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ON December 13, Reginald Arthur Green, PhD, BSc(Zool), MRCVS, of 51 Cottenham Court, High Street, Cottenham, Cambridge. Dr Green qualified from London in 1938.
David Williams, Roger Akester, Brenda Akester, Ian Silver and Jonathan Holmes write: Reginald Green, who died at the age of 95 after a short illness, was the founding force behind the development of veterinary anatomy at the University of Cambridge, from its inception in 1949.
He graduated as a veterinary surgeon in 1938, and as a member of a 'reserved occupation' was exempted from military service during the Second World War. He occasionally reminisced about initially practising in western Scotland, near Glencoe, with a motorbike for transportation, and greatly lamented the postwar development of tarmac roads in the region. He especially deplored the 'new' road (now the A82) across Rannock moor to the eastern entrance of the Glen. But 10 years into his career, Dr Green was to leave Scotland for an academic life. For the majority of his career, he was the originator and architect of the veterinary anatomy course at Cambridge.
From the start, veterinary anatomy (like human anatomy at that time) was very much a Cinderella subject in the university; veterinary students were taught vertebrate zoology during the formal university terms in their first two years, and then had to cover the entirety of veterinary gross anatomy in six weeks in the seclusion of the basement of the zoology department during the second summer...