by John Hicks
Ah! Here is the delicate dissection of an eye of newt.
Be careful! Do not shake me,
For the williwaws of detritus you create
Will speed the ravages of time,
And seal my early fate.
And so, in the main, these relics were accorded the respect they deserved.
After the ‘Porky and Petal’ story, Barry Hargreaves struggled for a mnemonic, something that would help him to remember the sequence of nerves conjoining at the brachial plexus: something suitably obscene. He was ably assisted by others. Soon we had created a phrase replete with sexual connotations that would never bear repeating in polite company, but memorable long after we had forgotten the assignations of the initial letters. We were juveniles adjusting to an adult world; you must forgive us the odd lapse in decorum.
Those who had been lured into a veterinary career by images of caring individuals tenderly bandaging dogs’ paws, or some bucolic idyll, were being re-educated, their illusions stripped to the bone. This was the start of a five-year science degree. Subjects that seemed remote from our ultimate objective—in nearly all cases to become a practising vet—were drummed into us. Organic chemistry, biochemistry and physiology were all subjects I struggled with and even, one stressful summer, had to re-sit. The dread of having to repeat a year was sufficient spur for me to pass but, for me, a pass was a pass and that was enough. I wanted to be a vet. I was never going to be honours material. Honours graduates perform consistently highly throughout the full five years of the course. Perhaps only one student in forty would attain this standard. I held on to my rustic dreams.
Later studies such as pharmacology, microbiology and genetics built on those early courses and by the time we entered our third year it was possible to see an end to academia. Soon we would be bandaging dogs’ paws, but with some understanding of the principles of pathology and pharmacology that govern healing and therapy. Soon we would be leaning on a sunny gate beside a farmer discussing the state of his stock, but with some knowledge of ruminant physiology, animal husbandry and nutrition.
Our studies were intensive, a stream of lectures filled our days. We were effectively separated from other more social students studying non-vocational subjects. Some of the social science students had only two or three lectures a week, for goodness’ sake! They could indulge their individual voyages of self-discovery and uphold the student stereotype of political protest and free love, and fulfil peacenik ideals whilst collecting money for the IRA (this actually happened). The lot of a veterinary student was different: more a matter of endurance, application and enquiry. There was very little free time for a plodder like me.
As the course progressed and became more practical and shed the Perspex perspective of anatomy and the pre-clinical years, it became more enjoyable for me; but I would never contend, as some do, that university years were the best of my life. They were years of unremitting study.
I was also assailed by doubts as to where my vocation would lead. Field trips to farms nearby in Cheshire to familiarise us with modern production systems were far from my experience and conception of what rural life should involve. Pigs reared in sweatboxes and other intensive pig and poultry systems alarmed me. This trend to factory farming even extended to dairy cows housed under zero-grazing systems, where the grass was cut and brought to them. As we wandered around screeching pig factories it was obvious that my disillusionment was shared by other students, in part because the noise, dust and smell made it a far from ideal learning environment. Len Piggott, however, seemed indifferent to this and was enjoying the status his new waders, he imagined, conferred upon him.
Many British vets in those days wore fishermen’s waders because they frequently had to work with housed cattle on deep litter systems. Because straw is added to the accumulating dung the vet called in to examine a sick animal could be required to approach it across a thick layer of dung and straw. If the farmer has been mean with the straw the vet ends up striding through thick slurry. For farm vets a pair of thigh-length waders and a brown coat were desirable accoutrements.
Waders were expensive and, in the opinion of some penurious students, Len had acquired his shiny new pair a trifle early in his fledgling career. He was getting ideas above his station for a second-year student. Later in the afternoon, his swagger became a stagger as pignuts—posted down the tops of his waders by friends and colleagues—rattled into the inaccessible confines of his feet. It isn’t easy to hop on one foot and empty your waders in the middle of acres of slurry and, to our disappointment, it was a challenge that Len was disinclined to meet. He was a hulking and clumsy youth, but he had dignity, and he defused our mirth by ignoring our childish antics; we learned the more because of it. We were growing up. But no one else ever wore waders.
I found it difficult to adjust to the freer and more collaborative relationships that we had with our university lecturers. My strict schooling had precluded any social interaction between teachers and pupils. Teachers like ‘Mong’ (of whom we shall hear more) kept an icy remove from their students. Schoolboys must be kept in line, any glimmer of weakness and life as a master would be intolerable: them or us.
For students at university by contrast, it was a matter of self-motivation. The lecturers were a diverse bunch. For many of them teaching was a minor aside to their research. If their teaching was lame or inadequate it was up to us to do the background reading and make good the deficits in our knowledge or understanding. No one was going to write a sardonic report to your parents if you were performing inadequately.
Students of brilliance were able to transcend the boundaries and freely discourse with these higher mortals, but those treading the fine line between pass and fail, such as me, were acutely aware of the sway they held. They still marked those exam papers. Your future was in their hands and some of them consciously wielded this power.
Miss Joshua bestrode the pathology lab in ankle socks and plimsolls, her rotund figure concealed under a long white coat, her short grey hair worn in a pragmatic manner that owed nothing to elegance. She was about to show who was boss in a rather unusual manner.
