Veterinary History

…

Found in a 120 year old time capsule.

November 6th 1885 saw the birth of Sir William Leishman, Scottish bacteriologist.

Leishman was born in Glasgow and followed his father into medicine, graduating from the University of Glasgow in 1886.  After this he took a commission in the Royal Army Medical Corps.   It was whilst serving in India that he began his lifelong research into microbiology and public health.  It was while he was an assistant Professor there in 1900 that he identified the causative parasite of Dum-dum fever (now known as leishmaniasis)

Returning to England to work at the Army Medical School at Netley, he became Assistant Professor of Pathology.

He was knighted in 1909, became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1910, was President of the Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 1911-1912, and honorary physician to King George.  For over a decade, he worked to produce an effective vaccine against typhoid.  When war began in August 1914, 170,000 doses were issued to the troops. It is estimated that, without it, there would have been about 551,000 cases of typhoid and over 77,000 deaths. Thanks to the vaccine, there were only 1,191 deaths from 21,139 cases.

The Arabian Horses of Abbas Pasha

It’s here, finally! After 18 months of keeping our mouths shut (and many many more years of this for our friend Edouard, who runs Daughters of the Wind), @mylittlehony and I can talk openly about this!! This is… really cool. Really really really cool.

See, anyone who has dipped their toes in Arabian horses is going to know about Straight Egyptians, and they’ll probably have heard of Abbas Pasha, the Viceroy of Egypt, who sent envoys all across the Middle East to gather desert bred Arabian horses and bring them to his collection in Egypt, which he enjoyed right up until his assassination in the middle of 1854. His young son, Ilhami Pasha, inherited the entirety of the collection when he was just 18 years old. It was known that Ilhami Pasha had to disperse the horses in an enormous sale in 1860, but very little was known about the specifics, the horses, the buyers, and more. What has been a fascinatingly opaque piece of Arabian horse history that had an enormous impact on the trajectory of the breed now has an explosion of information coming out of a chance discovery of a document that was, as Edouard puts it, hiding in plain sight within the Raswan Index. Nobody had ever bothered to translate the Arabic, and didn’t understand that Carl Raswan had published scanned photos of the actual sales list of the Arabian horses of the Abbas Pasha stud that were sold in the final month of 1860.

Not only does this connect us with many of the largest historical breeders of Arabian Horses in Egypt a la the tradition that brought Lady Anne Blunt into the fold, but also it connects us to the studs of Europe - the breeding depots of Vittorio Emmanuelle II as he began his bid to unify Italy under a single banner; the German studs, with a wonderful contextualization of Baron von Hugel; the French studs; and more. Furthermore, it connects with the Sal Oppenehim banking family, and there is a connection to the Confederate spy Edwin de Leon, who brought an Abbas Pasha Arabian stallion across the ocean to the United States, where the horse had to run the Union blockade during the American Civil War in order to make landfall and be gifted to the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis.

Some of what has been discovered or otherwise pieced together bumps back the known pedigrees of many of the foundational Arabian horses by quite a few generations, all the way back deep into the desert with their Bedouin breeders. It’s introduced the discovery that there was an unknown sireline in Arabians via Lady Anne Blunt’s favorite stallion, Mesaoud, who was believed to have carried the Zobeyni sireline but is now known to be a Ghadir sireline stallion. Ghadir, of course, being Abbas Pasha’s own favorite herd sire, and who was later bought in the 1860 sale as an older stallion and thereafter exported from Egypt to Germany, where he was also utilized as a herdsire.

The impact on Arabian pedigrees is astonishing, and the relationships between a number of foundation horses are finally made clear in this book - including relationships between horses in Abbas Pasha’s stud in the 1850s and horses that were still in the desert when the Blunts made their two trips in the late 1870s. That was a moment that gave me gooseflesh, when I realised just how many generations back the pedigrees can now be recorded. 

We understand so much more, now, about the history and provenance of not just the Arabian horses of Abbas Pasha’s fabled collection, but also of horses that went to Weil-Marbach and to Bábolna, and horses that would later be exported from Egypt to Crabbet Park. And these were horses whose descendants shaped the Arabian horses found in the western world - so the Arabian horses that stand in our fields and stables today. This book links them, definitively, to horses that came from Bahrain, from Syria, from Arabia, from Oman, tells us who their owners were before they were acquired by the agents of Abbas Pasha, puts them firmly in their context as horses of the Bedouin. 

