Animals and the Shaping of Modern Medicine

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvii

   PDF

2. Introduction: Centring Animals Within Medical History

   • Abigail Woods, Michael Bresalier, Angela Cassidy, Rachel Mason Dentinger

   Pages 1-26Open Access

3. Doctors in the Zoo: Connecting Human and Animal Health in British Zoological Gardens, c.1828–1890

   • Abigail Woods

   Pages 27-69Open Access

4. From Coordinated Campaigns to Watertight Compartments: Diseased Sheep and their Investigation in Britain, c.1880–1920

   • Abigail Woods

   Pages 71-117Open Access

5. From Healthy Cows to Healthy Humans: Integrated Approaches to World Hunger, c.1930–1965

   • Michael Bresalier

   Pages 119-160Open Access

6. The Parasitological Pursuit: Crossing Species and Disciplinary Boundaries with Calvin W. Schwabe and the Echinococcus Tapeworm, 1956–1975

   • Rachel Mason Dentinger

   Pages 161-191Open Access

7. Humans, Other Animals and ‘One Health’ in the Early Twenty-First Century

   • Angela Cassidy

   Pages 193-236Open Access

8. Conclusion

   • Abigail Woods, Michael Bresalier, Angela Cassidy, Rachel Mason Dentinger

   Pages 237-245Open Access

9. Back Matter

   Pages 247-280

   PDF

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

This book breaks new ground by situating animals and their diseases at the very heart of modern medicine. In demonstrating their historical significance as subjects and shapers of medicine, it offers important insights into past animal lives, and reveals that what we think of as ‘human’ medicine was in fact deeply zoological.

Each chapter analyses an important episode in which animals changed and were changed by medicine. Ranging across the animal inhabitants of Britain’s zoos, sick sheep on Scottish farms, unproductive livestock in developing countries, and the tapeworms of California and Beirut, they illuminate the multi-species dimensions of modern medicine and its rich historical connections with biology, zoology, agriculture and veterinary medicine. The modern movement for One Health – whose history is also analyzed – is therefore revealed as just the latest attempt to improve health by working across species and disciplines.

This book will appeal to historians of animals, science and medicine, to those involved in the promotion and practice of One Health today.

• Human health
• Medical research
• Biomedicine
• Animal testing
• Drug development
• One Health
• Public Health
• Zoological gardens
• Diseased Sheep
• Tuberculosis
• rickets
• inter-war medicine
• Calvin W. Schwabe
• Echinococcus tapeworm
• Healthy Cows
• Parasitological Pursuit
• Open Access

“Both historians of medicine and advocates of One Health will benefit from its careful reconstructions of the intertwined histories of human and animal health and its incisive critiques of the conceptual and institutional borders that continue to separate them.” (Etienne S. Benson, Isis, Vol. 111 (2), 2020)

“This is a methodologically well-grounded book, full of documentation, on one of the major shifts in animal health history through the centuries. It illustrates a rarely explored aspect of current globalization that goes beyond internationalization, and illustrates the concept of ‘globality’ in the life sciences with the logical consequence of medicine being fundamentally as unitary as life. … a descriptive book that explores the development of a current phenomenon in society.” (Alain Touwaide, Doody's Book Reviews, November, 2018)

“Animals and the Making of Modern Medicine demonstrates the distance that can be traveled, and the depth of connections that can be revealed, when we break through disciplinary boundaries and challenge the norms that define – and limit – our scholarly pursuits.” (Georgina M. Montgomery, Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 51, 2018)

• Department of History, Kings College London, London, United Kingdom

  Abigail Woods

• Department of History, Swansea University, Swansea, United Kingdom

  Michael Bresalier

• Department of Politics, University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom

  Angela Cassidy

• University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA

  Rachel Mason Dentinger

Abigail Woods is Professor of the History of Human and Animal Health and Head of the Department of History at King’s College London, UK.

Michael Bresalier is Lecturer in the History of Medicine at Swansea University, UK.

Angela Cassidy is a Lecturer in the Politics department, University of Exeter, UK.

Rachel Mason Dentinger is a Scholar-In-Residence and Associate Instructor at the University of Utah, USA.