Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This chapter lays down the volume’s aims and objectives: to make a programmatic contribution to the field of medical history by elucidating some of the largely unrecognised ways in which animals informed the knowledges, practices and social formations of medicine; to enhance the burgeoning field of animal history by offering the first substantive account of animals within medicine that goes beyond the much-studied context of the laboratory; and to provide a history of, and critical reflections on the present-day agenda known as One Health. It introduces the field of animal history for the benefit of medical historians who may not be familiar with this scholarship, and draws from it to explain the volume’s core concepts, approaches and cross-cutting themes.

This chapter identifies Britain’s nineteenth-century zoos as important sites of medical research and practice that have shaped and have been shaped by animals. It explores the illness experiences of animal inhabitants, the problematic nature of their diseases and deaths, and how these events enabled the development of comparative anatomical and pathological knowledge. It shows that responses to animal disease were led by medical men, who applied the knowledge and practice of human medicine in ways that were shaped by their animal subjects and the zoos’ wider scientific agendas. Their clinical interventions, adjustments in animal husbandry and post-mortem dissections transformed animals into patients, victims of their environments, pathological specimens and points of interspecies comparison. As zoos became medical, so medicine became zoological, encompassing a wide array of vertebrate species, whose bodies helped to generate knowledge of health and disease that found applications in human medicine.

This chapter explores the history of diseased and dying sheep on farms in and around Scotland at the turn of the twentieth century. It reveals how these animals came to be regarded as victims of their environment, and positioned at the hub of a research network containing farmers, doctors, vets, natural historians and zoologists. It examines the investigations performed by this network, and how sheep shaped and were shaped by them. It then describes and explains key changes to the network, which shifted the location of investigations from farms to laboratories, and distanced doctors and practical farmers from the scientific study of sheep. Awarded new roles as hosts and transmitters of infection, sheep lost influence over investigators’ activities. Meanwhile, veterinarians sought to capture sick sheep for themselves by claiming superior knowledge that derived from their unique relationships with them. In these ways, sheep first integrated, and then contributed to widening divisions between, the various experts in their diseases.

This chapter is concerned with diseased and undernourished dairy cattle, and how they came to be perceived not simply as threats to agriculture but also as contributors to world hunger and ill health. Moving from interwar Britain and its empire to the post-war international stage, it explores how developments in nutritional science and veterinary medicine combined with economic depression, wartime food shortages and the aftermath of war, drew attention to the undernourished, unhealthy bodies of both cows and humans, and suggested connections between them. Enrolled by the United Nations and its agencies in their campaign against hunger in the developing world, cows inspired the formation of new health structures that aimed to tackle their unproductive bodies. Within these, experts in human health, veterinary medicine and agricultural science came together to survey the situation, and plan interventions that would create new bovine bodies and new experts capable of supporting their provision of health and nutrition to humans.

This chapter focuses on the tapeworm , as studied by American parasitologist Calvin Schwabe. It shows how following the movements of between animal hosts, ecological environments, continents, and scientific and medical disciplines led Schwabe to new intellectual territory and career opportunities. Rather than casting the parasite in the restricted role of infectious disease threat, he regarded it as an animal like any other, worthy of biological investigation in its own right, and an influential ecological participant in its environment. His conception of species relationships undermined traditional boundaries between human and non-human animals. This transgression he also enacted on a disciplinary level, where he combined the advantages of biological and medical approaches to parasites, and the practices of both human and veterinary medicine. Always on the trail of his tiny tapeworm subject, he blazed a path that led him eventually to advocate a philosophy of ‘One Medicine’, an approach unbounded by species or discipline.

This chapter explores the history of recent movements for One Health, which argue that because many of today’s pressing health problems lie at the interface of human, animal and environmental health, they can only be managed effectively by breaking down traditional disciplinary silos. It explores how Schwabe’s work influenced, and was reconfigured by, this movement, and locates its early development in several different research and policy networks, which produced not one but several different forms of One Health. The chapter also examines how human–animal health relationships have inspired and shaped One Health, and how they are represented—in sometimes contradictory ways—in the texts and images produced by One Health researchers and advocates. It argues that in foregrounding the roles of animals as transmitters of diseases to humans, and as experimental models of human disease, One Health rebrands existing longstanding research agendas that are more concerned with the health of humans than that of animals.

This chapter summarizes what this book has revealed about the medical history of animals and the animal history of medicine. It reflects on the implications of these findings for how historians think about and study the history of medicine, and for how One Health advocates conceptualize and pursue their integrating agenda.