It’s been very exciting, and it has been a tremendous honour to work on this book alongside Edouard and Moira. We had some moments of awe-struck wonder when we identified well-known horses in the sale catalogue. We had many hours of going cross-eyed and muzzy-headed while combing through the French and Italian stud books in particular. We spent days arguing about naming patterns of horses, and a particular pet hypothesis of mine was thrown out for having no evidence, only to be revived months later, towards the end of the work on the book, and then thrown out all over again (Mabruka and Mabruk, I forgive you for making us go round in circles). It was fun, it was frustrating, it was highly rewarding, and, well, those months have now turned into a book. An actual book, crammed with detail and so much new information. 

Which is REALLY cool when you consider that we previously only had a very thin line to Ghadir (aka Gadir) via his three daughters from the Marbach-Weil program. In the old AK Roster, this was represented in some of the last of the asil representatives of the Polish programs and the Babolna program. The all came down via 1911 gm Soldateska (WL) (Souakim (WL) x Sylphide I (WL)), and they came to the United States via 1970 gs *KEM Safir (Hadban Enzahi (RAS) x Sahmet (W-M)). *KEM Safir left an extremely thin line of descent thereafter:

Fan-Safir is deceased, Zahia Al Rafiq is deceased, Zafira CW has proven to be very difficult to breed and has not had a successful foal yet, and meanwhile, Halimah CW is currently with Desert Heritage Arabians and has produced two fillies, both sired by Straight Egyptian stallions - one with the El Deree sireline, and one with the Jamil El Kebir sireline.

I’ll repeat that: there are just 4 horses currently alive today, all mares, who carry this particular collection of bloodlines forward within the United States.

Meanwhile, if we look at Mesaoud, who’s pedigree records are functionally the same for all his descendants, save going beyond his OWN pedigree to clarify a few things:

To quote from an article by Gudrun Waiditschka (which looks at the sireline of Amurath 1881, hence the emphasis on Bairactar, rather than Ghadir): 

When we leave purebred Arabian breeding and turn towards Shagya-Arabian breeding, we find some offspring of Amurath 1881, who got a name in Warmblood breeding of various different countries, eg. with Amurath I 1898 (out of 314 Gidran XXIV) in Hannovarian breeding. Amurath I was widely used and six of his sons were breeding stallions at Celle, where you can find his blood through Amulett II and Amateur I, among others, in the pedigree of Gotthard (*1949), a famous sire of show jumping horses.

Another stallion, Amurath II 1896 (out of 248 Shagya V), ended up in Schleswig-Holstein. Here, he had 11 licensed stallions, in Lower Saxony three, in Trakehnen one. But he also had a certain influence on Dutch Warmblood breeding, and so the Olympic horses Hickstead and Valegro carry Amurath blood.

However, the most significant influence on European sport horse breeding was through the famous sire of show jumpers, Ramzes (*1937). He had Amurath 1881 twice in his pedigree - and Bairaktar 28 times - through his dam, the Shagya-Arabian mare Jordy. Ramzes founded a true sport horse dynasty and many horses whose name start with ‘R’ trace back to him: Retina under Fritz Thiedemann, Romanus with Hans-Günther Winkler in the saddle and Ramona with Alwin Schockemöhle. They all wrote equestrian history and furthered the fame of Ramzes in Holstein. The strain of Ramzes was later split into two branches: From Holstein, the Raimond-Ramiro-branch spread and stamped show jumping worldwide. Today’s show jumpers such as Rubinstein, Rock Forever or Cornet Obolensky – he is said to carry Bairaktar more than 100 times in his pedigree – they all have Ramzes among their ancestors. From Westphalia, the Radetzky-offspring through Remus I-Romulus I-Romadour II prevailed, but this time in dressage: Remus with Harry Boldt, Mariano with Dr. Josef Neckermann and Tiga with Heinz Lammers in the saddle. It is a phenomenon that is true ‘til today: Ramiro Z stands for show jumpers, while Radetzky stands for dressage horses, but all carry Ramzes and with him Amurath and Bairaktar in their pedigrees. Ramzes was considered one of the most influential sires of the postwar era. 

it used to be pretty common for there to be cats on boats. they'd take care of any rodents who would chew on ropes or wires and spread diseases. sailors were also superstitious and believed that having a cat aboard would bring good luck! this belief passed on to their wives, who kept cats - especially black ones who were believed to be extra lucky - at home in order to keep their husbands safe when at sea.

another popular superstition? that if a cat came aboard it was a sign of luck, but if it only boarded halfway and then left, it was a sign of bad luck.

most ship's cats are only found in modern times on private vessels, but they have roots going back to early history. one such example is the Vikings, who took cats with them on expeditions.

