2016 CVM News: Dr. Samuel Bender '41: The Centenarian Veterinarian

Abstract

The news item is about: Times have changed a bit since Dr. Samuel Bender ’41 was a veterinarian. “Back when I started, we didn’t even have penicillin,” he says. “Our practice depended a lot on how to take care of the animal until nature healed them.” He recalls what one of his Cornell professors, Dr. Howard J. Milks, professor of therapeutics and small animal diseases, would tell his students: “Now boys, nature will heal 90-some percent of your cases, medicine will heal a small percent, and there’s some cases where nothing will heal it.” Patient outcomes are good deal brighter now—and Bender has gone from Cornell DVM student to Cornell celebrity; this June he came to his 75th reunion as the oldest graduate school alumnus in attendance. “It’s really something to see how much things have changed,” he says.