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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 27, 1984)
Monday, August 27, 1984AThe Battalion/Page 5C s jfi A&M vets: pioneers in their fields By MICHAEL CANNATA Reporter With a dead snake under one arm apd a jug of wine under the other, a ieterinarian in 1684 was no more lan a glorified witch doctor. Three s four-™ hundred years later, Texas A&M > two pir | veter i nar i ans are pioneers in the icdical profession, experimenting with theories that one day may he me standard in human medicine. About a tenth of all veterinarians in the United States come from the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine, one of the 10 original vet- ierinary colleges and the largest in : the country. k Today the college, located west of the main campus on Farm Road 60, levelop«l!:|graduates a class of 138 each year campusiBith Doctor of Veterinary Medicine licrocircutidegrees. A total of 4,031 veterinar- 1 heart ilians have graduated from Texas A&M. More than 550 students are in the curriculum at the moment. I Dr. George Shelton, dean of the college for 11 years, has seen the col- Hege strengthen its teaching pro- brat), to tt| grams. Despite a reduced national 85, will tJinterest in veterinary colleges a sur al Medici!; plus of veterinarians has developed sizes iculty md urricukut pent tabs courses s compl the Templi and Vikii )lin E.T& has a strait ion audit pis of it id. tidy of tffl lar and cd :h and m 3P« inary Med m some areas. However, Shelton structedm says, Texas A&M graduates are still connefliih in high demand, in part because of y Medk I their speciality training. I ‘‘We’ve strengthened our clinical Ijleaching programs a great deal,” Shelton says. “We’ve brought in a sident and intern training pro- am patterned somewhat after hu- an medicine where young veteri narians do get some specialty paining. At the same time, they con- |ibute to the teaching program.” I Shelton says veterinarians can no longer rely solely on a DVM degree ante totnBistead, they must pursue additional atmospbBaining in fields such as toxicology, arddealt'Ipaihology, laboratory animal medi- ley s are a All throif t barbe®' g-of-war: geofHopt ied by Fund am irganizesai with Of (gram on campus ! of adorn i by payiui hich alio* dorm fuoc (irogni ional pro icils. It cos- ohol aw» conditi® e promi id itw"' •e, Harlor Resides the Texii m and if \ssociatio: ities. ic d given i, Icine, equine and food animal medi- |ne. •Country Atmosphere complete with pool and games ^ A place you’ll want to come back to... r - 3600 South College Bryan 846-3306 odems a allow con e and i micationsi I -orry ato -ith modi mean bool v compun iwith. | micate still with con i,“then s« :h. The st astronoit oputers ied six; a»f iiiiiiiiiiiiimiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimiiiiiiiiimiiimiiii VGef A<mON\ with mwr About a tenth of all veterinarians in the United States come from the Texas A&M College of Vet erinary Medicine, one of the 10 original veterinary colleges and the largest in the country. New facilities, in addition to cur riculum changes such as the resident and intern training program, have improved the college, Shelton says. The newest facility, the Veteri nary Teaching Hospital, includes both the large and small animal clin ics. It has the largest case load of any animal hospital in the United States with about 30,000 cases per year. Twenty-two veterinarians are en rolled in intern and resident pro grams in the Veterinary Teaching Hospital, which functions like a gi ant laboratory for students in their third and fourth years of their pro fessional education. The College of Veterinary Medi cine has 135 fulltime professors in tenure positions and about 60 non tenure positions. Support personnel number more than 300, including clerical and technical positions. The newest addition to the col lege, a joint project with the College of Meciicine, is the Medicial Sciences Library located across Farm Road 60. It will be connected by an under ground tunnel. “It’s a good size medicial library, and perhaps one day it will be the best medical science library in the state of Texas,” Shelton says. Improvements in the facilities at the college are encouraging students to apply, but the main reason more than 500 quailified students apply each year is the cost of tuition, says Shelton. “Our tuition rates are very low, and when compared with other insti tutions it is embarrassingly low,” he says. “For instance, our tuition and building use fee are $10 per student credit hour, and that’s low when you look at schools like Cornell and Pennsylvania. At places like those, the tuition alone is running close to $2,000 per year, and we’re looking at one-tenth of that.” Today’s college is a far cry from the one at the turn of the century when Texas was still wild and not that many people wanted to be vet erinarians. The College of Veterinary Medi cine’s history began in 1916. It sprang from a need, to stop the spreading of Texas fever, a disease that was decimating livestock herds. The Texas Legislature allocated $100,000 for a veterinary college, so the construction of Francis Hall be gan. Dr. Mark Francis, the first dean of the college and the “father of vet erinary medicine in Texas,” is cred ited with convincing the legislature of the need for the college. Francis taught the first classes there with only 13 students enrolled. In 1920 the first class graduated. It had four students. Since that time the graduates of the college have set academic stan dards for the nation to follow. The curriculum at the college is con stantly being up-graded, says Dr. Dean Gage, associate dean for aca demic affairs. He says several academic policies, some which will not take effect until September 1985, are making the col lege tougher and better. “Starting with the class of ’83, the minimal passing academic standard is a 70 rather than a a 60,” Gage says. “What we’ve done is dropped the D grade so it’s A, B, C or F.” The academic calendar was switched back to four years, says Gage, because the students and the staff couldn’t keep up a three-year pace. “The accelerated curriculum was very stressful on the students,” he says. “They had no breaks, no time off. It was very time consuming, and the amount of material covered was overwhelming.” Texas A&M veterinary graduates have been scoring well above the na tional average on the national board’s examination for licensure despite the previously stressful cur riculum, Gage says. The most important change to take place, Gage says, will be the re cently approved pre-professional curriculum. The change will add 17 undergraduate credit hours to cur rent requirements. The added hours are classes in biochemistry, com- E uter science, nutrition and entomo- >gy. The required credit hours will jump from 66 to 83. This change will require the appli cants to have at least three years of college credit, although most stu dents enter with an average of four and a half years of pre-professional education. In addition to teaching, many vet erinarians are employed by federal, state, and local agenies to control or eliminate diseases in the animal in dustry. In public health, the primary con cern is fo stop those diseases that can spead to man from becoming epide-. mic and to control those which can’t be stopped. Through the research at the vet erinary college many diseases have been controlled and several modern human medical techniques have been developed. 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