Animals and the Shaping of Modern Medicine

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.

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.

Chapter 1: Introduction. Centring animals within medical history.- Chapter 2: Doctors in the Zoo: Connecting human and animal health in British zoological gardens, c1828-1890; Abigail Woods.- Chapter 3: From co-ordinated campaigns to water-tight compartments: Diseased sheep and their investigation in Britain, c1880-1920; Abigail Woods.- Chapter 4: From healthy cows to healthy humans: Integrated approaches to world hunger, c1930-65; Michael Bresalier.- Chapter 5: The Parasitological Pursuit: Crossing species and disciplinary boundaries with Calvin W. Schwabe and the Echinococcus tapeworm, 1956-1975; Rachel Mason Dentinger.- Chapter 6: Humans, other animals and 'One Health' in the early twenty-first century; Angela Cassidy.- Chapter 7: Conclusion.- Appendix: Annotated bibliography