Edinburgh’s Veterinary Women

This article first appeared in University of Edinburgh Journal, 51(4) (2024), pp. 278-290.

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Each year, the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, known to its friends and alumni worldwide as the Dick Vet, welcomes around 170 new students on its Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine and Surgery (BVM&S) programmes. 

The five-year course is the typical route for UK school-leavers, with a four-year option available for about 60 graduate entrants, many of them international, who have a first degree in life sciences. Just over 80 per cent of the students at the annual White Coat Ceremony of welcome each year are women, a figure typical of veterinary schools worldwide. The veterinary profession has ‘feminised’, to use a term which first found currency in the international veterinary press in the 1990s and early 2000s. 

Since mid-20th century, women have been attracted to this profession in steadily increasing numbers and have found careers in all the veterinary disciplines and specialties but, as with medicine, the struggle for true equality of opportunity has not been easy. The history of the early, pioneering veterinary women is less well-known than that of their medical counterparts, and it is fair to say that progress towards gender equality in veterinary medicine experienced a particularly difficult birthing, a dystokia indeed. 

It is a story in which Edinburgh features prominently.

Let’s begin with a Tweet (as was). 

In 2022, I came across a post to the thread #InHerShoes. The writer was in The Royal Dick Bar at Summerhall, and shared an image of the old animal hospital entrance sign on display there. 

‘Going to a gig tonight,’ she wrote. ‘I feel privileged to be in the building where Aileen Cust the first ever female vet trained’. 

It was a lovely post, and an easy mistake to make. Britain’s first woman vet did indeed train in Edinburgh, but not at the Dick Vet which, in 2023, celebrated its bicentenary. Cust qualified in 1897 from New Edinburgh Veterinary College, which opened in 1873 at East London Street, moved to new premises in Elm Row in 1883, and then, in 1904, transferred to Liverpool to become the first vet school fully incorporated into a university. 

New Edinburgh Veterinary College is not to be confused with the earlier Edinburgh (New) Veterinary College, which opened in 1857 at Drummond Street before moving across Edinburgh to Lothian Road in 1862, and then relocating to London in 1865 to become the second veterinary college there (where it was known as Albert Veterinary College). 

The two names – Edinburgh (New) and New Edinburgh – seem purposely designed to confuse. So how many veterinary colleges did Edinburgh have? The answer is four, if we include the Polish Veterinary Faculty, the veterinary equivalent of the Polish Medical School which operated during the war years for displaced students. The Polish Veterinary Faculty operated within the Dick Vet but existed as a separate entity and had some teaching spaces of its own.

The historical geography of veterinary education in Edinburgh is therefore interesting and complicated, not least because of a fondness for the use of the word ‘new’. Since 2011, when the Dick Vet finally vacated its historic Summerhall site, all teaching has been located at the Easter Bush campus, still referred to by one and all as NVS − New Veterinary School. 

Vets, it seems, are unimaginative when it comes to naming their institutions, although perhaps ‘the Dick Vet’ makes up for this. But what of this older ‘new’ veterinary college that trained Aleen as she was universally known? Historical cause and effect can be a curious thing and to understand how Aleen came to be trained at New Edinburgh Veterinary College we have to understand a bit about the history of the Dick Vet, and also our broaden our focus from ‘woman veterinary surgeon’ to ‘veterinary woman’. This subtle change allows us to bring someone in from the periphery, an individual always present in discussions about the history of Dick Vet but one who perpetually exists in the shadow of her famous brother. 

It is Mary Dick, William’s sister. She was not a veterinary surgeon, yet she was key to the success of veterinary education in Edinburgh, which began in 1823 when her brother gave a series of lectures at the Calton Convening Rooms (now Howie’s restaurant) supplemented with practical classes at his father’s forge in Clyde Street (now the site of Edinburgh bus station). It turns out Mary was also, indirectly, key to the inception of New Edinburgh Veterinary College but that, as we will see, was a less than happy association.

