Matthew Mackay-Smith, internationally-renowned equine veterinarian, medical editor for EQUUS magazine, lifelong foxhunter, competitive endurance rider, and historian, died on December 8, 2018 in Berryville, Virginia. He was eighty-six.
Matthew possessed one of the most brilliant, ravenously curious minds I’ve ever encountered. A pioneer of equine surgical procedures, Harvard man, crazy brave foxhunter from age eight to eighty, mapper of colonial roads, 100-mile endurance rider, wordsmith nonpareil, coiner of riotous witticisms, knower of seemingly everything, mentor of seemingly everyone. In a world peopled with the narrow-focused, he was Jeffersonian in breadth. (Matthew was, in fact, a descendant of Thomas Jefferson.)
As the medical editor at EQUUS magazine, where I began working at age twenty-one, he shaped my prose, gave me sincere encouragement as well as illuminating criticism, and informed my writing and my thought from the day I first turned in an article to him to today to all my tomorrows. Every time I pick up a pen, every time I minister to our beloved horse, Pants, and so often when I simply reflect on the world, horses, and our language, he is present, conversing with me. Matthew was a generous, hilarious, grand giant of a man.
“Matthew was one of the best horsemen I ever knew,” wrote eventing gold-medalist and coach Denny Emerson, “as a brilliant veterinarian; as a winner of the two hardest endurance races in America, the Old Dominion and the Tevis Cup, on the same horse in the same year; and as the supportive owner, with his wife, Winkie, of Farnley Rob Roy,* one of my best event horses.” [He] was brilliant, kind, witty, generous, a great supporter of American riding, and a dear friend.”
“I first met Matthew and Winkie on an equestrian journalists junket to Portugal back in the 1970s,” wrote author/editor Steven Price. “It took no time at all before Matthew and I formed a laundry list of mutual interests. Since the list began with country music, I bought a guitar in Lisbon so he and I could sing our hearts out in the back of the tour bus, arguably the first time that Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, and Kitty Wells had been celebrated on the Iberian Peninsular.”
“[It was] a privilege to be a part of his family,” wrote Matthew’s step-niece Denya Dee Leake. “My best memories of Matthew were out hunting where you would never see him with the rest of the field. Always finding the better trail and spot to hear from. Would drive the Masters crazy but he would just smile and move on. A true loss to the endurance/foxhunting/veterinary/all around horse world.”
“Simply knowing Matthew was akin to earning an advanced degree in history, geography, horsemanship, and the English language,” writes Foxhunting Life Editor Norman Fine. “I always learned something new, whether we were in a remote field out foxhunting which turned out to be the site of an obscure historic event, at the dinner table learning how he and Dr. Dan Marks conceived the now well-known tie-back procedure on horses because they needed business for their young practice, or hunting on the Scottish-English Border where he taught me how to save my horse’s energy in the open, vast, and hilly country so I wouldn’t get left behind.”
The son of another Harvard man—author, prominent horseman, and National Sporting Library founder Alexander Mackay-Smith and his wife, Joan, of the Boston Higginsons (Symphony Hall and author A. Henry, MFH)—Matthew was born on September 15, 1932 in Washington, DC. He attended the Stuyvesant School in Warrenton, Virginia, then St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, from which he graduated in 1949. He went on to Harvard University, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1953 at the age of twenty. He received his degree in veterinary medicine from the University of Georgia in 1958, and went on to earn a post-doctoral Master of Science in Medicine degree from the University of Pennsylvania in orthopedics and epidemiology in 1960. He was the first large animal intern at the Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, where he taught for seven years.
In 1967 he founded the Delaware Equine Center in Glasgow, Delaware with partners Lawrence Cushing and Daniel Marks. The practice later moved to Cochranville, Pennsylvania. With Marks, Dr. Mackay-Smith pioneered a host of surgical and diagnostic procedures that remain standard in the field, including the now universally-used “tie back” procedure for the common equine respiratory disorder, laryngeal hemiplegia. Drs. Marks and Mackay-Smith were also the first to use a rigid endoscope to film the workings of the equine larynx, a major breakthrough in diagnostics. Mackay-Smith was an institution on country roads, motoring between his clients’ barns in a battered BMW on which he put 500,000 miles, driving it to such a state of exhaustion that his mechanic refused to let him use it anymore, “lest a front wheel part company with the axle,” wrote Mackay-Smith’s wife, Winkie.
