A white horse in the desert: The life of Dr Thomas Somerville (1887-1941).

This article details the remarkable life of Dr Thomas Somerville, who qualified both as a veterinary surgeon and medical practitioner, served in two world wars and was recommended for the nation's highest award for gallantry. In doing so, it records the life of a man whose repeated gallantry on the battlefield has been overlooked.

The European College of Veterinary Surgeons 1991-2011: a 20-year success story.

The first meeting leading to the formation of the European College of Veterinary Surgeons (ECVS) was held August 30/31, 1990 in Lenzburg, Switzerland. Specialists in small animal and large animal surgery from practice and academicians from many European countries were invited. The constitution was developed based on that of the American College of Veterinary Surgeons (ACVS). ECVS was founded during the ACVS European Surgical Forum in Nice in 1991. The provisional Board elected at this meeting stayed active during the initial 4 years to provide stability. For the 146 Charter Members to become a Diplomate, they had to pass an examination. Therefore, the ECVS is the only Specialty College that does not have a "Grand Father Clause." In 2000 ECVS, was the first College to acquire full recognition-status by the European Board of Specialization (EBVS), which underlines the leading role the surgeons play in the development of the European veterinary specialty colleges. Like its American Sister College, ECVS maintains high standards for surgical training programs for Residents and administers rigorous certifying examinations. It is appropriate to recall the facts that lead to foundation of ECVS on its 20-year anniversary.

Animals in surgery--surgery in animals: nature and culture in animal-human relationship and modern surgery.

AThis paper looks at the entangled histories of animal-human relationship and modem surgery. It starts with the various different roles animals have in surgery--patients, experimental models and organ providers--and analyses where these seemingly contradictory positions of animals come from historically. The analyses is based on the assumption that both the heterogeneous relationships of humans to animals and modern surgery are the results of fundamentally local, contingent and situated developments and not reducible to large-scale social explanations, such as modernization. This change of perspective opens up a new ways of understanding both phenomena as deeply interwoven with the redrawing of the nature-culture divide.

The animal as surgical patient: a historical perspective in the 20th century.

Current veterinary history has not engaged significantly with patient histories. In many historical accounts of veterinary medicine, animal patients are backgrounded or completely invisible. Yet modern veterinary medicine, in its dominant form of companion animal practice, has become increasingly patient-centred. The modern animal patient is accorded something near full subject status in many veterinary clinical interactions. Embracing this raises issues of how to handle animals in veterinary history. Animals are the recipients of veterinary medicine, they exert agency in the clinic and field, yet they have remained problematical for the historian and sociologist, who have remained anthropocentric in orientation. This paper explores different constructions of the veterinary surgical patient in the 20th century in an attempt to begin examination of veterinary history as an animal-patient history "from below." In doing so, a trajectory of the development of British 20th-century veterinary medicine is presented which suggests the value of minding animals in historical accounts. Further interdisciplinary studies of veterinary procedures and practices are needed in order to foreground animals more and evaluate their subject status within historical and contemporary veterinary medicine.

Picturing the pain of animal others: rationalising form, function and suffering in veterinary orthopaedics.

Advances in veterinary orthopaedics are assessed on their ability to improve the function and wellbeing of animal patients. And yet historically veterinarians have struggled to bridge the divide between an animal's physicality and its interior experience of its function in clinical settings. For much of the twentieth century, most practitioners were agnostic to the possibility of animal mentation and its implications for suffering. This attitude has changed as veterinarians adapted to technological innovations and the emergence of a clientele who claimed to understand and relate to the subjective experiences of their animals. While visualising technologies and human analogies have shaped the nuts and bolts of veterinary orthopaedic practices, an emerging awareness of the inability of radiographic images to apprehend or correlate to a patient's experience of their function reliably has required veterinarians to place a greater emphasis on the owner's knowledge of the "selves" inhabiting their animals. Rather than simply basing clinical judgments on the "look" of their patients, the indeterminacy in the connection between form and function has compelled veterinarians to put questions regarding particular human-animal relationships near the centre of their practices, not least in orthopaedic surgery.

The emergence of "implant-pets" and "bone-sheep": animals as new biomedical objects in orthopaedic surgery.

In this paper we examine the role of animals in orthopaedic surgery and research in the 1960s. We describe their different roles as patients and laboratory models in the emergence of two new biomedical objects that we call "implant-pets" and "bone-sheep." For this purpose, the ways of practicing (veterinary) orthopaedic surgery and of "materializing," or bringing into being, complex and heterogeneous biomedical objects are analyzed as the coevolving histories of humans and animals. Focusing on non-discursive material practices, we use the concept of "articulation" in order to explore the inventive and intervening character of biomedical practices that led to the existence of implant-pets and bone-sheep. Our analysis interprets the distribution of human-like and animal-like character features and values to these animals not as the result of a stable animal-human boundary, but as the effect of diverse interactions in contingent historical situations. This dynamic-relational approach makes it possible to investigate the drawing of human-animal boundaries in the making and thus contributes in a new way to the study of animal-human relationships in history.

[From the practice, for the practice: Swiss veterinarians invent surgical instruments]. / Aus der Praxis, für die Praxis: Schweizer Tierärzte erfinden Instrumente.

Sometimes the name of instruments in veterinary text books and catalogs of medical suppliers points to their origin. Between 1850 and 1950 quite a number of veterinarians in Switzerland invented various instruments. They passed their ideas on or produced and distributed their inventions. The ideas originated from their daily work, such as surgery and treatments in the field of diseases in obstetrics and reproduction, udder diseases and digestive system.