Vet Visions belongs to Jonathan Naylor. I was a Professor of Large Animal Veterinary Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, at the time it had one of the better food animal case loads in North America. I had great access to interesting cases, combined with the resources of an engineering shop, IT department, sound, video, and digital learning specialists.
Vet Visions produces computer based, multimedia books. The founding principal is that people learn best when given a mixture of information sources: the written word, images and sounds, the last is our specialty. Multimedia books, rather than old-fashioned texts, are the easiest way to combine text and images and the only way to add sound and video. Over the years, we produced a variety of multimedia resources. We produced the first computer based large animal case simulations (Diseases of Calves, long out of date) and an Equine text “The Art of Equine Medicine”. We have suffered from poor marketing (my fault) and the single author source of many of the texts. Books with many authors automatically have ambassadors at many Universities.
The books most likely to be timeless are those on auscultation and the interpretation of sound. I spent about ten years learning how to record heart and lung sounds, edit and display them. I used purpose built electronic stethoscopes. These were based on input from sound technologists in the UK and Canada; they were made with specialized machining tools at the Engineering shop at the University of Saskatchewan. I invented a method of playing the sound while displaying the waveform and superimposing the interpretation. This makes it possible to precisely identify and name different types of sound. Many of the recordings in the books are uncompressed files. Where compression is used, sound quality was checked against the original to insure true reproduction. A note of caution, heart sounds are very low frequency, other sounds change rapidly in frequency; some computer speakers cannot reproduce them. If you think you may be having problems, try use headphones. This website includes a free resource on canine auscultation. If you are interested in equine or bovine sounds, try the books “The Art of Equine Auscultation” and the “Art of Bovine Auscultation”. The books were first produced years ago so the images are smaller than I would like, but the sound quality is still the best available.
The other noteworthy resource is “Passing a Nasogastric Tube in the Horse”. This was a team project and I am very grateful to all co-authors including Gale Parchoma (an organizing fiend), Dr Sameeeh Abutarbush (an exceptionally talented vet and educator) and Wayne Giesbrecht (a self-confessed technology addict). The book was evaluated in a controlled experiment and is superior to traditional teaching methods. It is also more welfare friendly – less horses are used to demonstrate the technique and students are more proficient on their first attempt with a live horse.
– Jonathan Naylor, DVM, PhD, DACVIM