Veterinary is the IQ/H TL skill of caring for sick and wounded animals. The defaults are Animal Handling (any)-6, Physician-5, or Surgery-5, and Diagnosis, First Aid, Physician and Surgery have defaults to Veterinary. Optional specialisation in a type of animal is possible, and while the Animal Handling list of categories might seem useful, Animal Handling's narrower scope for more intelligent animals isn't obviously applicable here. The skill appeared at GURPS 1e.
Modifiers include +5 for an animal that knows and trusts you, and -2 or worse for an unfamiliar type of animal, plus the Animal Friend and Healer talents. Medical equipment modifiers are potentially applicable, too.
I wasn't entirely sure about the scope of this skill with respect to the human-orientated medical skills, so I asked PK, who discussed it with Kromm:
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Originally Posted by PK
Per Kromm, the intent is for Veterinary to replace Physician; it's the skill of treating and patching up animals. That would leave Diagnosis and Surgery as additional requirements for a full-service vet. Rather than require vets to buy off physiology modifiers, I'd suggest* that any campaign in need of detailed vet rules split both skills into two mandatory specialties, Animal and Human, with the additional rule that neither Diagnosis (Animal) nor Surgery (Animal) can exceed Veterinary skill.
* Until we publish something with more detailed rules.
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Those (Animal) and (Human) specialties presumably default to each other at -5, given the existing defaults structure and physiology modifiers.
In modern training, a newly graduated veterinarian with a four-year degree can go straight into practice, while a newly graduated doctor needs years of further training. This has to imply that there are limits to the detail that veterinarians go into, compared to doctors, and loss of animal patients is certainly more acceptable than humans dying. Pharmacy for animals is pretty similar to the skill for humans, at least on Earth, and many real-world veterinarians have been trained using pharmacology texts written for medical schools. Acquiring familiarity with a new type of animal takes a year, or a breeding cycle (whichever is less, per Social Engineering: Back to School), and this presumably isn't full-time work, given that newly trained veterinarians are familiar with several types.
Veterinary is a common template skill for low-tech nomads and traders and the people who look after their beasts of burden, plus roving druids and medics at any TL. Knights usually leave it to specialists.
Creatures of the Night has animal parts that need Veterinary to extract, and
High-Tech has tranquiliser guns.
Martial Arts has Pressure Points as an option for use on animals, which becomes more plausible with this skill, and
Monster Hunters uses it for identifying animal-like monsters.
Power-Ups 3 and 7 have examples for Veterinary, which will come in handy for upgrading animals via
Powers: The Weird.
This is a skill I've often taken, but less often used. I usually take a point of it on any character with Healer talent, and the Romany wise-woman I'm playing has more than that, since it's one of her assorted ways of earning a living. It was the key to a favourite rules abuse I had before 4e: take Animal Empathy, which used to give +4 to Veterinary, and then spend a point on it with a old-style Optional Specialisation in Equines, producing a skill of IQ+7 for horses for a total of six points, and a good way to make a living anywhere that has horses. That really did have to go.
What have you done with this skill?