In 1817, on hearing from a neighbour about a London-trained veterinary surgeon in Edinburgh, Mary Dick was said to have responded, ‘Oor Willum’s gaun tae be a graun’ veet’nar. He’s saved enough siller noo tae tak the lang road coach for London, and he’s making his will afore he sterts.’ ¹

That journey was to the London Veterinary College. It had opened in 1791 on the French model, but its progressive first Principal died in 1793 after only a short time in post. He succumbed to glanders, a horse disease that could also afflict humans (a zoonosis in modern parlance). Charles Benoit Vial de St Bel was succeeded by a London medical surgeon, Edward Coleman. Dick arrived in town around half-way through during Coleman’s long tenure at London. 

This farrier’s son from the north evidently felt his training in Edinburgh, where he had come under the influence of renowned comparative anatomist, Dr John Barclay, was superior to anything available south of the border. Dick later wrote:

Present day veterinary students facing four or five years’ hard graft may gasp when told of Dick’s brief sojourn at vet school, but the young farrier arrived in London already trained by one of the finest anatomists and medical educators in the world. 

The scheme cherished in Dick’s mind was to open a veterinary college of his own, and in this Barclay fully supported him. He started on the project immediately, with several series of lectures delivered between 1819 and 1821, before opening his college in 1823. 

It was a family affair from the start and for many years Dick was the only teacher, funding his college from the proceeds of his horse practice. So successful was this private practice that it was said that Dick paid for substantial property he accumulated in Fife from the proceeds of his practice that were earned before breakfast. 

In the grand historical scheme of things, Dick appeared in Edinburgh, Athens of the North and epicentre of the Scottish Enlightenment, at just the right time. Extensive practical training as a farrier at his father’s side, wedded to Barclayan comparative anatomy, resulted in a more rational system of medicine that reaped rewards (more horses cured).

Mary Dick (Fig. 1) played a central part in the whole endeavour. It probably would not have succeeded without her. We know she had a role in what we would now call student support and that erring students had to report to her. She may well have supported Dick with school and practice financial management, and she certainly maintained the household: neither married and brother and sister lived together ‘above the shop’. 

A bit like the veterinary wives of single-handed practitioners up and down the country, Mary would likely have been drawn into a wide variety of tasks. At any rate, for nigh on 50 years while Dick lectured, practised, wrote, and contributed to the development of the profession in Edinburgh and beyond, his sister steadfastly supported him. 

Then, in 1866, Dick visited London to investigate cases of cattle plague. The great pandemic of 1865 had finally reached Britain (through the port of Hull) and tracked south. Despite a national day of prayer to try to halt its spread, the disease was relentless. 

Dick was already a sick man before the journey to London, with difficulties breathing, and it is possible the lengthy travel caused deterioration in his health, leading to his death from heart failure on 4 April 1866 after his return to Edinburgh. He is buried in New Calton Burial Ground, just a short distance from his birthplace in White Horse Close.

Her brother’s death must have been a terrible blow to Mary but she retained her prominent role at the college. The Principal from 1867 was William Williams, who had trained under Dick. In 1873, following a series of disagreements with Mary Dick, which were serious enough to end up in the courts, Williams left his alma mater to set up a rival college, New Edinburgh Veterinary College. 

It must have been difficult for Mary to work with someone else and Williams had a very different personality from her brother. Like Dick, though, Williams was a popular teacher. When he left, he took most of the students with him and, because the library belonged to the students, most of the books went too. 

This was a precarious time for the Dick Vet and it could have folded. After a series of unsettling changes in leadership, stability was finally regained under the steadying influence of Thomas Walley, who stayed at the helm for 20 years from 1874.²

In an indirect way, then, through bringing about the departure of William Williams, Mary Dick created the circumstances for the first woman to enter a course of veterinary study. That woman would be Aleen Cust and the veterinary college, the New Edinburgh, run by an enterprising Welshman who became a strong advocate for women in the profession.

Connie Ford’s biography of Aileen Cust, recently reissued by Routledge, gives a rich account of Cust’s background and career. There’s also a popular novel, The Invincible Miss Cust, written by Penny Haw, and the story would probably make a good film. 

It is a tale of determination – of the talent and tenacity shown by all the pioneering women vets – with, in Cust’s case, a strong injection of pathos. She came from an aristocratic family with prominent connections at court, and had an idyllic childhood surrounded by ponies and dogs in Ireland, but her choice of career effectively isolated her from much of her family, and this lasted a lifetime. 

