Veterinary College (Montrose Street, Glasgow)

The Veterinary College (Montrose Street, Glasgow) is the setting of James Herriot’s first decisive encounter with veterinary study: a lecture on the points of the horse that transformed abstract learning into a sense of belonging to the profession. Recalled after six months of demanding practice, the scene also marks the distance between acquiring knowledge and knowing how to use it amid the uncertainty of sick animals.

Setting and First Encounter

At seventeen, Herriot had been a student for only three days when he walked beneath the college arch into Montrose Street. Botany and zoology had their place, but his first animal-husbandry lecture gave him the feeling that his chosen vocation had truly begun. The subject was the horse’s points, and Professor Grant used a life-size picture to identify features from the withers and stifle to the hock and poll.

The lecture’s force lay in its mixture of formal instruction and practical anticipation. Alongside the anatomy, Professor Grant mentioned curb and windgalls, then named conditions such as thoroughpins, sidebones, splints, and quittor—subjects the students would not study in detail for years. Those examples made the material immediate. Walking away, Herriot felt initiated into an exclusive club and thought he really knew about horses; even his new riding mac, its straps and buckles slapping against his legs as he turned into Newton Road, belonged to the excitement of that beginning.

The Scope of the Training

In retrospect, the college forms the starting point of a long and systematic education. Herriot describes five years of theory, moving from plants and the lowest forms of life through anatomy and physiology to materia medica, pathology, and parasitology. Medicine and surgery brought that accumulated study toward the everyday problems of animal care. Physics, chemistry, and hygiene broadened the curriculum further.

This breadth matters to the way the training is remembered: veterinary knowledge was built in layers, through both the study of living systems and the classification of disease and treatment. Yet Herriot’s image of knowledge as carefully stored fragments also suggests a limit. A large body of facts did not automatically settle what to do when a particular animal was in pain and the available evidence was incomplete.

Education Tested by Practice

Six months into work, Herriot could look back on treating cows, horses, pigs, dogs, and cats through every part of the day, and on the physical demands of calving cows and farrowing sows. Despite those experiences and his years of study, he felt that he knew almost nothing. The contrast does not diminish the college’s teaching; it shows how practice exposed the scale and uncertainty of the field beyond the classroom.

The cases that follow the recollection make that gap concrete. Faced with a horse staggering in severe pain, Herriot recognizes that an ordinary remedy is inadequate and considers intestinal torsion; examination by rectal palpation reveals displacement and a tense mass. In another case, subtle swallowing difficulty and a faint snoring sound raise concern about an abscess behind a cow’s throat, while a narrowed passage and the feel of a calf’s feet and head reveal uterine torsion in another cow. Such diagnoses depend on applying learned concepts to observed signs, while acknowledging what cannot yet be known. The college’s narrative significance rests in that double role: it provides the first exhilaration of professional knowledge, and the foundation against which the harder, never-finished education of practice becomes visible.