From Babylonian cattle healers and medieval farriers to MRI machines, cancer clinical trials, and the $2,500 emergency vet visit — four millennia of caring for sick animals
The earliest written evidence of veterinary practice dates to roughly 2000 BCE, from Babylonian clay tablets describing treatments for horses, cattle, and donkeys. The Kahun Papyrus (approximately 1900 BCE) from ancient Egypt contains a section on animal ailments — the oldest surviving veterinary text — with prescriptions for dogs, cattle, birds, and fish. These were not sentimentalists treating beloved companions. They were protecting agricultural and military assets with irreplaceable economic value.
Aristotle (384-322 BCE) advanced animal anatomy with the systematic dissection and observation recorded in his Historia Animalium — a nine-volume work that described internal organs, reproductive systems, and behavioral differences across hundreds of species. Roman cavalry units employed hipposandal makers who evolved into de facto horse healers, and Roman agricultural writers like Columella (1st century CE) included detailed livestock disease management in their farming manuals.
European history often skips from Roman animal medicine to the Renaissance, but between those eras lay a significant tradition in the Islamic world. Ibn Akhī Ḥizām, a 9th-century Arab scholar, wrote Kitāb al-Furūsiyya wa al-Khayl — a comprehensive hippiatric text on horse care, disease, and training that was one of the most systematic animal medicine texts of the medieval period. Al-Baytar (1197-1248 CE) wrote encyclopedic works on plant-based treatments for both humans and animals that were used by physicians across the Mediterranean for centuries.
Medieval European farriers — craftsmen who made and fitted horseshoes — gradually took on veterinary responsibilities by practical necessity. A horse that went lame represented significant economic loss, and the farrier was the craftsman closest to the problem. This informal horse-healer tradition persisted in rural Europe well into the 19th century.
The formal discipline of veterinary science was born in Lyon, France, in 1761, and its birth was driven by crisis rather than intellectual curiosity. A devastating cattle plague (rinderpest) had swept through Europe in the 1740s and 1750s, killing tens of millions of cattle and devastating agricultural economies. The French government, facing economic catastrophe, asked Claude Bourgelat — the director of the Royal Academy of Equitation in Lyon — to establish a school specifically to train animal healers.
Bourgelat's École Nationale Vétérinaire de Lyon opened February 1, 1762, and is recognized as the world's first veterinary school. A second French school followed in Alfort in 1765. The British established the Royal Veterinary College in London in 1791. These institutions were founded with an explicit mission: to protect livestock, not to care for pets. The curriculum focused entirely on horses and cattle. The notion that a trained professional would treat a dog was not part of the founding vision.
The American Veterinary Medical Association was founded in 1863 — the same year as the Emancipation Proclamation — driven largely by the needs of Civil War cavalry units and the economic importance of farm animals in a still largely agricultural economy. Early American veterinarians were expected to focus on horses, cattle, pigs, and sheep. Small animal practice was considered beneath the dignity of a trained professional.
This began to shift gradually in the early 20th century as the automobile replaced the horse and American cities grew. By the 1930s, small animal practice was emerging as a legitimate specialty, but it remained secondary to large animal work in terms of prestige and earning potential.
No single figure did more to shape public perception of veterinary medicine than James Alfred Wight, the Yorkshire veterinarian who wrote under the pen name James Herriot. His memoir All Creatures Great and Small (1972) and its sequels sold hundreds of millions of copies and were adapted into a BBC television series that ran for nine years. Herriot's writing depicted veterinary work as simultaneously scientific, compassionate, physically demanding, and deeply connected to community — a portrayal that reshaped how the public understood the profession and contributed significantly to increased enrollment in veterinary schools through the 1970s and 1980s.
The development of vaccines transformed companion animal medicine in the mid-20th century. Distemper, a devastating viral disease affecting dogs' respiratory, gastrointestinal, and nervous systems, claimed enormous numbers of dogs annually until the development of effective vaccines in the 1950s. The parvovirus crisis of 1978 — when a new strain appeared that appeared to kill puppies within 48-72 hours and spread so rapidly through kennels that some shelters lost entire populations — drove rapid vaccine development; an effective commercial vaccine was available by 1983.
Diagnostic technology followed the trajectory of human medicine with a lag. Veterinary radiography was established by the 1920s. MRI and CT scanning entered veterinary use in the 1980s and 1990s, initially at university teaching hospitals and then at specialist referral centers. Today, major veterinary specialty hospitals offer imaging capabilities equivalent to human hospitals, including functional MRI for neurological cases.
Veterinary oncology — the treatment of cancer in animals — developed in parallel. The first formal canine cancer clinical trial was conducted in the 1980s. The field has grown into a significant specialty, with board-certified veterinary oncologists available in most major metropolitan areas, offering chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgical oncology.
Modern veterinary medicine's capability comes with a price that has become a serious access problem. The average emergency veterinary visit in the United States in 2024 costs between $1,500 and $2,500, and complex cases — orthopedic surgery, cancer treatment, neurological intervention — regularly exceed $10,000. Pet insurance, which exists to bridge this gap, is carried by fewer than 4% of US pet owners.
Telemedicine platforms including Vetster, Pawp, and Dutch have expanded access for non-emergency consultations. AI-assisted diagnostic tools, some using the same convolutional neural networks that screen human medical images, are beginning to appear in veterinary radiology. The four-millennia arc from Babylonian cattle healers scratching observations into clay to algorithms analyzing canine chest radiographs is not a straight line — but the direction of travel has always been toward more knowledge, applied with more precision, to more species.
For breed-specific health information for your own dog, explore our dog breed pages or visit our care guides for condition-specific guidance.
When was the first veterinary school founded? The École Nationale Vétérinaire de Lyon in France, founded by Claude Bourgelat, opened in 1762 and is recognized as the world's first formal veterinary school. It was established in response to a devastating cattle plague that had killed millions of livestock across Europe.
When did veterinarians start treating dogs and cats? Small animal practice emerged gradually in the early 20th century as horses were displaced by automobiles. Before the 1920s and 1930s, most veterinary work focused exclusively on livestock and horses, which represented significant economic assets.
What is the most important vaccine in dog history? The parvovirus vaccine (1983) and distemper vaccines (1950s) are both transformative. The 1978 parvovirus outbreak was particularly devastating — the virus appeared suddenly, killed puppies within 48-72 hours, and spread rapidly through kennels before an effective vaccine was developed within five years.
Why are vet bills so expensive? Modern veterinary medicine offers capabilities equivalent to human medicine — MRI, CT scanning, chemotherapy, board-certified specialists — which require the same equipment, training, and facility infrastructure. Unlike human medicine, there is no third-party payer system covering most veterinary costs, so the full cost of care falls on the pet owner.