With the development of medical and health undertakings, the scope of veterinary medicine has now expanded to zoonosis, public health, environmental protection, human disease models, experimental animals, food production, pharmaceutical industry and other fields, and many new frontier disciplines have been formed, playing an increasingly important role in agricultural production and the development of biology and human medicine.
History of veterinary medicine
The treatment of livestock diseases may begin at the early stage of domestication of wild animals into livestock, and the history of veterinary technology in China is particularly long. Horse disease prevention, livestock conservation and castration can be traced back to the Yin and Shang Dynasties. From the Western Zhou Dynasty to the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, full-time veterinarians appeared. After Qin and Han Dynasties, not only various veterinary drugs and animal epidemic prevention technologies developed rapidly, but also a large number of veterinary works appeared and gradually formed a system. In the Tang Dynasty, veterinary technology began to spread abroad.
In the west, the early record of the development of veterinary medicine is 2 100 BC, and there are provisions on the obligations and remuneration of cattle doctors and donkey doctors in the ancient Babylonian code; In BC 1900, Egyptians recorded prescriptions for treating animal diseases on papyrus. In ancient India, veterinarians and doctors were equally prosperous. In the Vedic era from 1500 BC to 1200 BC, some classics recorded animal diseases and their treatments in verse.
In the era of slavery, due to the sharp increase in the demand for military horses in the war, veterinarians tended to be developed. There were horse doctors in ancient Greece; Veterinary technology in the army reached a high level in the late Roman Empire, and books on horse diseases were written on the basis of veterinary literature in ancient Greece.
Veterinary medicine tended to decline in the Middle Ages, and horses were often treated by blacksmiths who forged iron hooves. The English word veterinarian refers to both the blacksmith who nails horseshoes and the veterinarian, which may be the reason. Since then, due to the development of capitalism in western Europe, the expansion of the trade volume of livestock and breeding livestock, and the many wars between European countries, a large number of livestock have died of rinderpest and other diseases, which made people realize that apprenticeship veterinary training can no longer meet the actual needs, thus creating a modern veterinary higher education system.
176 1 year, France opened the world's first higher veterinary school in Lyon. By 1800, about 20 veterinary schools had been established in 12 European countries. Beiyang Horse Medical School, the first veterinary school in China, was established in 1904.
Since the 20th century, most countries in the world have established veterinary schools and institutions, and the level of veterinary scientific research, education and diagnosis and treatment has been continuously improved. At present, the countries with relatively developed veterinary science are the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, Britain, Denmark, Japan and the Soviet Union.
Veterinary discipline system
Veterinary medicine and medicine have the same theoretical basis, learn from each other and develop together. The main basic theories and applied disciplines of veterinary medicine include animal anatomy, animal histology and embryology, animal physiology, animal pathology, veterinary pharmacology, veterinary microbiology and animal infectious diseases, animal parasitology and parasitology, animal internal medicine, animal surgery, animal obstetrics and so on.
China's traditional veterinary medicine has a unique system, and its basic theory comes down in one continuous line with China's traditional medicine, which is a summary of China people's experience in fighting livestock diseases.
Since the 20th century, especially after the Second World War, veterinary science has developed rapidly, and new disciplines have been established one after another, such as small animal veterinary medicine, poultry epidemiology, veterinary epidemiology, research on animal nutrition and nutritional metabolic diseases, anesthesiology, experimental surgery and microsurgery, veterinary toxicology and livestock poisoning, veterinary mycology, veterinary virology, veterinary immunology, zoonosis, animal hygiene, veterinary public health, preventive veterinary medicine and wildlife.
The content of veterinary medicine
The task of modern veterinary medicine is not only to ensure the development of animal husbandry, but also to reduce the harm of zoonotic diseases and improve the hygienic quality of animal food (meat, eggs, milk, aquatic products, etc.). ) and improve environmental sanitation, thus directly serving human health.
Veterinary clinical diagnosis and treatment work is mainly based on expensive individual livestock or breeding livestock, as well as some accompanying animals and ornamental animals. Generally, the prevention and control of livestock is mainly based on the whole group.
The rapid development of industrialized intensive livestock and poultry breeding has increased the responsibilities of veterinarians in the selection of breeding sites, the design of barns, the preparation of feed additives, the formulation and implementation of immunization procedures for environmental sanitation management, disease diagnosis and immune level monitoring, so as to improve the health level of livestock and prevent the occurrence of group diseases, including infectious diseases, parasitic diseases, poisoning diseases and nutritional metabolic diseases. Hundreds of such diseases have been discovered. Infectious diseases are the most harmful, but many of them have been eliminated.
