So, let’s say you have two patients complaining of hip problems. The first one goes to the doctor, who examines the patient, orders x-rays, confers with the radiologist, refers the patient to a surgeon who schedules surgery the next day. The second patient waits a month to see the doctor, waits another month to have x-rays, waits another month to see the surgeon, and waits another month to have the same surgery as the first patient.
What’s the difference?
The first patient is a golden retriever. The second is his owner.

The first encounter most people have with a veterinarian is in a small local clinic with a handful of doctors who neuter cats and fit itchy dogs with Elizabethan collars. But vet schools across the United States are training a new breed of veterinarian whose education reflects recent advances in medicine and technology more associated with human health care. Veterinarians tend to everything from mad cow disease to post-traumatic stress disorder in elephants. They are surgeons who can rebuild the leg of a racehorse and restore eyesight to a seeing-eye dog. They are among the nation’s first responders to threats of bioterrorism and pandemics. It’s not just kitties and puppies anymore.

There are 125 schools of human medicine, but only 27 accredited veterinary teaching hospitals in the United States. Competition for admission is fierce. It is in these teaching institutions where vet medicine students enter the beating heart of a hospital, learning surgery, diagnostics, and anesthesiology for everything from lions to lambs. Veterinary science emphasizes comparative medicine, because veterinarians are trained to provide care for dozens of different species, not just one, like human doctors. 

Once considered a job for cowboy poets and Yorkshire heroes, veterinary medicine today is increasingly dominated by women, who make up four out of five students currently enrolled in vet school. Many of these students say they knew since kindergarten that they wanted to be an animal doctor. But veterinary medicine in the 21st century is more ER than All Things Bright and Beautiful. Veterinary science has expanded in new directions such as oncology, cardiology, and epidemiology, so today your golden retriever has access to state-of-the-art facilities for surgeries, dentistry, cancer treatments, acupuncture, and physical therapy. And his doctor is likely to be a woman.

So what happens in a hospital when the patients are on the hoof? Let’s take a tour.

The first thing you notice in the brightly lit hall are people dashing about in color-coded outfits: navy blue coveralls (students on small animal rotations), forest green coveralls (students on large animal rotations), baby blue scrubs (surgical staff and anesthesiologists), and starched white coats (clinical interns, residents, and doctors).

The navy blue coveralls are celebrating the 200th spay job that the hospital’s small animal clinic has donated to a local animal shelter. Reporters from the newspaper are there to photograph the patient, a little gray stitched-up tabby curled up and purring in the arms of a white-coated surgeon. Farther down the hall, we pass a gray-nosed old beagle being escorted to an exam room for a pre-op ultrasound and an iguana in for some fluoroscopic imaging. We pass several small animal surgery rooms and several aquaria where patients who happen to be fish hang out, perhaps reading Field and Stream while they await their appointments.

We go through another set of double doors and enter the large animal wing of the hospital, the domain of green coveralls. It is quiet compared to the small animal bustle, and the air is heavy with the sweet smell of hay. We peek inside two radiology suites, one for full-size horses, cows, and llamas; the other for miniatures and pediatrics. We pass a maze of exam rooms outfitted for MRI, ultrasound, and laparoscopy, and stalls for surgical prep and recovery.  In one of the stalls, there is a horse being prepared for surgery.

The large-animal surgery room at the teaching hospital looks more like a double garage than an operating suite. It’s a big, high-ceiling room with a concrete floor and two garage doors that connect to the prep and the recovery stalls. A metal U-shaped track attached to the ceiling adds to the garage décor. It’s the kind of rig a mechanic might use to lift an engine out of a pick-up truck; the vets will use it to lift a horse onto the operating table. In the middle of the room, there’s a contoured bench, eight feet long and padded with Naugahyde, with an assortment of lights and a camera hanging overhead. Beside the bench, there’s a bellows that will breathe for the horse during the operation. Doors lead to the surgical commons, where doctors and students on the large-animal rotation change clothes and scrub for surgery.

The surgery room is filling up with people hidden behind masks and blue scrubs. A tall, blue-clad someone adjusts knobs on the bellows. A smaller blue-clad someone tests the camera and the television set that displays what the camera sees. Two masked vet techs, the nurses of veterinary medicine, arrange armloads of blue linens and a dozen scalpels and clamps on a cloth-lined table next to the bench.

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