Not only that, she was ostracised by the profession she hoped to join, so much so that she was not admitted to the Register of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) until 1922, 25 years after she had qualified with high honours in Edinburgh (Fig. 2). 

Her eventual admission to the Register was enabled by the clunkily titled Sexual Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919. The RCVS became legally bound to accept her. Prior to this, she had been barred from practising her profession in Britain and instead worked under the radar in Ireland, where she was much respected as a country veterinary surgeon. In fact, she could have taken the RCVS to court and would probably have won. The RCVS had acted in a somewhat duplicitous manner concerning her case but, after an initial attempt at the Edinburgh Court of Session, put forward by Williams on Cust’s behalf, the matter was dropped, probably to avoid embarrassment to the Cust family in London.

By April 1934, Cust had been rehabilitated enough for the profession’s house journal, The Veterinary Record, to run a special Ladies Number.³ The issue reported on an event held by the Central Veterinary Society in London on the topic of women in the profession. Aleen was invited as guest of honour and regaled the audience with stories of ‘roughing it’ as a large animal vet in Ireland. 

She accepted that most of the women students and vets in her audience would, of necessity, probably end up working with dogs and cats, but for those who wanted to follow her path she offered a few hints for veterinary life in the farm yard and stable: how to shoot a horse without having it fall on top of you; how to make a funnel using the thumbs to allow pouring from a large container into a small dispensing bottle; and how to improvise an instrument from the car repair outfit to perforate the hymen in so-called white heifer disease of cattle. 

But the reality was it was extremely difficult for women vets to get any kind of job. Some ended up working unpaid; most had, like Cust, graduated with high honours and hoped for a career in mixed general practice doing the full range of veterinary work. They were to be disappointed. A well-meaning but patronising attitude about what women could and could not do as vets was summed up in the editorial of the special Ladies Number:

Another comment suggests an interesting view of gender and the veterinary role. The writer wondered whether the previous generations of old-time horse vets, with their disdain for books and ‘theory’, would now consider the colleges ‘largely filled with unregenerate, pallid and studious sons of suburbia, with a sprinkling of virile and competent women’. Aleen Cust certainly seems to have been made in the latter mould but if this was a compliment to those early veterinary women it did not much alter their prospects. 

The numbers of women graduated from the different veterinary schools at the time of the Record's special issue in 1934 tells an interesting geographical story (Table 1). The Dick Vet remained resistant, while London and Liverpool seemed progressive, London especially so under the influence of its principal, Frederick Hobday.

*Data in the table are extracted from a document in which one page is partly missing (that corresponding to 1947), so it is possible the numbers qualifying that year are slightly larger than quoted here.

Why was the second oldest veterinary school in Britain so slow to admit women? It was not the case that none were applying. One woman had applied to the Dick Vet as far back as 1920 but was told all places were being reserved for ex-servicemen. Miss Hilda Bisset’s enquiry to the college in January 1920 was no doubt connected with the recent passing of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act in 1919. Hilda Bisset went on to qualify at Dublin in 1927, one of three women to enter the profession that year, two from Dublin and one from Liverpool. 

The principal of the Dick in the crucial period of 1911-37 was Orlando Charnock-Bradley. He appears a progressive individual and did much for the profession locally and nationally; his diaries show he knew Aleen Cust and met her in Edinburgh while she was studying at his old college (he was a New Edinburgh alumnus himself). He likely offered her advice in her studies, yet years later the Dick Vet under his leadership remained resistant to admitting women. Perhaps there was a problem of internal politics. 

If so, the reasons have not surfaced but clues may yet be lurking in the archive. In 1938, an issue of The Centaur, the Dick Vet student magazine, carried a piece on ‘Dick Entry Qualifications’. It noted that students ‘must be essentially male, unless wishing to be a secretary, when skirts must be worn’ and that all students should ‘abhor the sight of women within the gray walls’.

The Dick Vet did not graduate its first women until 14 years after The Veterinary Record first celebrated women veterinary surgeons in print. In 1948, four women were in the graduating class: Elizabeth A. Y. Caird, Elizabeth A. Copland, Marjorie E. Millar and Ann C. Preston. These, then, are the ‘Dick Vet Four’ – the college had finally qualified a quartet of women who could take up the baton that Aleen Cust first seized 51 years before in Edinburgh (Fig. 3).

