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This article details the remarkable life of Dr Thomas Somerville, who qualified both as a veterinary surgeon and medical practitioner, served in two world wars and was recommended for the nation's highest award for gallantry. In doing so, it records the life of a man whose repeated gallantry on the battlefield has been overlooked.

The first meeting leading to the formation of the European College of Veterinary Surgeons (ECVS) was held August 30/31, 1990 in Lenzburg, Switzerland. Specialists in small animal and large animal surgery from practice and academicians from many European countries were invited. The constitution was developed based on that of the American College of Veterinary Surgeons (ACVS). ECVS was founded during the ACVS European Surgical Forum in Nice in 1991. The provisional Board elected at this meeting stayed active during the initial 4 years to provide stability. For the 146 Charter Members to become a Diplomate, they had to pass an examination. Therefore, the ECVS is the only Specialty College that does not have a "Grand Father Clause." In 2000 ECVS, was the first College to acquire full recognition-status by the European Board of Specialization (EBVS), which underlines the leading role the surgeons play in the development of the European veterinary specialty colleges. Like its American Sister College, ECVS maintains high standards for surgical training programs for Residents and administers rigorous certifying examinations. It is appropriate to recall the facts that lead to foundation of ECVS on its 20-year anniversary., (© Copyright 2011 by The American College of Veterinary Surgeons.)

Advances in veterinary orthopaedics are assessed on their ability to improve the function and wellbeing of animal patients. And yet historically veterinarians have struggled to bridge the divide between an animal's physicality and its interior experience of its function in clinical settings. For much of the twentieth century, most practitioners were agnostic to the possibility of animal mentation and its implications for suffering. This attitude has changed as veterinarians adapted to technological innovations and the emergence of a clientele who claimed to understand and relate to the subjective experiences of their animals. While visualising technologies and human analogies have shaped the nuts and bolts of veterinary orthopaedic practices, an emerging awareness of the inability of radiographic images to apprehend or correlate to a patient's experience of their function reliably has required veterinarians to place a greater emphasis on the owner's knowledge of the "selves" inhabiting their animals. Rather than simply basing clinical judgments on the "look" of their patients, the indeterminacy in the connection between form and function has compelled veterinarians to put questions regarding particular human-animal relationships near the centre of their practices, not least in orthopaedic surgery.

In this paper we examine the role of animals in orthopaedic surgery and research in the 1960s. We describe their different roles as patients and laboratory models in the emergence of two new biomedical objects that we call "implant-pets" and "bone-sheep." For this purpose, the ways of practicing (veterinary) orthopaedic surgery and of "materializing," or bringing into being, complex and heterogeneous biomedical objects are analyzed as the coevolving histories of humans and animals. Focusing on non-discursive material practices, we use the concept of "articulation" in order to explore the inventive and intervening character of biomedical practices that led to the existence of implant-pets and bone-sheep. Our analysis interprets the distribution of human-like and animal-like character features and values to these animals not as the result of a stable animal-human boundary, but as the effect of diverse interactions in contingent historical situations. This dynamic-relational approach makes it possible to investigate the drawing of human-animal boundaries in the making and thus contributes in a new way to the study of animal-human relationships in history.

Current veterinary history has not engaged significantly with patient histories. In many historical accounts of veterinary medicine, animal patients are backgrounded or completely invisible. Yet modern veterinary medicine, in its dominant form of companion animal practice, has become increasingly patient-centred. The modern animal patient is accorded something near full subject status in many veterinary clinical interactions. Embracing this raises issues of how to handle animals in veterinary history. Animals are the recipients of veterinary medicine, they exert agency in the clinic and field, yet they have remained problematical for the historian and sociologist, who have remained anthropocentric in orientation. This paper explores different constructions of the veterinary surgical patient in the 20th century in an attempt to begin examination of veterinary history as an animal-patient history "from below." In doing so, a trajectory of the development of British 20th-century veterinary medicine is presented which suggests the value of minding animals in historical accounts. Further interdisciplinary studies of veterinary procedures and practices are needed in order to foreground animals more and evaluate their subject status within historical and contemporary veterinary medicine.

AThis paper looks at the entangled histories of animal-human relationship and modem surgery. It starts with the various different roles animals have in surgery--patients, experimental models and organ providers--and analyses where these seemingly contradictory positions of animals come from historically. The analyses is based on the assumption that both the heterogeneous relationships of humans to animals and modern surgery are the results of fundamentally local, contingent and situated developments and not reducible to large-scale social explanations, such as modernization. This change of perspective opens up a new ways of understanding both phenomena as deeply interwoven with the redrawing of the nature-culture divide.

Sometimes the name of instruments in veterinary text books and catalogs of medical suppliers points to their origin. Between 1850 and 1950 quite a number of veterinarians in Switzerland invented various instruments. They passed their ideas on or produced and distributed their inventions. The ideas originated from their daily work, such as surgery and treatments in the field of diseases in obstetrics and reproduction, udder diseases and digestive system.

