Before James Herriott

As July is the month of the RCVS Annual General Meeting (AGM), I thought it would be a good time to share a few nuggets of history from RCVS AGMs back in the 1840s and the first few years of the college’s existence. Initially, the AGM was scheduled for the first Monday in May each year. As there was no building owned or rented by the RCVS, meetings were held at the Freemasons’ Tavern (you can learn more on notable venues of veterinary history in my guest blog for RCVS Knowle

In my PhD research I was amused to find that editorials in the original veterinary journals started with a Latin phrase – but before I suggest Vet Times resurrect this tradition, let’s see what they were saying and consider why… The editorials of early veterinary journals weren’t always written by the editor. In fact, they were often published in the form of anonymous letters – a trend that could be seen in many professional journals of the time (those social media accounts

I thought I’d offer a little insight into the things I have discovered throughout the course of my research so far. The project is to look at the original veterinary legislation, with the RCVS charter of 1844 and the Veterinary Surgeons Act of 1881 as my main focus. I had a bit of delay in accessing the RCVS archives due to COVID, but did spend some time in other archives, which I found really interesting. How others saw us Veterinary presence in 19th century archives was var

I’ve had this blog post brewing for a while. Bear with me as, even for me, this is a bit niche! A common OSCE question is: “How many instruments do we need to learn?”. The simple answer is: “Commonly used instruments you would find in a first opinion clinic – including orthopaedic, ophthalmology and general surgical instruments”. However, in my PhD research, my question would be: “Why are there so many similar surgical instruments with different names?”. In a quick check of a