There was, however, an earlier woman student who graduated in the Dick Vet, if not from it. During the later war years, a Polish Veterinary Faculty was established in Edinburgh, mirroring a similar initiative at the medical school. The veterinary faculty operated from 1943-48 and used some of the teaching facilities at the Dick Vet. 

Janina Maria Sokołowska started her veterinary training in 1934 but her education was interrupted by war occupation just as she entered the final part of her training at Lwów Veterinary Medicine Academy. She sought refuge in Edinburgh with some 63 fellow students and finally obtained her veterinary diploma in August 1945 after studying in the Dick Vet, but as part of the Polish Veterinary Faculty in exile.⁴ It is ironic that the first woman to become a veterinarian at the Dick Vet was not a matriculated student there.

Just as the first Dick Vet women had been settling into their course in 1944, the government published an updated version of the pre-war Loveday Committee report, which had been considering the whole structure and remit of British veterinary education. 

The 1944 version reaffirmed many of the original recommendations, but they were now given much more urgency. The Atlantic Blockade had shown that the nation was not self-sufficient in its food supply; the war-time government had been days away from declaring a nutritional emergency. This, it was agreed, must never happen again. 

A key theme of the 1938 Loveday report was that the British veterinary profession was backward-looking, still fixated on the now redundant horse, and paying too little attention to an animal that could embody a new policy towards human food and nutrition: the humble dairy cow. 

The report took a few well-aimed swipes at the vet schools for providing a stagnant education unresponsive to the nation’s needs − ‘spiteful bosh’, A. M. Whitehouse, principal of Glasgow Veterinary School, responded, and debate raged in the columns of The Veterinary Record. However, the Loveday Committee repeated its assertion that the veterinary surgeon of the future must now be trained as a ‘physician of the farm’.

Around the time women started to train in higher numbers, the British veterinary profession was in an existential crisis following the decline of horse transport. As an animal, the horse was both noble and useful, and the equine class structure, from blue-blooded thoroughbreds, through ‘middle class’ hacks and hunters down to humble cart and commercial horses, mirrored and reinforced the human one. By attending to horses in all their varied and important roles in human society, the veterinary profession, too, could think of itself as noble and useful. 

The suggested new species of focus, cattle, did not quite cut the mustard in the same way. The veterinary profession had lost a symbolic animal of focus and identity in the horse, and there seemed no other available to replace it (Fig. 4).

The intended re-set of the profession’s role and purpose by the Loveday Committee was in some ways an opportunity. Human and animal health were to be drawn closer under the same umbrella using an old idea of One Medicine (later to be expanded and recast as One Health). The term ‘physician of the farm’ reflected the new inter-disciplinary outlook. However, this bold vision was one in which women were side-lined.

 It must have been depressing for those first Dick Vet women students to read phrases like the following in a report that was supposed to modernise the British veterinary profession: ‘We could not justify expenditure of public money on the training of women for work among dogs and cats; the number of women admitted by the schools should be small’.

What the Loveday Committee were trying to do, no doubt with the best of intentions, was to socially engineer a profession to make it better suit society’s needs. In doing so, they were making assumptions not just about gender but also social background (‘The veterinary student is more likely to be successful if he comes from the farm or is the son of a practising veterinary surgeon than if he is town bred’). 

It is also clear that in a job where professional identity was (and still is) constructed around animal species − horse vet, farm vet, small animal vet, etc. − animal species was heavily gendered. 

For a profession of men, work with some animals (horses, cattle, working dogs) had been seen as manly and respectable. Work with other animals (cats, lap dogs, poultry) was effeminate and ‘below the salt’. Gender and species were therefore linked in veterinary medicine in interesting ways, with one animal, the horse, placed above all the others. We can better understand the profession’s late acceptance of women by taking this linkage into account. It helps explain how veterinary role and purpose were constructed in times of great change and also allows us to question common assumptions made about women vets. 

A frequent one is that women caused the huge turn towards small companion animals from the middle of the 20th century as more women entered the profession. In fact, the British Small Animal Veterinary Association, which now hosts one of the largest veterinary conferences in the world, was formed by a group of men, who began to see the small companion animal (dog first, then cat) as a suitable recipient for a new type of scientifically driven veterinary medicine, where cost was not always a limiting factor in deciding upon treatment, as it was with livestock. 

