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 19th
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
[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