About the Title

We are all familiar, in some way or another, with the generally beloved James Herriot, nom de plume of James Alfred Wight.  The animal-lovers among us grew up reading his children's books and, a little later, his adult memoir-novels.  Those of us interested in veterinary medicine are inevitably asked what we think of him, if we've read his stories, if we could possibly ever measure up to his humility and compassion for the four-leggeds among us, and so on and so forth.

What you may not know is that Mr. Herriot was a graduate of the University of Glasgow's veterinary college, class of 1939.  I'm sure that the Garscube campus, where the vet school is currently located, didn't exist in '39, and I know that many things about the program there and veterinary medicine in general have changed dramatically since then.  In some ways it's irritating, being followed around by the quaint memory of Herriot's stories.  But it's also lovely, being a new student, to have the fatherly (if sometimes sentimental) character in the background, to imagine what lambing was like in the '40s, and what it will be like for me in a year or two.  To know that the animals haven't changed, although the way we interact with them certainly has.  Herriot was dealing with mastitis, gastroenteritis, and poorly-presented lambs, calves, and foals seventy years ago, and as vet students (and later veterinarians), we will face the same set of challenges in the years to come.

So, to make a long story short, my title is a salute to James Herriot.  That's all I'll say about him.