Science was linked to sentiment, as in human medicine, and diagnosis and treatment could become more elaborate. The new branch of veterinary medicine was also a promising business opportunity. So the status of the small animal as a veterinary patient gradually changed in the 20th century and pet medicine became not only respectable but, eventually, the prestigious norm. Most British vets are now small animal vets.⁵

A related assumption is that women only joined the veterinary profession when they saw it was ‘becoming more small animal’. But the first woman vet was an enthusiastic large animal practitioner, as was the second, Edith Knight, who initially qualified from Reading Agricultural College and then went on to Liverpool University Veterinary School to obtain her veterinary diploma in December 1923, staying on for a further three years to gain the new Bachelor in Veterinary Science degree awarded there (the first woman to do this). 

Like Cust, Knight was an inveterate horsewoman and rode regularly to hounds. A study of adverts placed by women seeking veterinary work shows that many wanted to do the whole job of veterinary medicine: they wanted to treat all creatures great and small. 

The following example is interesting, not only because of the range of species mentioned, and the order in which they are listed, but for the bracketed gender and the emphasis placed on what were seen at the time as masculine personality traits. Given the advert’s date of publication in The Veterinary Record (December 14th, 1935), it may well have been Knight placing it, as BVSc veterinary degrees, taken in addition to the qualifying diploma, were unusual at this time:

Recorded oral history from retired women vets who worked in the post-World War II period also confirms that they wished to do the whole job of veterinary medicine.⁶

Thus the entry of women into the British profession was brought about by a complex interplay of professional and social factors shaped by changes in post-war British society and refracted through the lens of veterinary medicine’s own changing role and purpose, and through animal species. 

It was slow progress at first but, as can be seen in the annual graduation photographs of the Dick Vet, the number of women steadily and then more quickly increased throughout the second half of the 20th century. Now they are the majority of every veterinary cohort in every veterinary school.

Veterinarian William M. Reed, in his foreword to a collection of essays on diversity and inclusion in veterinary medicine, wrote:

The wide remit of veterinary training, its essential comparative character, and its unique blend of scientific insight and pragmatism are valuable commodities to any society, but the people employing those skills must be as diverse as the skills themselves if the profession is to rise to current global challenges in relation to climate, food security, and human and animal health and well-being. 

In terms of articulating, developing and delivering the One Health concept which will be essential to securing to our future on this fragile planet, we need to maintain a diverse and inclusive veterinary profession open to all. 

The ‘Dick Vet Four’, the women who preceded them from the other British veterinary schools, and of course Aleen Cust and her unjustly delayed recognition after qualifying from the ‘New Edinburgh’, were the vanguard of this more inclusive veterinary profession.

1. Quotes from Mary and William Dick are from O.C. Bradley, History of the Edinburgh Veterinary College (Edinburgh: 1923).
2. In 1872, Thomas Walley diagnosed the cause of death of Greyfriars Bobby, one of the most famous dogs in the world. The little Skye terrier succumbed to cancer of the jaw. 
3. The ‘Ladies Number’ of The Veterinary Record appeared in 1934: vol. 14, no. 14. 
4. For information on the Polish Veterinary Faculty and Janina Maria Sokołowska, I am indebted to Alastair Macdonald and Colin Warwick. See their History of Veterinary Education in Edinburgh (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).
5. For an account of the rise of British small animal practice, see Gardiner, A. (2014) The dangerous women of animal welfare: how British veterinary medicine went to the dogs. Social History of Medicine 27(3): 466-487. https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkt101 (open access). 
6. Some extracts from oral historian Sue Bradley’s extensive conversations with British veterinarian Mary Brancker are available at https://www.bva.co.uk/news-and-blog/blog-article/mary-brancker-a-life-of-manyfirsts/ 
7. Reed, W.M. (2013) What it means to be inclusive and why it is imperative for the veterinary profession. In: L.M. Greenhill, K.P. Davis, P.M. Lowrie & S.F. Amass (eds) Navigating Diversity and Inclusion in Veterinary Medicine. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. 

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