Between 1961 and 2001, Dr. Mackay-Smith was the author/co-author of twenty-two professional papers and lectured around the world on a host of equine veterinary subjects. He joined the American Association of Equine Practitioners in 1961 and served on the organization’s Ethics, Racetrack, Education, Prepurchase, and Farrier Liaison committees.
In 1977, while maintaining his medical practice, he became Medical Editor for the newly founded EQUUS magazine. A born wordsmith who had adapted to a childhood stutter by amassing a massive vocabulary to give him alternate words to use when stuck on one, he was lauded as a superb editor and mentor to many writers. His impeccable veterinary expertise helped establish the magazine as a perennially award-winning, indispensable guide for owners, trainers, and riders. He often said that while his clinical veterinary career was “dedicated to saving one horse at a time,” at EQUUS he embraced the opportunity to educate a wide range of horsemen about equine disease and management so that they could improve not only many horses’ lives, but provide better outcomes for veterinary treatment. He retired from veterinary practice in 2001, and from EQUUS in 2007.
An avid foxhunter from the age of eight, Dr. Mackay-Smith hunted principally with the Blue Ridge Hunt (VA) and Mr. Stewart’s Cheshire Foxhounds (PA) for seventy-two years, interspersing his local rides with hunting excursions to England and Scotland.
His passion for competitive endurance riding began in 1964, when he entered the Western States Trail Ride, popularly known as the Tevis Cup, a single-day 100-mile event known as the grand-daddy of endurance races. Riding a borrowed horse, he placed fifth, a remarkable result for an intensely grueling event in which nearly half of the fifty-three competitors failed to finish. In 1995 he became the first rider to win both the Old Dominion 100 (VA) and the Tevis Cup 100 (CA) on the same horse in the same year, just six weeks apart. In an endurance riding career that spanned more than three decades, he introduced a host of innovations to protect the welfare of the equine competitors, changes embraced by the American Endurance Ride Conference, for which he was a board member and onetime president, and the International Federation for Equestrian Sports.
While foxhunting with his father as a boy, Mackay-Smith learned to recognize the traces of old colonial roads over which they galloped. Upon his retirement, Dr. Mackay-Smith launched a project to identify and map those colonial roads in Clarke County, Virginia, an early site of colonial farming and industry and the seat of Lord Fairfax, a fellow avid fox hunter over that same country, albeit two centuries apart. Discovering that newly-fallen snow revealed centuries-old road ruts most clearly, he did most of his work in winter, walking the fields and following the snow shadows that marked the old byways. In recognition of his achievement, he was made “Historian Laureate” by the Clarke County Historic Association in 2011.
At his fiftieth class reunion at the University of Georgia in 2008, Dr. Mackay-Smith was honored as Veterinarian of the Year. He is also a member of the Hall of Fame of the American Endurance Riding Conference as well as the American Farriers Journal International Veterinarians Hall of Fame.
He is survived by his wife of sixty years, Wingate (Winkie) Mackay-Smith of White Post, Virginia, as well as three daughters—Joan Mackay-Smith Dalton of Dedham, Massachusetts and Juliet Mackay-Smith and Emily Day of White Post—and six grandchildren.
* Farnley Farm was established by Matthew’s parents, Alexander and Joan Higginson Mackay-Smith, in White Post, Virginia, and is the birthplace of the widely-sought Farnley ponies.
Posted December 15, 2018
Laura Hillenbrand is the author of Seabiscuit: An American Legend and Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption. Together, the two books have sold more than thirteen million copies and both were adapted for film. Seabiscuit was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture of 2003.