Page 49 - VHSA - Onderstepoort 100 Years - Part 3

Present pathology building erected in 1923
strangles, biliary fever, bluetongue, pulpy kidney disease and plant poisonings. He did not remain for long in the post, however, as he left in May 1910 to take up the position of Assistant Professor of Pathology and Bacteriology at the School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, USA (see Part 1). In 1924 he became Director of the George Williams Hooper Foundation for Medical Research, University of California, San Francisco where he remained for the rest of his professional career. Coincidentally enough, one of his renowned works concerned the aetiology, distribution and control of botulism in humans at the same
Post-mortem hall in the 1923 building
Theiler became Dean and first Professor of Pathology and de Kock was appointed as Professor of Anatomy. Theiler, how- ever, was succeeded in his position as Professor of Pathology in 1924 by de Kock who retained the Pathology chair until 1937 when he was appointed Professor of Comparative Patho- logy, a newly formed post, which he retained until he retired in 1949, and A.D. Thomas became Professor of Pathology. De Kock was eventually promoted to Sub-Director of Vete- rinary Research and in 1948 succeeded P.J. du Toit as Director of the Institute.
time that the elusive aetiology of lamsiekte (also a form of botulism) in cattle was being actively but unsuccessfully pursued by Theiler and others at great cost in South Africa.
“A ‘baffling disease’, as De Kock described it in 1927, was a relatively common fatal condition
in sheep known as true geilsiekte (the name implying that it was associated with a rich pasture).”
De Kock had a wide field of interest from the pathological point of view. In the 1920s he, inter alia, studied what he considered were probably two separate infectious disease entities of the lungs of sheep. He considered that the lung lesions of one of them, colloquially known as jaagsiekte, were undoubtedly those of a neoplasm, probably a multiple cyst-adenoma. The other disease became known as ‘Graaff- Reinet disease’ because of the number of cases emanating from the now long defunct experimental station near that town in the Eastern Cape Province. Both these diseases were later shown to be caused by separate
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ONDERSTEPOORT 100
Another young veterinarian recruited by
Theiler was Kehoe in 1909 soon after he had
graduated at the Royal College in Dublin,
Ireland. Although Theiler had engaged him
as an assistant for serological work there is
no doubt that he was multitalented with
an interest in pathology as, after 10 years
at Onderstepoort during which he gained
much practical experience in the subject, he
left to take up the Professorship of Pathology in Dublin.
retroviruses (see Part 3: Molecular Biology) and occur virtually world-wide under a variety of names such as ovine pulmonary adenomatosis for jaagsiekte and maedi-visna for the other.
In 1927 de Kock described a condition known as swelled head or dikkopsiekte in young rams which had been seen in South Africa since 1924. Its pathogenesis was subsequently shown to be the invasion of head wounds, caused by rams fighting amongst themselves, by the bacterium, Clostridium novi type A. A ‘baffling disease’, as de Kock described it in 1927, was a relatively common fatal condition in sheep known as true geilsiekte (the name implying that it was associated with a rich pasture). It was only after pulpy kidney disease had been described elsewhere in the world that the nature of
One of the first students to be sent overseas by the South African Government soon after the Union of South Africa had been declared in 1910 to be trained as a veterinarian was G. van de Wall de Kock (see Part 1). He studied at the Royal College in London. On his return in 1914 he was appointed as a bacteriologist at the Laboratory and for a while was stationed at the Armoedsvlakte Laboratory near Vryburg. He, however, exhibited a natural proclivity to pathology and was to a large extent responsible for building the Pathology Section into what it became in later years. In 1918 he left Onderstepoort to study Medicine in England but he did not remain there long. When the Faculty of Veterinary Science was founded in 1920
Pathology
1908-2008
Years