By Donald F. Smith, Cornell University
Posted January 5, 2015
Posted January 5, 2015
It took Walter Williams 40 years to get a steady job.
In the years between growing up on a farm and
attending a one-room school in Illinois to becoming an inaugural faculty at Cornell’s
veterinary college in 1896, Williams attended a Presbyterian seminary, the
Illinois Industrial University (now the University of Illinois) and the
Montreal Veterinary College in Canada. His principal instructors were a veterinarian
from London’s Royal Veterinary College (while in Illinois) and, in Montreal, a
physician who was just seven years his senior. Though he had taken several veterinary courses
in the agricultural college in Champaign-Urbana, his total veterinary college
exposure was a single six-month session at Montreal. [i]
Because Williams never completed any single course of study,
he never earned a diploma or degree of any sort. His sole award of merit (from Montreal) was a
medal that according to Cornell lore, his children used as a teething ring.
Following his short stint in Montreal, Williams practiced
rural veterinary medicine in Indiana, and held positions at Purdue University
and Montana Agricultural College in Bozeman. While there, he received an
invitation from Louis A. Merillat, the founder of the McKillip Veterinary
College in Chicago, to teach at that college. When negotiations broke down,
Merillat invited Williams to apply for the position as dean but that offer,
also, was not consummated.
Instead, Williams went east to Ithaca, NY, where he became
one the six founding faculty of the new veterinary college at Cornell
University under the leadership of James Law. Professor Law determined that a
clinician (in addition to himself) was needed to complement the histologist,
physiologist, pathologist and anatomist already assembled. Just a couple of
months before the college was to open with a class of 11 students, he invited
Williams to travel to Ithaca for an interview. Williams subsequently became the
sixth faculty member to be recruited for the fledgling college.
Though he never held a veterinary degree, Williams was an
able clinician. He also had a scientific mind having been educated in the basic
sciences by none other than William Osler, who would go on to become one of the
founding faculty at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the leading physician
of his generation.
The lack of formal credentials, noteworthy even at this
early stage in veterinary education, did not diminish the wisdom shown by James Law
in recruiting Williams to be one of Cornell’s founding faculty. For the fledgling university to reach all the
way across the country for a Chair of Surgery must have seemed ironic to some
people, however, because shortly after his appointment was announced, an
acquaintance of Williams is said to have remarked, “Well that is from the
sublime to the ridiculous, for Cornell University to come to Montana for a
professor.”
[i]
Leonard, Ellis P. A Cornell Heritage: Veterinary Medicine 1868-1908. (Ithaca, New York, New York State College of Veterinary Medicine, 1979) 190-8. This
citation applies to quotations and information throughout this
story.