All great creatures great and small

Like many viewers I have been enjoying the latest television interpretation of James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small, with its entertaining and only slightly embellished tales of the Veterinarian's early career. Although Mr Herriot wasn't my inspiration for being a vet (that comes from a love of animals, fostered by Gerald Durrell), I did devour each of his books as they were published.

Despite being set in the 1930s–50s, some aspects of the program, such as white and brown coats, the use of a house as a practice and living above the surgery are all familiar to me from my youth. While I didn't use chloroform as my (primary) method of anaesthesia, I did come across an old bottle in the back of our dangerous drugs cabinet the other day! The ring of the single practice phone sends shivers down my spine. When even pagers were not ubiquitous, it was not uncommon to drive home from an out of hours call to find that you would have to turn around and head back to the surgery or out to a call. For that matter, rather than pay for an answering machine, it was common for adverts to call for married vets to apply so that their wives could perform that function.