CONVERSATIONS with Animals...

Residents of America’s Midwest summer cauldron suffered 118-degree heat and high humidity on the hottest day in state-recorded history less than a year before July 4, 1955. On that date, a newborn inhaled her first gulp of life-giving air at five a.m., piercing the patchy silence of St. Francis Hospital’s small nursery in rural Washington, Missouri. At the time, U.S. President Dwight David Eisenhower occupied the White House in his first term, and Frank Sinatra’s Learnin’ the Blues claimed the ears of almost everyone following Your Hit Parade only slightly less than Les Paul and Mary Ford’s Hummingbird. On the nation’s holiday celebrating inalienable freedoms, the infant joined an estimated 272,432 other new American babies who would live among an estimated world population of 2,782,098,943 people.

Celebrated Hollywood actress Ava Gardner advanced the popularity of her first name among most Americans by then, but the new infant’s parents named their second-born daughter “Ava” simply because they liked the sound of it.

The word Ava means “origin” and “popularity.” It is derived from “Avis” (Latin for “bird,” or “Chava” (“life” or “living one”) from the Hebrew form of “Eve.” If from the Hebrew “Eve,” it derives from “ḥawwah,” which, in turn, derived from “chavvâh,” means “to breathe or live; living.” Ava Lee Frick’s appearance served as both harbinger and accelerant to the heating up of a firestorm of notable changes that would enter the world of veterinary medicine through which she, too, would breathe life and health back into the survival potential of many types of animals. Frick’s hard-won understandings and applications of the practicalities and possibilities within her primary field and those of animal chiropractic she would meld with other compassionate treatments—herbal phytotherapy, Alpha-Stim® technology, early laser-therapy design, Standard Process® whole-food supplements, hair-tissue-mineral analysis in animals, and Ayurvedic Medicine, to name a few. She would, in time, help blossom and expand their influence—hers as well—well beyond local, regional, state, and national boundaries; certainly far beyond the accepted norms of her time.