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Equine center celebrates anniversary
The Marion duPont Scott Equine Medical Center at Morven Park in Leesburg recently celebrated its silver anniversary.Back in 1980, Richard Talbot, one of the proponents of the center, wrote to Marion duPont Scott with a proposal:
“The Marion duPont Scott Equine Medical Center of the College of Veterinary Medicine [of Virginia Tech] will be a worldwide center of excellence where the most advanced and dynamic veterinary medicine is applied to the benefit of the region and its horses and people.”
Marion duPont Scott wrote a check for $4 million, the Westmoreland Davis Foundation gave 400 acres of Morven Park, and the center was born.
Today it is one of three campuses of the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine, and serves students, veterinarians, horse owners and horse professionals.
Michelle Duke, who serves on the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors and chairs the center’s medical council, presided over the anniversary.
“Thank God to my horses for bringing me here,” she said, and introduced Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger. Steger, she said, kept the center going in spring 2007 when the equine herpes virus quarantine bankrupted the budget.
Patient visits fund the operating budget, Duke said. During the 43-day quarantine, there were no patients and the cost topped $750,000. Without Steger’s support, and that of Delegate Joe May (R-western Loudoun) and Sen. Mark Herring (D-eastern Loudoun) in the General Assembly, the center could have folded.
It now has insurance to cover communicable disease crises, Duke said. Duke has directed that $10 million go to the center from her estate.
Dr. Nat White, director of the center since 2004, said the center has succeeded “beyond anyone’s expectation. We give the best care to every patient and we are the teaching hospital at its best.
“The greatest fear we have is that we would fail to meet Shelley Duke’s vision for the Equine Medical Center.”
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