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Vintage Vet

Retired pathologist curates a collection of antique medical instruments Retired pathologist curates a collection of antique medical instruments Just off a gravel driveway in Cayuga Heights, the green, barn-style prefab shed looks like a fine spot to store garden tools and maybe a couple of trash cans. Instead, its white-trimmed doors swing open to reveal […]

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Retired pathologist curates a collection of antique medical instruments

Retired pathologist curates a collection of antique medical instruments

Just off a gravel driveway in Cayuga Heights, the green, barn-style prefab shed looks like a fine spot to store garden tools and maybe a couple of trash cans. Instead, its white-trimmed doors swing open to reveal the workshop of retired veterinary pathology professor John King, PhD ’63, who has spent the last fifteen years amassing antique tools of his trade.

John King

As Ritza Crackers—an eight-year-old white toy poodle and the professor’s constant companion—weaves between his feet, King hoists a sixty-year-old suitcase onto his workbench, releases the latches, and begins a show-and-tell of artifacts spanning 400 years of human and animal medicine from around the world. There’s a 300-year-old brass scarification box for vaccinating against cowpox (and thus smallpox) and a pewter syringe from the medical kit of a seventeenth-century Spanish warship, where it was used to administer arsenic to syphilitic sailors. From a small box King pulls a wart removed from an African warthog and the punctured skull of an Argentinian lamb, one among 750 in a flock whose cause of death the professor was called to investigate. (Necropsy revealed that a puma and her young, learning to hunt, were behind the mass extermination.)

King started collecting such memorabilia early in a career that has taken him around the world, diagnosing cause of death and teaching pathology on six continents. He has amassed an online database of some 27,000 images collected on his travels, allowing anyone with an Internet connection to access what was once available only in reference libraries. But most of the items King has collected are more akin to the tangle of large metal handtools he extracts from a five-gallon plastic pickle bucket. “Women call and say, ‘My husband trained at Cornell; how do I get rid of this stuff?’ ” he says, pulling the handles of a Civil War-era obstetrical instrument from a pair of retractors and a 100cc metal syringe used for dosing sheep. “They came in rusty as hell,” he says. “I clean each one with a wire brush, wax it, identify when it was made, and—if necessary—describe how it was used.”

tools

An accomplished woodworker who builds Shaker-style nesting boxes at his winter home in Florida, King crafts display boxes for the relics from boards salvaged from an Ithaca barn. A small card describes each item and names the person from whom it came. He has collected some 10,000 artifacts, he says, and donated 100 of the boxes to historical societies and museums throughout Upstate New York, including the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown. At the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine in Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, King’s boxes display a saw used to perform equine dentistry in the nineteenth century and various designs of the bloodletting instruments known as fleams. (“I think I had a thing for fleams at one point,” he says of the dozens he’s collected over the years.)

Twenty-two of King’s boxes hang on the white-tiled walls of a second floor hall near the Vet college library. Beside an equine tooth chisel and a twelve-blade scarifier hang cards identifying the former owner of both items as J. N. Frost, DVM 1907. A hoof trimmer with a wooden shoulder rest came from the estate of Earle Hopper, DVM 1917, while a benzene firing iron, once used to treat a horse favoring a lame leg, came from the estate of Joseph Ferris, DVM ’41. “Today’s students,” King notes, “will be amazed at how far we’ve come.”

— Sharon Tregaskis ’95

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