“Coming over queer”

“Coming over queer” is the informal name James Herriot gives to people’s bodily reactions to blood and other medical realities. In his account, the response is unpredictable: a first-aid lecture can overwhelm its audience, a large and confident helper can collapse when an operation begins, and a would-be veterinary student can lose interest in the demonstration only to revive instantly when money is involved. The phrase gathers these episodes into a wry working rule, but the scenes also show why such reactions matter in country practice: veterinary procedures happen where the animals are, with their owners and attendants often close enough to be recruited as helpers.

A Practitioner’s Rule

By the time of the incidents he recounts, Herriot had been in practice for only about two years, yet he had begun to form a set of rules about people who became faint or unwell at disturbing sights. His most definite was that the largest men were the likeliest to go down. In his observation, the women and smaller men he had encountered had not actually passed out, though they could show different degrees of squeamishness; the strongest candidates were big, boisterous men sure of themselves. He presents this as a practitioner’s pattern, not a scientific finding, and acknowledges that his other rules about clients, dogs, and directions were similarly unscientific. The humour rests partly on the gap between apparent physical assurance and what happens when the body meets blood or surgery. Confidence and size, which might seem to promise steadiness, prove unreliable measures of a person’s response.

The Bennisons’ Cow

One such episode began as a routine treatment. Herriot was giving a cow an intravenous injection of magnesium lactate, while Maurice Bennison held the animal and George Bennison raised the vein and managed the choke rope. Herriot asked George to tighten it and lean against the cow to keep her from turning. After the needle entered the vein, blood spurted onto the straw. As Herriot tried to connect the equipment, George’s full weight settled on him: George had lost consciousness, leaving Herriot pinned beneath him. The cow was still in the byre, so Herriot called for the unconscious man to be moved before she could trample him. Maurice and his father hauled George out by his ankles; Herriot then suggested sitting him against the wall and offering him a drink. Mr. Bennison brushed aside the concern and urged him to continue the injection. The procedure’s practical demands did not pause for the collapse, and the men around the cow had to manage both patient and helper before work could resume.

Reactions Beyond the Operating Site

Herriot wondered whether country people, despite their close contact with practical realities, might be particularly susceptible to this response. He recalled Sid Blenkhom arriving at Skeldale House after a first-aid lecture given by Dr. Allinson. Sid asked for whisky and described the talk about veins and arteries as overwhelming. Fred Ellison, a fishmonger attending the same lecture, had been carried out unconscious after about ten minutes; Sid himself had barely made it to the door. The episode extends the pattern beyond an operation or an animal in distress: even an explanatory lecture could produce a physical reaction in its listeners. For Herriot, such incidents were likely to recur in veterinary work. Doctors could send patients to hospital when procedures required cutting, whereas veterinarians generally had to operate on the spot. Owners and attendants were drawn in to assist and consequently exposed to sights they might not have expected to face. Their presence was useful, but it also made the possibility of a helper fainting part of the practical situation.

The Assistant Who Fell Silent

A more dramatic example came during a cow’s rumenotomy. Herriot’s diagnosis was supported by the cow’s reduced milk yield, loss of cud-chewing, and other signs, as well as the farmer’s account of repairing a henhouse in the pasture. With his instruments laid out, Herriot asked the group of local young men watching from the half-door whether one would assist. A very large, red-haired young man volunteered. While Herriot prepared the cow, the new assistant joked and mimed using the instruments; the spectators encouraged him. But when Herriot made a ten-inch incision, the laughter stopped. The watching heads disappeared from above the door, and the Viking, as Herriot describes the young man, was lying unconscious on the floor. The contrast between his noisy confidence before the operation and his collapse at its decisive moment gives Herriot’s rule its clearest comic reversal. The farmer, a small, bent man, calmly took over: he secured the cow, washed his hands, passed instruments, and helped through the operation. When the nail responsible for the cow’s condition was found, he showed only mild interest before returning to his quiet whistling. The Viking recovered partway through, stood up, and left with studied nonchalance, apparently hoping no one had noticed what happened.

The Lesson Interrupted

Henry Dickson’s reaction gives the pattern a different turn. Henry wanted to develop his skill with pigs and asked Herriot to show him how to castrate a pig with a ruptured condition. Herriot hesitated at first, saying that this case was better handled by a veterinarian, but proceeded to demonstrate the procedure. He explained what he was seeing and how the problem could be corrected, treating Henry as a student and taking care to make the mechanics clear. By the time the explanation was under way, however, Henry had slumped over an oil drum, his head resting on his arms. Herriot finished the work with his student apparently asleep nearby. Once the pig was back in its pen, Herriot remembered that he still owed Henry change. Instead of the amount due, he put down a smaller sum beside him. The noise brought Henry upright, pale but suddenly alert, demanding the missing shilling. The sharp change from an unresponsive audience to an energetic complaint turns the lesson into a small comic experiment: the medical demonstration had failed to hold Henry, while the shortage of money immediately restored his attention.

Work, Risk, and Comic Reversal

Across these episodes, “Coming over queer” names a response that Herriot observes rather than diagnoses. The examples range from the Bennisons’ byre and a village lecture to a farm operating space and a pig pen, and they show that the trigger need not be identical: an injection, an incision, or a verbal account of medical matters may each be enough. In the operating scenes, a reaction is more than an embarrassment. The veterinary work must continue, and the remaining people have to adapt: the unconscious helper is moved, the small farmer takes over, or the procedure is completed while the intended student sleeps. The recurring reversal is that the physically imposing or self-assured man proves less dependable than the quiet, practical figure beside him. Herriot turns this unpredictability into humour without making it a formal law; his own caution about the unscientific character of his rules keeps the generalization provisional. The phrase thus captures both a bodily event and a feature of the work around it: in rural practice, the people gathered to help are themselves part of an uncertain scene.