Dr Griffith Evans has been called the father of modern veterinary science. Born before Queen Victoria came to the throne, he celebrated his 100th birthday at his home in North Wales amidst telegrams of congratulations from King George V, his old friend David Lloyd George and many other notables. In the intervening century, he had led a life which would be the envy of scholar and adventurer alike - as a veterinary student, surgeon and army officer, as traveller, mystic, writer and devoted lover.
Born the son of a farmer in wild West Wales, his early devotion to medicine and in particular to animals, took him to Victorian London as a veterinary student. An ascetic, withdrawn young man, he completed his studies, shunning the temptations of the capital, then took a commission in the Royal Artillery to serve as a veterinary officer in Canada at the time of the American Civil War. At McGill University, Montreal, he became a medical doctor, then visited the United States to make the acquaintance of President Abraham Lincoln and to tour the Federal Lines. Later, in India, ‘Griff Evans was to discover that a trypanosome, a parasite in the blood, was responsible for a decimating disease in horses, and sleeping sickness in man.
The love of his life was a charming Welsh girl, Katie, and among the delights of this biography are the letters that passed between them while he was serving in India.
Evans was a man of immense courage and determination, but he was dogmatic, tactless and infuriatingly convinced of his own rectitude. His life was dominated by two intellectual compulsions - one towards medical research, the other to probe, as an agnostic, the world’s religions.
Of the two authors of THE SEVERAL LIVES OF A VICTORIAN VET, Jean Ware is ‘Griffs’ grand-daughter, and her moving first chapter describes, how as a girl of twenty she walked up the hill to the old man’s house to look after him on his great day. Her husband, Hugh Hunt, is a retired civil servant and journalist, formerly Deputy Editor of the Liverpool Daily Post