A mule controlled by means of wooden stocks and supported by a web or leather belt. 

Farriery has ancient origins and historically, farriers' and blacksmiths' jobs were practically synonymous. Blacksmiths feature in various mythologies and The Smith and the Devil is believed to potentially be one of the oldest European folk tales. Research estimates it is around 6000 years old, meaning this story goes back to the Bronze Age. The bare bones of the folk tale is that a blacksmith makes a deal with a malevolent being then tricks them.

Danish soldier conversing with a blacksmith, presumably a scene from the Second Schleswig War, 1864 by Frants Henningsen  (1850–1908). Oil on mahogany.

(Picture source)

Even in ancient times people saw the need to protect their horses hooves, though nailed on horseshoes developed later. Existing references to the nailed shoe are fairly late, first known to have appeared around AD 900. But by the time of the Crusades they were in widespread use and often mentioned in written sources. It's not surprising then that farriers and blacksmiths appear quite regularly in art history, as they've been a part of society for so long.

The farrier (1997) by the Belgian painter Albert Demuyser (1920–2003). Oil on canvas.

Animal hitched to a wall by means of a rope and three rings (used in lieu of stocks). 

Title: Charley the vet 

Credit: Denver Public Library Special Collections 

Date: 1902, February 

Summary: A man identified as Charley, a veterinarian, poses astride a horse at the Boston Ranch, Crowley County, Colorado, by a barn. He wears woolies (chaps). 

Source: Lamont Johnson, 1638 Franklin, Denver, Colo. 

Notes: Attached typed paper reads: “Charley the Vet, from Kansas, astride a roan horse in front of big barn. He gave final examination on all broncs broke on Boston Ranch before they went to the Boer War.;” also transcribes handwriting. Condition: fold crack, dirt, stains. Formerly F11860. Title inked on back of mat board with: “(vet’s) home was in Kansas, I was ropen [sic] horses one day for Charley to Doctor (he was a vet - horse Dr.) was ropen [sic] the horses for him, and as I threw the larriatt [sic] & caught the horse, Charley got between the fence and band of horses. He got his collar boan [sic] broke & 3 or 4 ribs caved in. I put him on my horse and took him to the bunk house. We sent him to Pueblo to the hospital & as soon as he recovered he came back to the outfit, but went home & that is the last I know of him.,” and “I had other pictures but can’t find them.”; R7100219692 

Veterinarians have had assistance from staff throughout their existence of the profession, but the first organised paraveterinary workers were the canine nurses trained by the Canine Nurses Institute in 1908,[2] and announced in the magazine ‘The Veterinary Student’. According to the founder they would “carry out directions of the veterinary surgeon, meet a genuine need on the part of the dog owners, and at the same time provide a reasonably paid occupation for young women with a real liking for animals”.[3]

In 1913, the Ruislip Dog Sanatorium was founded, and employed nurses to care for unwell dogs and in the 1920s, at least one veterinary surgery in Mayfair employed qualified human nurses to tend the animals. In the mid 1930s, the early veterinary nurses approached the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons for official recognition, and in 1938 the Royal Veterinary College had a head nurse appointed, but the official recognition was not given until 1957, first as veterinary nurses, but changed within a year to Royal Animal Nursing Auxiliaries (RANAs) following objection from the human nursing profession.

In 1951, the first formal paraveterinary role was created by the United States Air Force who introduced veterinary technicians, and this was followed in 1961 by a civilian programme at the State University of New York (SUNY) Agricultural and Technical College. In 1965 Walter Collins, DVM received federal funding to develop model curricula for training technicians. He produced several guides over the next seven years, and for this work he is considered the “father of veterinary technology” in the United States.[4]

In 1984, the term veterinary nurse was formally restored to paraveterinary workers in the United Kingdom.

i am BEGGING everybody to please look at this picture of a dog who worked at Wood Island Lighthouse in Biddeford, Maine in 1903. his name was Sailor and it was his job to ring the foghorn. he was famous nationwide. mariners passing nearby the lighthouse would toot their horns in greeting and he would get very excited and ring the foghorn as a hello

Extinct animals. 1905. Cover detail.