232 
ARMY VETERINARY DEPARTMENT. 
be remembered by some of the older members of the committee 
as the man who attempted to organize the veterinary corps of the 
army. I entered the army about the time that Dr. Pidhe and sev¬ 
eral other young men joined, thinking at that time that there was 
some future for the veterinarians in the army. Very shortly 
after entering the service, however, I ascertained that there were 
certain objections at that time to commissioning army veterinar¬ 
ians, and when the War Department finally decided to refuse to 
commission the veterinarians I saw nO' future in the service and 
resigned. There was a well-grounded prejudice in the army 
against the commissioning of veterinarians at the time I was in 
the service, and I, as a commissioned officer, would not have 
liked to see commissioned certain veterinarians who were in the 
army at that time. Far be it from me to cast any reflections on 
those men as veterinarians or as honorable men, but they were 
men who* had entered the army—one of them in the dragoons 
before the Civil War, and just retired as the oldest man in the 
service of the United States army. Another had entered the 
army during the Civil War as an enlisted man, and another one 
entered very shortly after the close of the war, and all of them at 
a time when graduate veterinarians would not think of entering 
the service, and at a time when we had no schools in this country. 
These men did not have the chance to attend colleges; they were 
what we call self-made men, and I have heard a distinguished 
United States Senator say that one of these men was the best 
judge of a cavalry horse in our army and a very valuable man 
to the service. But from other standpoints he was rather unde¬ 
sirable as a commissioned officer. 
I believe that the sentiment that exists in the War Depart¬ 
ment and among officers of high rank against commissioning 
veterinarians is largely due to their remembrance of some of 
these old men—not from their ability as veterinarians, but pos¬ 
sibly from their social status. I can say, however, that these 
men were retired last year by the action of this committee. It 
should have been done io years ago. It was not a mistake, but 
an oversight possibly. At any event, this committee last year, by 
putting a rider on the appropriation bill, retired all these old men. 
So there is no longer any excuse among the commissioned offi¬ 
cers of the army and War Department along this line for not 
commissioning the veterinarians from the men now in the ser¬ 
vice. Take the men in the service. Forty-two men have stood a 
severe examination, which is an examination equal to that of an 
