One of the most noticeable features of veterinary medicine, particularly if you look at the 20th century, is the huge amount of specialization that's occurred within the profession, and that's taken place as knowledge has expanded. How was that accommodated within teaching methods, and how did students cope with that sort of increase in knowledge level? In veterinary medicine, specialization happens in two ways: by animal species or species group, and by medical discipline. Specialization by species involves focusing on an individual animal species or species group, such as for example, horses, wild animals, fish, or companion animals. And even within companion animals, some veterinarians may only treat cats for example. Specialization by discipline occurs when veterinarians concentrate on a specific area of practice, such as anesthesia, pathology, surgery, or veterinary public health. Because veterinary medicine is such a diverse profession that are many potential areas of specialization, simply because animals play such a wide and important role in human society. So what is all this specialization mean for people thinking of training as a vet? I think one of the surprising things is that a lot of veterinary students may know of an absolutely clear idea of the area they want to work in once they're qualified. They receive training on a lot of the common domestic animal species, but in addition, there are many other subject areas which they may not have experienced before, and that might mean that they change their career aspirations throughout the course. So that's one feature of specialization, just the amount of career opportunities that it seems to open up. To show how much specialization has occurred in the last hundred years, here are two books covering the field of small animal surgery. The one on the left is by a famous British veterinary surgeon called Sir Frederick Hobday. He's best known as an equine surgeon. In fact, an operation is named after him and is still performed a lot today. But he also wrote about dogs. And he first wrote this book called Surgical Diseases of the Dog in 1900. Copies can still be found in second-hand bookshops and on the Internet today, and it's an excellent book and still relevant to some areas of practice. But compare the size of it with a current day standard text, Fossum's Small Animal Surgery, familiar to all present-day veterinary students, this seems like a massive tome and is just one subject area, Small Animal Surgery. When you think that all areas of veterinary medicine have expanded to a similar extent, you can see why specialization within the veterinary profession has been necessary. Although it's still possible to be a veterinarian who treats all animals, as described in the famous books of James Herriot, it's true to say that this is becoming rarer. It just becomes harder to keep up to date in all areas. Alf Wight, the real name of the veterinarian behind the Herriot books, wrote that he really always wanted to be a specialist companion animal vet, but that in rural Yorkshire, in the 1930s where he worked, this wasn't a career option that was open to him. Companion animal practice just wasn't an accepted specialization at this time. It didn't really begin development until the 1950s and 1960s, but now, it's very common indeed. In fact, about 75 percent of veterinarians will do a substantial amount of companion animal work, with many of them doing nothing but companion animal practice. Any undergraduate veterinary course necessarily contains a huge amount of information even when just restricted to the common domestic animal species. How is this given to students, and how do students approach remembering all this information? Courses have adapted and changed to emphasize the skills needed for careers in practice, research, public service, and other areas while still keeping abreast with the ever-expanding knowledge base. So we're going to look at just a few examples of learning technologies in veterinary medicine. And I chatted to Sharon Boyd, Lecturer in Distance Learning, to see how some things have changed and how others have stayed exactly the same. So those handwritten notes are beautiful in that notebook, really. There's hardly a mistake, but there's no pictures, no illustrations of any type in them. It's just literally solid text all the way through. I think when these lantern slides were brilliant to use right about 1920. I think they were first used, and it must've been an amazing experience for the students to suddenly see some images projected up onto a screen and brought the subject to life I guess particularly something like anatomy. And I was just wondering now, what are we using for 21st century students to kind of integrate text and image, and bring these subjects to life? It's interesting that all the way through, we're seeing how things have adapted slightly, but they all follow the same pattern and a recognizable form. So it's about enhancing the learning experience for the students. So with these lantern slides, it gave the students that sense of being at Edinburgh about something to connect with. And, as you said, a good resource for anatomy, a simulation. The lecturers now are using a process called a flipped classroom, where they are pre-recording their lectures, where they're providing additional notes and interactive reading lists as we have for this week on the course, the talus reading list. And this allows the students to prepare in advance. And then, when they come to the lecture theatre, it's about a discussion that they're having with the member of staff who's there to clarify things that are less clear, to look at things in more detail. That's the students on campus. We