Background

Esther J. Finegan, PhD - University of Guelph, Ontario, N1G 2W1 Canada;

C. Edward Stevens, PhD, DVM - Department of Molecular Biomedical Sciences, College of Veterinary Medicine, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, 27606 USA.

Background

In 1969 a graduate course in the comparative physiology of the vertebrate digestive system, was initiated at the College of Veterinary Medicine of Cornell University. This was followed by a series of graduate courses in comparative anatomy, nutrition, pathology, microbiology, and infectious diseases taught by faculty in the colleges of Veterinary Medicine, Nutrition, and Animal Science. In 1972 a five year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was awarded for a Training Program in Comparative Gastroenterology. The co-author of the present website (CES) served as the initial Program Director. The course lectures served as the basis for a text: Comparative Physiology of the Vertebrate Digestive System (Stevens 1988), published by Cambridge University Press. A second edition of this text by Stevens and Hume, with a greater emphasis on interpretation, was published in 1995. The information from this text was, in turn, updated and summarized in a CD-ROM teaching unit entitled The Digestive System of Vertebrates (Stevens 2000).

This information was last modified by Esther Finegan (efinegan@uoguelph.ca) on 6 July 2008.

Please use ‘Digestive System of Vertebrates’ in the subject line of all e-mail correspondence.