The 1 I th Kendall Oration

Some recent achievements of veterinary science in Australia AK SUTHERLAND

1 1 Epping Street, Malvern East, Victoria 3 145

This Oration commemorates the memory of William Tyson Ken- dall, founder in 1888 and first Principal of the Melbourne Veterinary College, which later became the Veterinary School of the University of Melbourne.

The oration sprang from the conception of Sir Colin McKenzie, the first Director of the Institute of Anatomy in Canberra, who had part of the exterior of that building decorated with masks of notable contributors to Australian biology and medicine, each of whom he hoped would become the subject of a commemorative oration. One of the notable contributors so commemorated was WT Kendall.

Dr Kendall died aged 85 years in 1936. His obituary is in the Australian Veterinary Journal of August 1936. This address records and discusses what we, as a veterinary profession in Australia, have built on the foundations that Kendall laid over 100 years ago.

There have been several publications on the life and work of WT Kendall, for example, the first Kendall Oration by WAN Robertson entitled WT Kendall: his Life and Work and several articles by E Murray Pullar and others, but the most thorough history of Kendall’s life and work is Jessica Taylor’s thesis entitled The Professionalisa- tion of Veterinary Science in Victoria, for which the University of Melbourne admitted her to the degree Master of Arts in 1990. It is a thorough and perceptive work that records and evaluates what the veterinary profession and veterinary science have achieved in Vic- toria (not the Commonwealth) from Kendall’s time to about World war 11.

Kendall arrived in Melbourne in 1880 en route to New Zealand, but he liked what he saw and stayed to commence practice in Melbourne. Kendall saw that to nurture a veterinary profession capable of serving the Colony’s livestock industries four things were needed, and he played a vital part in establishing all four.

First was a veterinary college, which he established and which accepted its first students in 1888.

The second was legislation in the form of The Veterinary Surgeons Act 1887, Victoria, to identify qualified veterinary surgeons and to regulate the practice of the profession.

The third was a professional association, the Australasian Veteri- nary Medical Association, which existed from 188 1 until about 1890.

Presented at the Annual General Meeting of the Australian Veterinary Association in Canberra on 1 1 March 1994

The fourth was a professional journal, so Kendall and Graham Mitchell produced the Australasian Veterinary Journal, which was published monthly, but it survived only one year.

To evaluate what we as a veterinary profession have built on what Kendall started, I will speak chiefly about what has been achieved in my veterinary lifetime - the 60 years from when I entered the University of Sydney Veterinary School in 1934 until the present time.

Veterinary Education WT Kendall was a clinician, so it was fortunate that when the

Melbourne Veterinary College was absorbed into the University of Melbourne Veterinary School, the University selected as the first Dean apathologist, Dr JA Gilruth, because Gilruth and his successor, Professor HA Woodruff, trained a bevy of outstanding leaders and veterinary research workers.

The Melbourne School closed in 1928 and did not resume under- graduate teaching until 1962. The closure was not attributable to the Depression, but from my reading of the history of the school by Hughes and Milne (1992), I attribute the closing to the failure of the Department of Agriculture, Victoria, to employ veterinary graduates in its animal health services. This is a matter that deserves firther historical examination.

Nevertheless, veterinary research flourished in a modest way in the 1920s and 1930s and led to great advances with respect to black disease and the other clostridial diseases of sheep, pleuropneumonia of cattle, nematodes, liver fluke, blowfly strike and footrot of sheep, and copper and cobalt deficiencies. These discoveries put Australia to the fore on the international veterinary scene, at least with respect to sheep and cattle.

Australia now has four veterinary schools teaching undergraduates at the Universities of Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland and Murdoch. All four schools are producing graduates who have shown them- selves capable of providing competent scientific and practical service to veterinary science throughout Australia and in many other coun- tries. However, with respect to veterinary education I would direct attention to the paper by the late Professor Mike Rex (1993). He analysed and discussed present trends and future needs of veterinary education world-wide. He called upon the Australian Veterinary Association (AVA) for support and action on several matters, but particularly the need “ ... to convince Government that present fund-

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ing is inadequate and that increased funding is urgently needed ifwe are to produce veterinarians of the quality the country will need in the next century.”I commend Professor Rex’s paper to members and to AVA Council.

Legislation The present Victorian Act is still much the same as the original of

1887, but similar Veterinary Surgeons Acts did not follow until 1926 in New South Wales, I935 in Queensland and later still in other States and Territories.

The Acts are always under threat of amendment, but in my opinion they serve the public, the animals and the profession very well, and the less they are tinkered with by bureaucrats and governments the better.

Veterinary Associations The Australasian Veterinary Medical Association created by Ken-

dall and Graham Mitchell survived only until 1891, and it was 1913 before another veterinary association was conceived -at a meeting of ANZAAS in Melbourne in 19 13 -but the gestation was prolonged by World War I, so that the AVA was not born until 1921.

The Association now has about 4000 members and a vast range of activities on behalf of members, animals, the livestock industries and public health. However, several important AVA achievements that tend to be overlooked or forgotten deserve mention here.

First, the AVA is the most important Voice of the Veterinary Profession so far as governments, State and Federal, the media, the public and animal owners are concerned.

The AVA was responsible for the re-opening of the University of Queensland Veterinary School after World War 11. This was achieved in the face of strong pressure to open a School of Animal Husbandry instead, which came from within the University and from parts of the State Government of the day.

The AVA initiated the University of Sydney Post-Graduate Com- mittee in Veterinary Science under the leadership of Dr Victor Cole, AVA President in 1961-62.

The AVA (Victorian Division) and the Graziers Association of Victoria, initiated the moves that led to the re-opening ofthe Univer- sity of Melbourne Veterinary School in 1962 (Montgomery and Hughes 1985; Blood 1992).

The AVA created the Australian College of Veterinary Scientists in 1971 and ensured that it grew to become a strong arm of the veterinary profession.

The AVA initiated the proposal that led to the creation ofthe Bureau of Animal Health within the Department of Primary Industry. It was a long struggle. That body is now the Bureau of Rural Resources and the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service.

The AVA was responsible for the establishment of Australia’s fourth veterinary school at Murdoch, Western Australia, rather than at the University of New England, New South Wales.

These are notable achievements for any professional body.

The Journal The Australian Veterinary Journal was first published in March

1925, with Max Henry as Honorary Editor. The Journal has been published continuously since then and has grown in quality and range as the profession has grown.

The Journal now goes to over 900 non-member subscribers and over 800 of these are overseas.

The role and the status of the Journal within Australia and overseas was described by Professor Keith Hughes, Honorary Editor for 17 years, in his response on receiving the Gilruth Prize, which is published in the Journal of October 1990.

Gee (1 994) wrote: ”The early acceptance of the Australian Veteri- nary Journal and its factual reporting ... gave the Australian veteri-

nary profession a high standing internationally. This was also seen in the high status achieved by the few expatriate veterinary gradu- ates”.

It is appropriate, however, that I should advise this annual general meeting that the audited accounts on pages 23 and 24 of the AVA Annual Report for 1993 show that the cost of publication, that is the Journal and A VA News, was $79 797 for the year, so that only $20 of the annual subscription of each member is attributable to the Journal and AVA News for the whole year.

The Control of Animal Disease I come now to the most important veterinary achievements in

Australia. First, on animal welfare, the greatest contribution to the welfare of

dogs in my lifetime was the introduction of canine distemper vacci- nation about 1935. Distemper was a ubiquitous and often horrible disease for dogs and for their owners. It is now a rare disease. The same could be said of advances in disease control for other animals and birds. We should not forget that disease control is an important contributor to animal welfare.

There have been three major recent veterinary achievements in Australia. These were the eradication of contagious bovine pleuro- pneumonia, bovine brucellosis and now bovine tuberculosis (Gee 1994).

Pleuropneumonia was introduced with a few cattle imported into Melbourne in 1858. There was no government veterinary service to deal with it, and the disease soon spread to New South Wales and then throughout Australia, except for the south-western comer of Western Australia. The disruption to the cattle industry was enor- mous. Australian veterinary research produced an effective vaccine and diagnostic method (the complement fixation test), so a national campaign to eradicate the disease was agreed between the Common- wealth and the States and commenced in the mid-1950s. The cam- paign of vaccination and eventually testing and slaughtering was funded by State and Federal Governments and the cattle industry by a levy on slaughtered cattle.

No case of bovine pleuropneumonia has been found in Australia since 1967 (Anon 1972). The history of the disease in Australia has been recorded by Newton ( 1992) who concluded:

CBPP was the first endemic disease of cattle to be eradicated from Australia. Even before the campaign had finished, the benefits of freer movement within and between States were enormous. Eradication had been easier and less costly than anticipated. It was important that it succeed as eradication programs for two other major diseases, tuberculosis and brucel- losis, had already begun and failure would have affected these programs adversely.

The Brucellosis and Tuberculosis Eradication Campaign com- menced in 1970 by agreement between the Australian Agricultural Council, State and Federal Governments and the cattle industry. There was grave concern at that time that countries importing our beef and dairy products might use the presence of these diseases to our detriment. This campaign also was funded by Commonwealth, State and Territory Governments and the cattle industry.

Australia was declared officially free of bovine brucellosis in 1989 (Anon 1989). The benefit to the cattle industry, to say nothing of the cattle themselves, was enormous. A side-benefit was that Brucella abortus was eliminated as a disease affecting people working with cattle on farms and in abattoirs. A residual minor problem is the occurrence of B suis infection in feral pigs in northern Australia. This is now a common cause of illness in people who hunt and slaughter feral pigs, and it is a minor hazard to cattle exposed to infected feral pigs (Robson et a1 1993; Gilbert 1993). This seems to me to be a matter worthy of urgent further research.

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Bovine brucellosis has been eradicated from a few other countries, but Australia is the first continent, admittedly an island continent, to achieve eradication. The USA is still trying.

And finally we can state that Australia was declared provisionally free of bovine tuberculosis in 1992. Monitoring at abattoirs through- out the country continues in order to detect any hidden remaining pockets of infection.

Thus veterinary science in Australia has a notable record of dia- gnosing, controlling and eradicating livestock diseases that have a severe effect on animal health, on profitability and on the nation’s export income. It is disturbing to read, therefore, that ‘The State and Territory animal health services are reeling from a period of savage cutbacks in both field and laboratory.” (Gee 1994). Equally disturb- ing are the bureaucratic reorganisations in Commonwealth and other government departments that deprive chief veterinary officers of the power to decide on action on livestock diseases. Even more disturb- ing is the recent announcement that the Department of Agriculture’s four regional veterinary laboratories in Victoria have been privatised to an American company with effect from June 1994.

To turn to a brighter note, another achievement is the establishment and development of the Australian Animal Health Laboratory at Geelong, so that specimens from suspected foreign disease no longer need to be sent to Pirbright, UK, or other overseas laboratories.

The impressive capabilities of AAHL in diagnosis of foreign diseases was recorded by Forman (1993). The laboratory’s expertise has been demonstrated in recent outbreaks of avian influenza and suspected vesicular disease of cattle, and has facilitated the safe importation of new genetic material through the new COCOS Island, Torrens Island and Spotswood quarantine facilities.

The Future There are still many animal diseases and parasites for which we

need improved control methods. To name just a few: blowfly strike, footrot, caseous lymphadenitis, bluetongue, and nematodes and liver fluke of sheep, ticks and tick fevers, mastitis and foot problems in cattle, in all species, improved reproductive performance would be welcome, and

the ever-present threat of introduction of foreign diseases and pests.

Molecular biology and other powerful new tools are now being used by pathologists, biochemists, microbiologists and immunolo- gists to tackle such problems. We are optimistic that more efficient diagnostic and control methods will emerge from such research. However, the testing, evaluation and application of new methods for control of animal diseases and parasites will still have to be done by veterinarians - as was the case with the three diseases of cattle that have been eradicated. We will have to ask the animals!

To conclude, I quote the last paragraph of Jessica Taylor’s thesis mentioned earlier:

To William Tyson Kendall and Graham Mitchell must go the credit for the legal establishment of the veterinary profession in Victoria, together with the opening of a school for training future practitioners. The measure of their success in having veterinary science accepted by society lay, though, in proving that veterinarians were able to offer a valuable and necessary service to the country which no others could provide satisfactorily. Sir Amold Theiler later put this need succinctly: “Animal health is national wealth”. Kendall and his successors ensured that their profession won acceptance and was able to put this maxim to good effect.

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References Anon (1972) Aust Vet 548529 Anon (1989) A VA News August 1989, page 273 Blood DC (1992) The Universify of Melbourne School of Veten’mvy Science:

A Recent History, University of Melbourne FormanAJ(1993)Ausf VetJ70:161 GeeRW(1994)AustVetJ71:1 Gilbert GL (1993)MedJAusf 159:147 Hughes KL (1990)Aust Vet J67:373 Hughes KL and Milne IL (1992) Aust Vet J69:325 Montgomery IW and Hughes KL (1985) Aust Vet J62:397 Newton LG (1992) Aust Vet J69:306 Rex MAE (1993)Aust Vet J70:369 Robson JM, Harrison MW, Wood RN, Tilse MH, McKay AB and Brodribb

TR(1993)MedJAust 159:153 Taylor J (1 990) The Professiodisafion of Veterinary Science in Victoria,

Master of Arts Thesis, University of Melbourne

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