use the same recorded process, recordings and simulations for the students who are studying online. They're the students that I work with predominantly. And they have that opportunity again to watch the recorded presentation at a time that suits them, to do their own research and preparation, and then come to the live tutorial sessions where they get to meet the member of staff and ask the questions that they have in that relaxed environment. We're talking about that sense of being at Edinburgh. We use Second Life. We have an Easter Bush farm on Second Life. And the on-campus students can access Second Life in order to work through the horse handling tools, to understand which is the right brush to use as part of their horse handling exams. And we also have the distance learning, master students logging onto the same place. For them, it's for a tutorial space. So it's somewhere that they can recognize names of places in Edinburgh. So, we're talking about Roslin Glen and Leon Helly. So there are places that they can feel that connection with Edinburgh even though they're not at the vet school, which is good. We've also got some examples of 3D printing that's being used. And what we're talking about there is a blended approach, something that's being used by the professionals, as well as by the students. What is a 3D print actually? It sensors? It is. It's quite good. It depends on the substance that you use, but what you can do is generally, it's a kind of a plastic that we're looking at corn-based plastics now, which would also be biodegradable. It's quite good. And it builds up this 3D image of whatever it is that you've put through the program. So what our staff members are doing is taking scans of, say, a fracture in a limb. They're able to take scans of the bone, and then use that to build up a 3D image of the fractured bone. Then imagine how they would be able to correctly fix that before they then go and turn and work with the animal. But in the same way, our students are able to use those resources to get that 3D image of how things articulate, how this works, and how the limb will work. The size of the structures that they're talking about in the way they function in three dimensions is quite good. So that's kind of quite a progression from as opposed to just seeing pictures, and then lantern slides, 35-millimeter slides I guess, and then a video and then 3D printing. What might happen in the future in terms of learning medicine or other types of subjects? It's exciting to see that hands-on approach. And it was something that Rachel touched on earlier about that breadth of understanding, where people who adapt and learn and take a more creative approach to find a solution to a particular problem and work out quite well. So we see staff members getting involved with 3D printing. The students are getting involved with this kind of creative process, ways of looking for solutions and working on them together. You think it would be able to 3D print a whole dog? It should probably could. We're looking at a good sized 3D printer to have at the moment. So we're currently looking to purchase that now. It would be good. So those were lantern slides. Here are some anatomical drawings made by veterinary students. One of them was drawn in the 1930s, and the others were drawn earlier this year by a present-day student. They look really similar in many ways. So this is a form of learning, which has remained exactly the same. Many veterinary subjects, such as anatomy and pathology, are highly visual subjects, so drawing could be useful. Veterinary recognitions are always drawing quick rough sketches to plan treatments and clarify their thoughts. These are working drawings made for a purpose and often done in the clinic as diagnosis and treatment is underway. It's very important to be able to think in two and three dimensions when doing surgery for example. Back in the 1920s, as we discussed with Sharon, the use of those beautiful lantern slides revolutionized teaching. They were cutting-edge technology for the day. Students could to be shown these vivid projected images which greatly facilitated learning. And hopefully, not too many of them fell asleep in the completely darkened room that was needed to show these slides. An equivalent development today is the use of interactive information technology. In the Online Veterinary Anatomy Museum, interactive programs are created, which allows students to move, rotate, and change images in order to facilitate learning. They can see the object from all directions and understand how it's put together and how its appearance changes depending on how you look at it. This is very important in using imaging technologies such as X-rays and ultrasound, CT Scans, and MRI, and also of course, in surgery. 3D printing is now being used to great effect in this area. It's today's equivalent of that first exciting use of lantern slides back in the 1920s. By creating an accurate 3D model of, for example, a fracture, Surgeons can rehearse the specific operation they're about to perform even before they touch the animal. 3D printing can also be used to create custom-made implants for animals and humans. And in the future, it will probably be possible to print tissues, which could revolutionize organ transplants and other treatments. In five fairly short sessions, we can really only scratch the surface of what is, after all, a big topic, the history of the veterinary profession. But I hope you've got some insights as to how the profession developed from its beginnings in the 18th and early 19th centuries. And you can always use some of the materials that we've listed in the further reading to explore the subject further for yourself.