By the end of 1986, the infectious diseases of livestock in developed countries were: Denmark 18, the United States and Japan 13, Britain 10, Australia 7, the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Germany 6. Rinderpest, which once killed hundreds of thousands or even millions of cattle every year in China, was eliminated in 1956.
But at the same time, many new diseases have emerged, such as viral infectious diseases (such as swine vesicular disease), toxic diseases caused by serious pollution of pesticides, fertilizers and industrial wastes, nutritional and metabolic diseases. Some of them have no effective prevention and treatment methods so far, while others (such as metabolic diseases and malnutrition) are related to one-sided pursuit of high yield. This puts forward a new topic for veterinary workers.
In order to prevent the occurrence of nutritional metabolic diseases at an early stage, the current veterinary work should not only observe whether the cattle have clinical symptoms, but also determine whether the expected production indicators can be achieved under certain conditions and whether the metabolism in the body is in a balanced state. Usually, the metabolic profile of high-yield cattle is tested by blood chemical analysis to predict recessive or subclinical cases of nutritional metabolic diseases.
In many European and American countries, because dogs and cats are regarded as pets, the diagnosis and treatment of accompanying animal diseases such as dogs and cats has become an important business of veterinarians in these countries, which has also promoted the development of small animal medicine; Ornamental animals, including wild animals kept in zoos and birds kept at home, have also increased greatly in recent decades; More and more wild animals with high economic value, such as foxes, minks, sika deer and musk deer, are raised artificially. Their diseases are not only various, but also very complicated, which also requires a lot of research work by veterinarians.
In addition, the cultivation of experimental animals puts forward stricter requirements for veterinary work. Some experimental animals need sterile animals or animals without specific pathogens to draw accurate conclusions in research experiments on immune mechanism, metabolic mechanism and pharmacology. Experimental animal science has become a new branch of veterinary science.
Infectious diseases originating from abroad can lead to the epidemic of the disease in China, resulting in huge economic losses. For example, contagious bovine pleuropneumonia introduced to the United States from abroad in 1980s 19 was finally put out after slaughtering a large number of sick cows and cows that had contact with sick cows. Porcine atrophic rhinitis and mycoplasma pneumonia introduced from Japan by buying breeding pigs from abroad spread to pig farms all over the country, and the infection rate reached 50 ~ 60% in severe cases.
Infectious diseases imported from abroad are also common in China. For example, when 19 19 bought cows from abroad, it brought contagious bovine pleuropneumonia to Shanghai. Atrophic rhinitis was brought into pigs when it was imported from 1963. Others such as bovine infectious rhinotracheitis, treponema suis dysentery, etc. It was also introduced by breeding animals bought from abroad. At the same time, domestic livestock pathogens may also flow abroad with the export of sick livestock. Therefore, it is one of the important tasks of veterinarians to carry out strict import and export quarantine according to laws and regulations, investigate the epidemic situation in the producing areas and eliminate various pathogens.
Veterinarians' main task in this respect is to implement the food hygiene laws and regulations promulgated by the state, such as health supervision and inspection of all links before and after the production of animal foods such as meat, eggs, milk and fish, so as to prevent the spread of infectious diseases of livestock, including zoonotic pathogens, from endangering human health.
Veterinary medicine and medicine have the same basic theory and treatment standard. Many human diseases can be manifested in some animals with very similar mechanisms and forms. This kind of disease is called the animal model of human disease and is often used in the study of human diseases. For example, the study of chicken viral tumor disease and chicken Marek's disease can be used for reference to study the occurrence of human tumors. Physicians and veterinarians often study some surgical operations based on animal diseases. In addition, preventive medicine and comparative medicine have become the subjects developed jointly by veterinary medicine and medicine, which is of great significance for preventing biological warfare, chemical warfare, atomic warfare and developing space medicine.
At present, with the new achievements of many related disciplines, veterinary medicine is increasingly applied to the study of livestock diseases, and develops to a higher level. The initial success of genetic engineering technology in developing vaccines for foot-and-mouth disease, rabies and diarrhea of young animals will open the way for developing subunit vaccines or synthetic peptide vaccines for epidemic diseases.
Monoclonal antibodies produced by cell engineering technology will make veterinary diagnosis more accurate and rapid. Computers and lasers have been used in veterinary medicine. The prevention and treatment of diseases of wild animals and ornamental animals is a field to be developed.
With the increase of air transport volume of livestock and poultry, the effects of air transport on physiology and pathology of livestock and poultry will be studied. At the same time, international cooperation in monitoring and prevention of epidemics will be further strengthened. In line with the above development, it has become a common trend in many countries to pay more attention to veterinary education and scientific research.