All Creatures Great and Small: Difference between revisions

* [[The Alleged Car]] - Pervasive throughout the books: small, mass-produced 1930s British cars were woefully underpowered, lacked the bodily integrity to keep winter drafts out (let alone heaters!) and generally weren't up to the duties called for by a quasi-emergency service in mountainous territory.

* [[All-Natural Snake Oil]] - Farmers sometimes try natural home remedies on their animals before calling the vet. These can range from the mildly useful to the downright sadistic.

** Ironically, many of the standard veterinary practices of the 1930s seem only a little better to a modern audience. Trepanning (drilling holes in the head), for example.

*** Routinely lampshaded in the books when Herriot mentions that he doesn't doubt that the modern vet student will look at his descriptions of their treatments of the time and consider them to be unbelievably barbaric (lungworm, for example, was treated with turpentine squirted into the lungs). He usually mentions, in the same breath, that the technology and attitudes of the time just didn't allow for better practices - either the science wasn't there yet, or no one had realized that there were better ways. And in the story about the first time he ever got to use sulfonamide on some seriously ill calves, which was spectacularly successful curing them, he notes that he still considers it to be a godsend, even for all the problems that have resulted from over-prescription.

* [[Hospital Hottie]]: Tristan is very fond of nurses.

* [[Hypocritical Humor]]: Siegfried's trademark. He often patronizingly lectures James and Tristan for exhibiting the same faults as himself or for following advice he gave them last week and has now changed his mind about.

** Also a frequent case of [[Broken Aesop]], on his part.

* [[Impossible Insurance]]: