A Graduation Gift of a Book for your Favorite Veterinary Graduate

Donald F. Smith, Cornell University

Posted May 14, 2014

If you have a family member or friend receiving their Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree this spring, why not include a great read among your considerations for a graduation gift? Here are three of my favorites, including one out-of-print gem.

First is from one of today’s hottest writers, Sheryl Sandberg. Need I say more? I just purchased her second book, shown in the picture below.1 Because of the overlap with her previous book, “Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead,”2 I’d recommend this later version. HINT: Don’t only get it for women graduates. Men need it just as much, perhaps more. Seriously!

Three Great Reads for Your New DVM Graduate

(Photo by the Author, 2014)

My second suggestion was written by recently-deceased veterinarian, Dr. Jeanne N. Logue, called “The Wonder of it All.”3 Though it has been out of print for years, I recently purchased three copies on Amazon for gifts, and they are all in wonderful condition (and at a great price).

In preparation for my recent post on this site about Dr. Logue, I re-read her emotionally-charged and exquisitely-penned chronicle of the middle portion of her veterinary career. Once again, I fell in love with her story.4 A 1944 DVM graduate, she writes about what it was like being a veterinarian, mother, and wife in general practice during an era where you could go for months without having a family meal that wasn’t interrupted by a sick dog at your door, or a bovine emergency ten miles away. Admittedly, other veterinarians over the years have chronicled books of this sort and, apart from losing her wedding ring in the womb of a cow while trying to help deliver a calf, their stories are not all that dissimilar.

The Logue difference, however―and this is why I recommend her book to accompany “Lean In”—is that she talks with personal authenticity of the struggles of being a solo-practitioner woman with all the attendant pulls of a busy veterinary practice, while being a mother and wife of a mid-20th century professional man who seems unable to make the requisite accommodations to meet her halfway.

I knew both her and her husband during the twilight years of their lives, and in reading her stories describing her work 30 years earlier, it struck me again how devoted and loving she was to her husband and her children. Her reflection on the pre-dawn morning, while returning home from yet another emergency farm call, when she parked in a familiar field overlooking a lake, and quietly and emotionally made the decision to sell her practice is, by itself, worth the trouble of locating and buying the book.5

[At my special quiet spot overlooking the lake], Orion was reflected in the lake again, and there being something about this particular constellation from which I would gain strength and regain my equanimity, I studied his stars for a while in an effort to center down, query myself and perhaps organize my harassed emotions and troubled thoughts.

As she contemplated what to do as the collisions of her personal and professional lives grated across each other like a steel-bristled broom on concrete, the personal side took precedence.

I turned my mind to the present. I reevaluated all of the complaints Joe had hurled at me at bedtime [the evening before] and I tried very hard, with both love and understanding, to see his point of view. …for the first time in my life, I began to feel a bit uncertain about myself.

Of one thing, however, I was still certain. One thing was firm, it was absolute and it was enduring. It was also very simple: I loved the man with all my being.

“A Way of Life”6 is my third recommendation. It is about William Osler (1849-1919), the best-known and highly-regarded MD of the time, the man who is often considered the father of modern clinical medicine. Osler had a close connection to veterinary medicine. He was even a member of the Faculty of Comparative Medicine at McGill University’s veterinary college (a subject written about previously on this site).7

As a spokesperson for the medical profession, Osler’s words are as fresh today as when he addressed students at Yale in 1913, advising them to stay focused on the present day, and not be overwhelmed by the successes or failures of yesterday, nor the looming concerns of tomorrow.8

In his address to the graduating students at the University of Pennsylvania in 1889, Osler talked about the need for imperturbability and equanimity in all their actions. Imperturbability, referring to physical self-control, is necessary to ensure clear judgment, he argued, emphasizing that it must be based on a wide knowledge of disease and of what needs to be done. Equanimity, he explained, is necessary for physicians to maintain presence of mind by being patient and persistent in working with patients.9

In my teaching on veterinary history, whether to veterinary students or to national audiences, I always pay tribute to Osler. His legacy in animal medicine and his enduring commitment to One Health are as relevant in the present as they were a century ago.

Whether contemporary or legendary, consider a book as a gift. Perhaps purchase two, and treat yourself to a good read.

Dr. Smith invites comments at dfs6@cornell.edu

 

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1 Sandberg, Sheyl, Lean In for Graduates. (New York. Alfred A. Knopf, 2014)
2 Sandberg, Sheryl, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead. (New York. Alfred A. Knopf, 2013)
3 Logue, Jeanne. The Wonder of It All.. (New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London, Sydney: Harper & Row, 1979).
4 Smith, Donald F. Jeanne Neubecker Logue: The Veterinarian who Understood the Wonder of it All. Perspectives in Veterinary Medicine. May 13, 2014.
5 Logue, Jeanne. The Wonder of It All. 166
6 Osler, Sir William. A Way of Life and other Addresses, with Commentary and Annotations (Durham and London, Duke University Press 2001)
7 Smith, Donald F. A Dual DVM/PhD Program is Established in Montreal, Canada. Perspectives in Veterinary Medicine. April 4, 2014
8 Osler, Sir William. A Way of Life and other Addresses, with Commentary and Annotations, 3-7.

9 Ibid. 21-29

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