Features
All Creatures and Other Tales
OVC students trade scalpels and stethoscopes for stories and poems about being, and becoming, veterinarians
BY ANDREW VOWLES
James Herriot is here. So are Margaret Atwood, Farley Mowat, Rudyard Kipling, Giller Prize winner Vincent Lam and Prof. David Waltner-Toews, Population Medicine. They're among numerous authors whose works are helping DVM students use the written word to explore some of the most deeply felt parts of being, and becoming, a veterinarian.
Offered at Guelph this winter for the third time by Ontario Veterinary College dean Elizabeth Stone, the second-year elective “Veterinary Medicine and Literature” allows up to 15 students to view veterinary practice through poems, plays, stories, essays and novels.
The five-week course is one of several recent initiatives at Guelph, including a “Community Readers” program and an upcoming conference, that use literature and other media to examine such topics as client communication and the human-animal bond. Other topics include becoming a medical professional; the dictum to “do no harm”; dying, death and grief; and retaining purpose and joy in the profession.
Stone, a veterinary surgeon, based the course on an offering she devised and taught along with poet and writing coach Hilde Weisert at the College of Veterinary Medicine at North Carolina State University. They also founded the Society for Veterinary Medicine and Literature, which promotes the topic through conferences, articles and a blog (www.vetmedandlit.org).
Here at Guelph, Stone hopes students will take away a few key lessons from their reading and writing. For instance, what does it mean to be a good veterinarian? How to treat clients and other practitioners with understanding and empathy? How does the human-animal bond work for both client and vet? And — given the science-heavy course load that is the DVM student's lot — just why did they decide to become veterinarians anyway?
That last one often hit home for the six students who met once a week this semester around the dean's corner office table. Stone thinks the chance to trade textbooks for poetry and prose collections makes a welcome breather and refresher for many of those students.
“It's almost like an oasis,” says the dean, who did her own share of comparative literature studies during a humanities undergraduate degree in California. “Literature works as a great equalizer.”
The extensive reading list includes works by and about veterinarians. Perhaps the best-known example is James Herriot's All Creatures series of books about life as an English country vet. Chapters from the series cover various topics, including client relations, the human-animal bond, finding purpose in work and dealing with death.
“His descriptions of people and their interactions with animals are superb,” says Stone, who often reads excerpts aloud to the class with mixed results. “I try to do the dialect, and it usually comes out as a southern accent instead of a Yorkshire accent.”
Another veterinarian on the list is Guelph epidemiologist Waltner-Toews, a prolific poet, short-story writer and novelist. Students encounter a piece from One Foot in Heaven, a collection of linked short stories he published in 2006.
Although he hasn't been involved with the course, Waltner-Toews says its goals resonate with him. “Good literature pushes one to be more self-reflective and to think about the complex contradictions of life within which our daily work is done.”
Beyond vets, there's a whole menagerie of animal-themed literature.
The course includes poems by Atwood (Elegy for a Giant Tortoise), Emily Dickinson (Surgeons Must Be Very Careful) and Toronto writer Molly Peacock (Fellini the Cat). Prose pieces include Hugh Lofting's Dr. Doolittle and Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories.
But it doesn't end with animals. Many of the same issues touch both veterinarians and medical doctors.
There's Lam, a Toronto emergency physician whose short-story collection, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, won the 2006 Giller Prize. Or Atul Gawande, an American surgeon whose essays have appeared in The New Yorker and Slate and have been collected in his books Complications and Better.
Many other works are collected in On Doctoring, an American anthology of stories, poems and essays. American medical schools have taught medicine and literature courses since the early 1970s.
Besides reading, students are required to write their own poems, essays or stories. “Almost anyone connected with veterinary medicine has a story,” says Stone. “They bring their thoughts and emotions to the forefront.”
When DVM student Colleen Best took the course two years ago, she wrote a short piece about her bond with a racehorse she had nursed for a month after colic surgery. Talking over stories with colleagues is one thing, she says, but writing the story — and reading it during class — forced her to look at the experience differently.
She says the course readings opened up discussion of morals and ethics in a non-confrontational way. “It was like the Aesop's Fables of vet medicine. You could take something away from each one, and it made you better.”
In a 2004 journal article, Stone and Weisert discussed the results of a survey that found many students thought the course had improved their understanding of the key topics. Stone says she thinks literature helps drive home lessons in a different way — and perhaps more effectively — than addressing the same topics in a more conventional lecture-based format.
For instance, the essay Language Barriers by Elspeth Cameron Ritchie forces readers to ponder how vet lingo might differ from a client's words and ideas, reinforcing the need to look at an issue from different perspectives.
Similarly, Peacock's Fellini the Cat contrasts the clinician's and the client's view of death.
“It's a spiritual time for owners,” says Stone. “Reading this kind of poem helps vet students reconnect with what this might mean for the average person. That's the beauty of literature — people being able to express their opinions and the opportunity for dialogue.”
Vet literature and the profession are connected at Guelph through other initiatives, including the “Community Readers” program launched last year. Under that program, all first-year students receive a copy of a selected book (last year it was The Chickens Fight Back by Waltner-Toews; this year it was The Rhino With the Glue-On Shoes and Other Surprising True Stories of Zoo Vets and Their Patients, edited by Lucy Spelman and Ted Mashima). The students are invited to discuss the book with graduate students, staff and faculty. Each year, the program culminates in a reading from the book.
In another initiative, OVC will co-sponsor a March 30 reading by Toronto writer and broadcaster Erika Ritter from her new book, The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath: Some Paradoxes of Human-Animal Relationships.
In May, how veterinarians are depicted in literature and film will be the subject of a talk by OVC post-doc Marie-France Boissonneault during a Guelph conference on the changing role of women in the profession.
Boissonneault studied psychology and film, as well as marine science and communications, before meeting up with Stone. Now dividing her time between Guelph and her native Quebec, she has dug into memoirs, movies and animal literature to learn how culture shapes ideas, particularly among new DVM students.
Childish Ways
(Written by a second-year DVM student)
I remember clearly
Evenings spent under the hot lamp at my bedroom desk
X-acto knife in hand
Building, creating
My father gave me a love of delicate model airplanes
Too fragile for my inexperienced fingers
But I loved them so
With half-made wheels
Or propellers glued in place
Windows stuck up with fingerprints so I can't see
The tiny captain inside
Guiding his craft on journeys of imagination
Into the unknown
Now I am under that hot lamp again
A mask shields my face to keep out
Not model cement but
The thick smell that would cling in my throat
Tempting my stomach to empty
With warm waves; a ferrous flood
Blood oozes from my patient
There is no instruction booklet to follow
No decals to put on when I am finished
Yet how a ligament
Which, slipping against my finger,
Reminds me of elastics taut to the plane's fuselage
Too strained for metaphors
Not here and now
Once again I am the small boy
Unsure of all he knows
How awkward to learn again and again as a man
So far removed from my childish inquiry
Now will my propeller turn?
Will my wheels hold up this body?
Now I am the captain who cannot see
And my imagination still races through the unknown
Yet I must guide this craft to a safe landing
And back to a guardian's loving embrace
Are my fingers ready for the weight of this knife?