Balloon valvuloplasty (BV) is currently the treatment of choice for pulmonic stenosis in humans and dogs. Before permission was obtained to attempt the 1st BV in a child in 1982, the safety and efficacy of the procedure were tested in 1980 in an English Bulldog with spontaneous pulmonic stenosis. A fatal outcome would have caused indefinite postponement of BV in human patients, a procedure that currently benefits over 25,000 patients a year worldwide. This article describes the initial test procedure and its fortunate outcome in spite of unrecognized coronary anomalies in the bulldog. A small balloon was used in the test procedure, and fatal disruption of the anomalous left coronary artery (CA) did not occur as it has in several bulldogs since that time.

At the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century experimental hypophysectomy was carried out on cats and dogs, by means of the lateral temporal approach, to investigate the physiological role of the pituitary gland because there was a debate as to whether the pituitary gland was essential for life. At the same time pioneering neurosurgeons such as Harvey Cushing used animal experiments to explore the different approaches to the neurocranium and the pituitary, thereby taking the first steps towards neurosurgery in humans. Eventually the transsphenoidal route was chosen for such an operation. Veterinary medicine has benefited from these developments in the medical field. For the past few decades, hypophysectomy has been used for the treatment of pituitary adenomas in dogs and cats that are kept as pets.

There are clearly a number of applications for which flexible endoscopic laser surgery has become the state of the art in equine surgery, and the Nd:YAG laser seems to be the most versatile instrument for this type of surgery. Nevertheless, it is critical to understand the advantages and disadvantages of each laser technique. For example, the Nd:YAG laser used in a noncontact fashion seems to be superior when ablation of tissue is required such as treatment of upper airway masses. Conversely, contact Nd:YAG laser techniques have proven themselves to be superior when more precise cutting is advantageous such as treatment of epiglottic entrapment. Ultimately, it seems that a range of lasers is necessary to ensure selection of the most appropriate technique, adding significantly to the expense of equipment but improving the outcome for a range of equine diseases.

Equine surgery continues to benefit from advances in endoscopic surgical techniques. Much of what we have learned in equine endoscopy comes from techniques used in humans. Descriptions of the normal anatomy of the standing horse and advances in instrumentation have improved our ability to perform laparoscopic surgery in standing and dorsally recumbent horses. This article describes the history of laparoscopy and available instrumentation.

By this review we commemorate professor dr. dr. h.c. G.H.B. Teunissen, who died on August 20, 1998. We report his important role in the development of human and small animal thoracic surgery in the Netherlands following his appointment as professor in the Small Animal Clinic of the State University of Utrecht in January 1947. Comparing Teunissen's publications on thoracic surgery with other literature on this subject in the same period shows that he was aware of and made use of the possibilities of the developments at that time. Thanks to his contributions, the small animal thoracic surgery in Utrecht is internationally recognized.

In German speaking countries Fr. H. ROLOFF (1830-1885) was one of the first veterinarians, who was active in the field of nutrition related diseases as osteomalacia, rickets or lupinosis. After careful epidemiologic studies, he developed hypotheses about the pathogenesis of the above mentioned diseases and tested them in experiments (with dogs or sheep). His work demonstrates, that clinical observations may stimulate research in animal nutrition.

A collection of 159 histopathological slides from 1893 was studied as to origin, condition and documentary value. The slides were dated in Leipzig, Germany, September 26-October 10, 1893. They had apparently been studied jointly by a Swedish veterinary surgeon (Knut August Hjalmar Dahlström) and one or several unknown German colleagues of his in Leipzig, and labelled with their diagnoses. In this paper the collection is referred to as the Leipzig collection. The majority of the slides were well preserved. They reflect part of the animal disease situation, and in some instances also human diseases. Some interesting cases are briefly presented in this paper, one of them even in this abstract, i.e. a case of embryonal nephroma in pig. Six years before Wilms in 1899 described this tumour in children, and 14 years before Day in 1907 described the first case in pig, our then colleagues failed to recognize the embryonic character of the tumour. Their diagnosis was renal adenoma. About 80 percent of the slides were diagnosed as done according to present day procedure. The quality of the slides and that of the diagnostic skill of which they bear witness certainly reflect the far-reaching progress that was made in the knowledge of the nature of diseases and their causes during the second half of the 19th century.

The American College of Veterinary Surgeons (ACVS), founded in 1965 and recognized by the AVMA in 1970, maintains high standards for surgical training programs and administers rigorous certifying examinations. It provides educational outreach to the veterinary medical profession by presenting scientific programs at ACVS annual meetings, sponsoring the Veterinary Surgical Forum in the USA and Europe, and publishing a refereed journal, Veterinary Surgery. The ACVS offers research grants and other awards to surgical residents, and encourages its members to pursue original investigations and contribute to the veterinary literature. In its silver anniversary year, it is appropriate to recall the aspirations and accomplishments of this forward-looking specialty organization.