After attending parish school, Andrew Smith worked on his
family's 160-acre farm near Dalrymple and enrolled at Edinburgh
Veterinary College aged 25. In 1861 he graduated and also gained a
diploma of veterinary surgeon from the Highland and Agricultural
Society of Scotland. He turned down the chance to enter the British
Army as a Veterinary Officer in favour of an offer to head a school
in Upper Canada to train veterinarians to deal with the province's
ever-increasing livestock population. He arrived in Toronto on the
23rd of September the same year. In January the following year
Smith began practising and lecturing from a horse infirmary
prompting the establishment of the Toronto Veterinary School. In
1869-70 he created the first veterinary teaching building in
Canada, the Ontario Veterinary College, which had the capacity in a
few years to enrol 400 students. He was to manage the college for
46 years. In 1874 he established the Ontario Veterinary Medical
Association for "the mutual improvement of its members . . . and
the advancement of the position and interests of the Veterinary
profession in the Province." Smith was president until
1879.
Smith advanced his own qualifications becoming a member of the
Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in 1880, and was elected an
honorary associate the following year. In 1909 he was awarded an
honorary doctorate in veterinary science from the University of
Toronto. He also served as veterinary surgeon of the Toronto Field
Battery, dominion inspector of stock for Ontario, judge at horse
shows in the United States and overseas, consultant to the Ontario
commissioner of agriculture in 1884. By 1908 his college had
graduated 3,365 students.
Smith died of blood poisoning in1910 but as founder of the first
veterinary college in Canada, a young country dependant on the
health and productivity of its livestock, he will be remembered as
a true pioneer and someone whose accomplishments his adopted nation
owes much of its early success to.
(Photograph supplied by Ontario Veterinary College)