Dead dogs lay cold and stiff on the tables we stood behind: strays that had been euthanised and arranged for our first tentative forays into the intricacies of surgery. Our eager anticipation was tempered fractionally by the cloying stench of death. But before we began, Miss Joshua wanted to involve us in a particular interest of hers. Dog pox …
‘The lesions are barely detectable. They are occasionally visible on the mucosa of the prepuce in the male dog, as with this dog that Miss Price is examining. Far more difficult to detect are the lesions in the rectal mucosa. You will need to palpate carefully and for this purpose you may not use a finger cot because it reduces tactile sensitivity too much. I repeat: these lesions are barely detectable. You must use a naked finger. If any of you find any lesions, please let me know. There is plenty of disinfectant and there are brushes by the basin at the right.’
And so I present, for your delectation, an unusual vignette. Forty students put to an exacting test. How will they perform in the brown finger stakes? Some caught in the enthusiasm of the moment dived in with nary a thought. For others, years of civilised conditioning was waging a winning battle with their scientific inquisitiveness. This was Miss Joshua’s real experiment. None of us would hear about ‘dog pox’ ever again. Her beady eyes, glinting over the steel half-frame spectacles, spotted a malingerer.
‘Well, Mister Hargreaves, have you checked to see if your dog has rectal lesions?’
‘Not yet, Miss Joshua, I’m just about to.’
And so, right there and then and under the direct supervision of the expert, he performed the manipulation to her satisfaction. Sometimes it is better to feign enthusiasm and lie.
‘Has this dog got dog pox, Mister Hicks?’
‘No, Miss Joshua.’ (I decided to rely on the laws of probability.)
‘Let me check… No, your dog seems to be clear.’ (And for
once they were on my side.)
I always seemed to get on reasonably well with Miss Joshua after that. She was my exacting tutor in the final clinical year.
[After a friend of mine, Richard Griffiths who was in this group at the time, had read a previous edition of this book I asked him about Miss Joshua and our unprotected dog pox checks. ‘I’m a bit concerned that my memory has exaggerated that episode, Richard; it seems hard to believe.’
He responded instantly: ‘It happened all right!’]
Most other lecturers were more innocuous. If anybody fitted the role of the absent-minded professor more completely than ‘Piggy’ I have yet to meet them. Piggy was our animal husbandry lecturer, and yes, he did have an interest in pigs, but that was not the sole reason for his nickname. Piggy was just a remarkably bumbling and untidy figure. His florid complexion was curtained by lank, greying locks. His tweed jacket was invariably strung up to the wrong button. When Piggy farted home it was in a car not seen in present times, in fact a rare beast even then. Piggy owned the only Wartburg on the campus. A car attuned to his needs. This wasn’t the saloon version. This was a Wartburg estate: ideal for the discerning pig farmer. You could hump all the pails of swill you required into its roomy abdomen. A car as un-dashing and inelegant as its name implies.
Another professor, on the other hand, drove a Rover. He was ever dapper, and invariably sported a blazer and bow tie. His lectures were accomplished, amusing and opinionated, but his politics were conservative and he deplored the bohemian appearance of many of the students. He was not amused by the ‘Vote Labour’ sticker that one wag affixed to the rear window of his car while he was having drinks at his club. He was especially mortified that several days elapsed before it was brought to his attention.
Slowly but surely, inappropriate thinking was eliminated from our repertoire. Physiology was my intellectual bête noire. The standards expected were laid from the beginning.
‘I shall expect no student to revert to this,’ said the professor of physiology, disdainfully displaying a copy of Green’s An Introduction to Human Physiology. But Green was, in the opinion of many students, an excellent little text that gave, in simple terms, an overview of a complex topic. ‘This is Noddy physiology.’
I have never been an Enid Blyton fan and dismissing Noddy came naturally to me, but this time it was a big mistake—instead, we were directed to my nemesis, the dense and frightening tome of Stirling: over a thousand pages of angstrom units and other worthy physiological esoterica that seemed more designed to obfuscate than enlighten. I didn’t discover the virtues of Green until I was in the process of re-sitting my physiology paper.
But even a dry topic can be leavened by the inspired eccentricities of a great mind. The cardinal sin was teleology. Teleology is the mistake of confusing, for instance, anatomical design in terms of purpose. A giraffe doesn’t have a long neck so that it can feed off high branches, but because having a long neck has given it an evolutionary advantage, enabling it to feed off high branches that other animals cannot reach. Lamark versus Darwin. To illustrate the point, our physiology professor was fond of resorting to an obscure avian example:
‘The Red Vented Bulbul—’ a name he enunciated elaborately, lovingly caressing each syllable, ‘—ladies and gentlemen, with which I am sure by now all of you have more than passing familiarity, is so named because it has a red vent. It does not have a red vent because it is called the Red Vented Bulbul’.
Idiosyncrasies aside, our lecturers were for the most part role models of scientific excellence and integrity, determined to cast intellectual shoddiness from their charges; men and women whom we could admire and only hope to emulate in a lifelong pursuit of logic and objectivity.
