Our Heroes Should Have Included a Cow Doctor (Theobald Smith)

Growing Up Loving Cowboys

When I met my first real cowboy at age five, I was thrilled. No star has ever gotten more adoration than I gave that random rancher on a trip to Arizona. He tied my shoe.

My stick horse was ridden long enough that the stick got dangerously pointy and Mother sent Old Paint to stick horse paradise lest I become an impaled rider. We aren’t sure how many more stick-horses I wore out. Cowboys made celebrity animals out of cows and I would pester my father to notice them on every car ride: “Tows, Tows, Tows , Daddy!”

Eventually he would reply: “Yes, John Mark.”

This would be repeated again on the next hill. I never noticed his enthusiasm waning, mine did not.

Roping, riding, (a bit) of shooting of the bad guys: cowboys were my cool. Fortunately, I hit the era when “Indians” were no longer the bad guys. The cowboy took on rustlers, bank robbers, and bad bankers. There was much wrong about the portrayal of First Nations in my era, but the Lone Ranger did teach me that other people (especially Native Americans) were to be respected and could be allies with important things to teach other people.*

I liked cowboys not so much gunslingers or sheriffs, though Matt Dillon was a television exception for Dad. I could not watch this grown up show (Miss Kitty!), but I admired what I heard from the living room where I set up my plastic figures and played at cowboys and Indians. Oddly, since “green army men” were cheap and common, my cowboys and Indians were almost always allied in trying to stop the modern and massive green army men from invading the next room.

Obviously, though, it was easier to make shows about gunslingers, Dodge, Batt Masterson, Wyatt Earp and company than Theobald Smith, whose very name is a 1960’s network nightmare. Keep track of Theobald Smith: he is a hero to cows and cowboys.

Finding the Cow Doctor

Nerdy kids must read (or we read back then) and so before long I discovered that the life of a cowboy was very hard and the range was open a very short time. The treatment of First Nations was bad. Can anybody defend the cattle barons and their range wars? I still had a soft spot for cowboys, but men like Theodore Roosevelt, cowboy conservationist, joined them.

But then there is Theobald Smith, the man television should have turned into a series. He was a scientist who paid his education at Cornell by playing a church organ.** Cowboys were losing cattle to Texas Fever and Theobald Smith discovered the causes for the fever. Millions of cows were saved and the life of cowboys made better.

Theobald Smith was far from done. Over the course of a long and productive career. . . He discovered the bacterium that causes salmonella poisoning and was the first to identify the causes and characteristics of the severe allergic reaction that came to be called the anaphylactic response, also known, appropriately, as “the Theobald Smith phenomenon.” He contributed to improved laboratory production of vaccines and was the first to develop a way to test for the fecal contamination of water. Outside the laboratory, he became a leading advocate for food and water sanitation.**

I was given toy microscopes and chemistry sets by fifth grade, the more expensive stuff was discovered in the attic of a parsonage where we lived! My brother and I were allowed to experiment and loved trying to do science: don’t ask about my attempts to vulcanize rubber. Oddly, nobody thought to combine our love of Tomorrow Land science with Frontier Land nostalgia.

What if someone had told me about Theobald Smith: the scientist who saved Texas cows? 

A book based culture might have been able to do so: his story is worth telling, but I doubt a visual story telling culture could. The gun fight is dramatic, less so hours spent in a lab. If the life of a cowboy is nine parts of tedium with one part excitement, the genius of a Theobald Smith comes with ninety-nine parts disciplined lab work and one part discovery.

The discoveries changed so much.

We need to know and honor people like Theobald Smith. If the cowboys (and even Batt Masterson) are mostly forgotten in this generation, Theobald Smith is almost unknown. He does not even have reruns.

Perhaps our desire to consume many visual stories is harming us. The life of a Theobald Smith is priceless to human advancement, but it is quickly told. He saved the cows and many people, but he was not entertaining and his life does not make good entertainment.

There is no Theobald Smith action figure, because he was not a man of action, but of deep learning and doing. Like the engineers we do not honor, Smith made the modern world and Hollywood used cowboys to decorate it. Cowboys did not ask to be commoditized and few profited from it. At their best, they were like Theobald Smith: patient, taciturn, doers of deeds. He just did his deeds with a microscope.

I still love cowboys, but I honor Theobald Smith: benefactor of the cows and the cowboys. Call this my seeing a cow doctor and shouting: “Look folks! A cow doctor!”

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*Again: we would not want to go back to those portrayals, but they were progress at the time and left a residue of respect at least in me that spurred a desire to listen and learn.

**Information taken from the highly readable Cattle Kingdom by Christopher Knowlton (First Mariner Books, 2018). This is excellent lay history. The long quotation is from page 247.