milk in Montreal. Within the professional organizations for veterinary medicine, he worked with Andrew Smith to improve the training of graduate veterinarians, and to reduce the possibility of charlatans from plying their trade. His writings and political action were instrumental in creating the Board of Veterinary Surgeons for the Province of Quebec.

In later life, his entrepreneurial spirit led him to areas of financial profit as a stockbreeder, when he helped establish two of the largest ranches in western Canada.

Like so many other events in veterinary history, sometimes programs close and other times the full expression of peoples’ talents and passions are never realized for other reasons. I think of the untimely closure of Harvard’s Veterinary College in 1901, the dismissal of Daniel Salmon from the Bureau of Animal Industry in the same decade, the death (was it really of natural causes?) of Pennsylvania’s Dean Leonard Pearson, the decision to keep Cornell’s veterinary college in Ithaca, rather than have it join its partner medical school when it moved to New York City, the tragic rule of anti-Semitism over rationality in the closure of Middlesex University in the 1940s. The list goes on.

The closure of McGill’s Faculty of Comparative Medicine is one of the great tragedies in the history of veterinary medicine.  Another way to think of McEachran’s lost impact could be imagined if he had come to the US after the turn of the century, and landed at one of the veterinary colleges in New York City (perhaps Columbia or New York University, for example) or at the University of Pennsylvania, or maybe even in Washington, what a different world veterinary medicine would be today.  One can only dream of the impact he could have had on the development of veterinary medicine and One Health, both as an individual, and through his continued association with physicians like William Osler.

Dr. Smith welcomes comments at dfs6@cornell.edu

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[i] Adapted, with some literary license from the Biography of Duncan McNab McEachran. Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Volume XV (1921-1930), University of Toronto/Universite Laval, 2005

Check out my New Blog at www.VeritasDVMblog.com

Posted August 29, 2013

Donald F. Smith DVM

Please explore my new blog, Perspectives in Veterinary Medicine, produced in conjunction with Cornell and Texas A&M Universities, and Zoetis.  

In celebration of the 150^th anniversary of the American Veterinary Medical Association, I am posting this series of stories to chronicle the events that have contributed to the way the veterinary profession functions today. This is all with an eye to the future, helping us anticipate what comes next in our profession.

Regular readers of this blog will see some overlap but most stories are new and more detailed, with more references and footnotes.

I am deeply appreciative of the almost 100,000 "reads" that you have provided over the past three years. You have been my most loyal support base and I deeply appreciate your readership.  It is my hope that you will also join me now at Perspectives in Veterinary Medicine.

As always, you can reach me at dfs6@cornell.edu.

With all good wishes, Donald Smith.

The First Doctor of Veterinary Medicine in the U.S.

By Donald F. Smith, Cornell University
Posted October 7, 2011.

Everyone has to start at the beginning, even if that person is destined to become one of the most famous veterinarians in history. On this date, October 7, 143 years ago, Daniel Salmon began his veterinary studies when Cornell University opened its doors for the first time. He would become the nation's first D.V.M. graduate.(1)

Celebrating what came to be known as the university's Inauguration Day, founder Ezra Cornell said, “I hope we have laid the foundation of an institution which shall combine practical with liberal education …. [and] which shall prove beneficial to the poor young men and poor young women of our country.” Wisely, Ezra Cornell also insisted that veterinary medicine be among the subjects to be taught from the very beginning of his new university.

Daniel Elmer Salmon
(Photo by Cornell University)

James Law, an eminent Scottish veterinarian had arrived in Ithaca only weeks earlier to become the nation’s first university professor of veterinary medicine. Though Professor Law had several students who became leaders in veterinary medicine and animal health research in the late 19^th century, none was more famous than Daniel Salmon.

When the Bureau of Animal Industry was established in 1894 to promote the health of livestock, and to establish a national standard for meat inspection, Daniel Salmon was chosen as its first director. He is also attributed with the discovery of the bacterial organism that bears his name, Salmonella.

The students who started their veterinary education at Cornell in August of this year have a special kinship with every new veterinary student who has entered this university since Daniel Salmon. Though they are now immersed in the challenging studies that are necessary in the making of a veterinarian, they can also look with pride at the man who started on a similar journey 143 years ago today.

(1) Salmon actually received his veterinary degree in 1872.  At that time, the degree was called the B.V.M. and he was the the second Cornell student to be so recognized.  Salmon then did postgraduate work in Europe and Cornell to qualify for the DVM degree in 1876.  In the modern era, that additional work would roughly quality for what we now designate as the PhD. So, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Salmon received his equivalent of the DVM in 1872, and the modern equivalent of the PhD in 1876.

Dr. Smith invites comments at dfs6@cornell.edu

Cornell's DVM Class of 2015 (150th Anniversary)

Blog by Donald F. Smith, Cornell University, 01.26.11

This a special welcome to the students who comprise the Veterinary Class of 2015 at Cornell University. You are on track to complete your DVM degree during the 150^th anniversary of the university.

Our founder, Ezra Cornell, was an entrepreneur who built a vast telegraph network for Samuel Morse. After amassing his fortune in Western Union stock, Cornell returned to his first love, farming. He acquired an expansive land tract on the top of the hill overlooking Cayuga Lake and then set to work fulfilling his dream of providing an educational institution where any person could find instruction in any study.