~
‘Daddy, why don’t you ever read us The Tale of Little Red Riding Hood?’
‘I can’t, darling; I just don’t enjoy it any more. When I was your age I loved it, but my tertiary education has made me aware that it was full of the crassest teleological thinking.’
‘Oh, do try, Daddy. The wolf was just ignorant. He didn’t know that it was eons of evolution that had given him such big eyes, big teeth and big ears. If Little Red Riding Hood had tried to correct his teleological explanations he would have got very, very angry.’
Chapter Eleven
Student in the Dales
Meanwhile my faith in my future in the profession was restored each holiday as I saw practice with a remarkable vet, Mike Harkness, in the Yorkshire Dales. This was an area to which my parents, escaping city life, had recently moved. Here there was no intensive agriculture, but a pattern of sweeping fells, stone walls, forested gills and flag-roofed barns. It was more than picturesque. This was and, thanks to the National Park status that it enjoys, still is a beautiful corner of England, but facilities were primitive. Mike’s predecessor was a retired army officer who had trundled around his patch with a horse and trap. Mike had modernised and over several years we patrolled the twisty lanes in a succession of Landrovers.
This was also stiff-shit country and although Mike never wore waders, he did, on occasions, wear a brown lab coat. A brown coat without waders or waterproof over-trousers is an impractical combination, the nature of the work leading inevitably to brown knees. Until recently it seemed requisite, in British veterinary journal advertisements placed by the drug companies, to depict vets in brown coats. New Zealand vets, clad in practical green overalls, may wonder the reason for this, but it is quite simple. It is a matter of professional image. An ‘overall’ in Britain is often referred to as a ‘boiler suit’ and therefore worn by labourers. We can’t have that, can we?
Mike faced the world in a brown tweed jacket, brown trousers and always wore a collar and tie. On entering a barn full of rollicking calves his jacket would come off and he would hang it in some cobwebbed corner. If it was a big job his tie might join it. I would be given the task of bulldogging the calves if there was insufficient labour (clasping them round the neck with one arm whilst gripping the septum of the nose firmly between the thumb and index finger of my other hand to restrain them), while Mike went down on his knees (ever browner and wetter) and castrated them. On the odd farm the farmer might doff his cloth cap and Mike would place the steaming hot testicles within. What culinary delight was conjured up from such an unpromising start hardly bears thinking about, but I suspected that the practice was guaranteed to result in a sticky head and, only if you were lucky, a hairy chest.
So we went, from farm to farm. You have read all about it in the wonderful series of books written by James Herriot. For people around the world the physical beauty of the countryside in which I was privileged to get an early grounding as a vet has been made accessible by the television series based on those books.
As we journeyed I was encouraged to reflect and question what we had done, what we might have done and, occasionally, what we should have done. A chance to glean a lifetime’s experience is rare indeed and I like to think that Mike enjoyed my company. In return I opened many gates for him.
Mike had firm ideas about most things. It was manly to ignore discomfort; indeed, discomfort was a part of the job. My hands froze as I recorded while he TB-tested Galloway cattle up on the fells in the cruel frosts of winter. We returned damp and dirty to his Landrover after blood-testing handfuls of cattle housed in barns scattered across the fields. Walking was often the only means of access, sometimes in drenching rain. We treated wretched, scouring calves lying in the stinking ordure of their bracken bedding, and we rolled in slimy shippons to calve cows. Life behind that bucolic façade was often hard and brutal. The lack of facilities for handling animals, such as races and head-bails, made the job frustratingly inefficient and occasionally dangerous. How ironic then, that Mike should have succumbed to an unseen invader.
Mike firmly believed that a healthy and vigorous life kept the bugs at bay. He disdained the use of many conveniences that would now be regarded as essential. One of the worst tasks facing vets is removing retained
placentas from cows. In the normal course of events a cow will naturally eject her placenta within a few hours of birth. Occasionally the placental attachments to the uterus will not part and the placenta is retained within the cow, usually leaving a smelly wick of rapidly rotting tissue dangling by the tail. Farmers are not best pleased by this state of affairs because placing the cups of the milking machine on the udder beside that swishing tail can defeat the subsequent efforts of even the best after-shave lotion (make that scrubbing brush and carbolic soap—after all, we are talking of Yorkshiremen here). The temptation is to intervene as soon as possible. Nowadays, research has shown that the best approach is to remove any protruding membranes and allow natural dehiscence, only intervening if the cow is sick. Until this divine statistical analysis of outcomes was widely published vets were routinely called out if the cow hadn’t ‘cleansed’ within four days. This meant the tedious task of trying to unbutton numerous placental attachments, all the while causing collateral damage that could result in infertility—but at least the cow didn’t stink any more and milking her became more pleasant.
Long-sleeved plastic gloves protect the hands and arms of the operator from the hot bacterial soup within the uterus and help ensure that he/she will be welcomed home, if not with open arms, at least with only mild repudiation. Unfortunately, one of the commonest reasons for retained membranes is because the cow has aborted and, until the disease was eradicated later in the last century, one of the commonest causes of abortion was Brucella abortus. This bacterium has been the death of many vets and farmers.