Jones S. A Concise History of Veterinary Medicine 2022

A Concise History of
Veterinary Medicine
SUSAN D JONES AND PETER A KOOLMEES
A Concise History of Veterinary Medicine
From Ayurvedic texts to botanical medicines to genomics, ideas and expertise

about veterinary healing have circulated between cultures through travel,
trade, and conflict. In this broad-ranging and accessible study spanning
400 years of history, Susan D. Jones and Peter A. Koolmees present the first
global history of veterinary medicine and animal healing. Drawing on inter
disciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives, this book addresses how
attitudes toward animals, disease causation theories, wars, problems of food
insecurity, and the professionalization and spread of European veterinary
education have shaped new domains for animal healing, such as preventive
medicine in intensive animal agriculture and the need for veterinarians
specializing in zoo animals, wildlife, and pets. It concludes by considering
the politicization of animal protection, changes in the global veterinary
workforce, and concerns about disease and climate change. As mediators
between humans and animals, veterinarians and other animal healers have
both shaped and been shaped by the social, cultural, and economic roles of
animals over time.
susan d. jones is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the

University of Minnesota and a trained veterinarian and historian. Along with
her co-author, Peter A. Koolmees, she served as co-president of the World
Association for the History of Veterinary Medicine, 2008-2014.
emeritus professor peter a. koolmees is a member of the
Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the
Humanities of Utrecht University and a trained BSc and historian. He served
as president in 2000-2004, and co-president in 2008-2014, of the World
Association for the History of Veterinary Medicine.
Published online by Cambridge University Press

New Approaches to the History of Science and Medicine
This dynamic new series publishes concise but authoritative surveys on the key themes
and problems in the history of science and medicine. Books in the series are written by
established scholars at a level and length accessible to students and general readers,
introducing and engaging major questions of historical analysis and debate.
Other Books in the Series
Susan D. Jones and Peter A. Koolmees, A Concise History of Veterinary Medicine

Mark A. Waddell, Magic, Science, and Religion in Early Modern Europe
Barbara Hahn, Technology in the Industrial Revolution
John Gascoigne, Science and the State: From the Scientific Revolution to World War II

A Concise History of Veterinary
Medicine
Susan D. Jones
University of Minnesota
Peter A. Koolmees
Utrecht University
Ц| Cambridge
UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge
UNIVERSITY PRESS
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom

One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
314-321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi - 110025, India
103 Penang Road, #05-06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108420631
DOI: 10.1017/9781108354929
© Susan D. Jones and Peter A. Koolmees 2022
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2022
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-108-42063-1 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-108-43070-8 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy
of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.

Contents
List of Illustrations page vi

List of Tables xii
Note on Translations xiii
Preface xv
Introduction: Human-Animal Relationships and the Need for

Veterinary Medicine 1
1 Animal Healing in Sacred Societies,1500-1700 13
2 Animal Healing in Trade and Conquest,1700-1850s 39
3 Formal Education for Animal Healing: From Riding Schools
to Veterinary Schools, 1700-1850 86
4 Veterinary Institutions and Animal Plagues, 1800-1900 134
5 Veterinary Medicine in War and Peace, 1900-1960 202
6 Food, Animals, and Veterinary Care in a Changing World,
1960-2000 276
7 Veterinary Medicine and Animal Health, 2000-2020 329
Epilogue: Veterinary Medicine in the Postmodern World 369
Appendix A Spread of Veterinary Educational Institutions

around the Globe (List of the First Veterinary
School Established in Selected Nations, 1762-1960s) 375
Appendix B Table of Learning Objectives 378
Appendix C Key to Main Topics for Use in the
Veterinary Curriculum 379
Further Reading 380
Index 398

Illustrations
1.1 Diagram with acupuncture points on the body of the horse.

Source: Ma Niu I Fang (China, 1399 CE); reproduced in
Lu Gwei-Djen & Joseph Needham, Celestial Lancets.
A History and Rationale of Acupuncture and Moxa
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) 238. page 17
1.2 Egyptian tomb relief depicting veterinary care during delivery.
Remarkably, the cow is in a standing position. It also shows a
division between hands-on work by an operator while an experienced
herdsman instructs. The accompanying text says: “Herdsman, catch
gently” (Egypt, Old Kingdom, 1990-1970 BCE). Source: A.M.
Blackman, The Rock Tombs of Meir. Vol 1 (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1914) Table X, detail; text p. 33. 21
1.3 Scheme of humoral theory with humors and temperaments,
elements and qualities. Courtesy: Lisanne van der Voort,
Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University. 23
1.4 Treatment of a horse with diarrhea. A drug is administered
with a horn. Source: Fourteenth-century copy of Corpus
Hippiatricorum Graecorum. Courtesy: Bibliotheque
nationale de France, Paris, Ms Gr. 2244, folio 74v. 27
1.5 Woodcut plate from Carlo Ruini, Anatomia del cavallo,
infermita, et suoi rimedii (Venice: F. Prati, 1618) 243.
Courtesy: U.S. National Library of Medicine
Historical Anatomies Collection, www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/
historicalanatomies/Images/1200_pixels/ruini_p243.jpg. 33
2.1 Map showing the New World, the Atlantic, and Western
Africa with arrows indicating the exchanges of animals
and knowledge. Courtesy: Lisanne van de Voort, Faculty
of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University. 41
2.2 Eye operation on a horse. Source: Shalihotra Samhita
[treatise on horses] India eighteenth century. Courtesy:
Wellcome Library, London Illustration and Text
vi

List of Illustrations vii
eighteenth Century Collection: Asian Collection.

Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons
by-nc 2.0 UK: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/bbvup8ka 46
2.3 Emperor Akbar training an elephant. Miniatur der Moghulschule,
India, dated circa 1609-1610. Courtesy: Staatliche Museen
zu Berlin - Museum fur islamische Kunst. 47
2.4 The Yi-ma or northern Chinese horse-doctor, Mantchu Tartary.
Note the use of drenching, using a horn to administer oral medication,
while the Yi-ma’s assistant carries the necessary instruments and
ingredients. Source: George Fleming, Travels on Horseback
in Mantchu Tartary (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1863) 406. 50
2.5 New Year’s print about rinderpest. Amsterdam 1745. Courtesy:
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.843, public domain. 66
2.6 Representations of battle wounds in veterinary texts were
modeled after those in books about human medicine and
anatomy. On the left is the “Wundenmann [Wounds Man],”
Strasbourg, German, 1530. On the right, the “Wundernpherd”
[Wounds Horse],” German, 1683. Source: “Wundenmann
[Wounds Man],” Hans von Gersdorff, Feldtbuch der
Wundartzney (Augsburg, H. Stayner, 1542) 17; public domain.
Source: “Wundenpferd [Wounds Horse],” Johannes Carlyburger,
Rossarzneihandschrift 1683. Courtesy: Dr. Veronika Goebel,
Bibliothek des Instituts fur Palaoanatomie,
Domestikationsforschung und Geschichte der
Tiermedizin der LMU Munchen, IPGTM Hs
germ. 1, p. 63. 82
3.1 The geometrical proportions of the horse. Source: Claude
Bourgelat, Elemens d’hippiatrique (Lyon: H. Declaustre
and les freres Duplain, 1750-1753), Vol. 1, 476. 89
3.2 Image of the “defective” horse. Source: L.W.F. van
Oebschelwitz, De Nederlandsche stalmeester (‘s Gravenhage:
Van Kleef, 1763) 91, plate II. 92
3.3 Plate illustrating trepanation of the sinus maxillaris,
which became a regular surgery in the eighteenth century.
Source: L.W.F. van Oebschelwitz, De Nederlandsche
stalmeester (‘s Gravenhage: Van Kleef, 1763) 238, plate VI. 93
3.4 Shoeing-smith, Korea, eighteenth century. Painting by
Cho Yong-Seok (1686-1761). Courtesy: Prof. Myung-Sun
Chun, College of Veterinary Medicine, Seoul National
University, Korea. National Museum of Korea, Seoul,
reg. no.: Dogwon-2307. 96

viii List of Illustrations
3.5 The competitors: Claude Bourgelat (1712-1779) and

Philippe Etienne Lafosse (1738-1820). Source: stipple
engraving by Francois Pigeot, Courtesy: Wellcome Library
London Digital Image no. 1298i. Philippe Etienne Lafosse
(1738-1820). Source: Line engraving by Michel after Harguinier,
Courtesy: Wellcome Library London Digital Image no. 5197i. 102
4.1 Tail inoculation according to Belgian physician Louis Willems
(1822-1907), Cologne, Germany, 1854. Source: C.Th.
Sticker, Die Lungenseuche des Rindviehs und die dagegen
anzuwendende Impfung (Koln 1854), attached plate. Courtesy:
Library, University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover,
Germany. 149
4.2 Daniel Elmer Salmon (1850-1914), the first American who
was granted a DVM degree (from Cornell in 1876) in the
United States. First director of the Bureau of Animal Industry, U.S.
Department of Agriculture. The bacterial genus Salmonella
was named in his honor. Source: Public domain, Library of
Congress (USA). 161
4.3 Bacteriological meat research at the Amsterdam abattoir
laboratory in 1900 by veterinarian Dirk van der Sluijs
(1849-1923) and his assistant. Courtesy: Collection
Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University Museum,
0285-151480. 165
4.4 British veterinarian and inventor John Gamgee (1831-1894).
He initiated the first international congress for veterinarians in
1863 in Hamburg. Source: Reinhard Froehner, Kulturgeschichte der
Tierheilkunde: ein Handbuch fur Tierarzte und Studierende. Band 2:
Geschichte des Veterinarwesens im Ausland (Konstanz: Terra,
1952) 110. 168
4.5 Portrait of Jotello Festiri Soga (1865-1906), first South African to
graduate from a veterinary school, and first Black South
African employed by the Cape Colony civil service. Soga
combined Xhosa knowledge with European science to elucidate
the role of toxic plants in causing diseases in grazing livestock
during the 1890s. Public domain. 174
4.6 Louis Pasteur’s vaccination against anthrax during a trial in
Pouilly-le-Fort on May 31, 1881. Source: L’ Illustration,
November 3, 1881. 188
4.7 Poster of Clinique Cheron in Paris from 1905 in art nouveau
style by T.A. Steinlen (1859-1923). Courtesy: Rijksmuseum
Amsterdam RP-P-1968-308, public domain. 197

List of Illustrations ix
5.1 Graph showing horse population (in million) in Britain*,

Canada*, France, Germany#, and the United States (right y-axis)
in the period 1870-1980. (*Only farm horses, #non-military use.)
Sources: Wilfried Brade, ‘Die deutsche Reitpferdezucht -
aktueller Stand und wirtschaftliche Bedeutung’, Berichte uber
Landwirtschaft - Zeitschrift fur Agrarpolitik und Landwirtschaft 91
(2013) 1:2; G.K. Crossman, The Organisational Landscape
of the English Horse Industry: A Contrast with Sweden and the
Netherlands, thesis Univ. Exeter 2010) Fig. 2.2; J.P. Digard,
Une histoire du cheval. Art, techniques, societe (Arles:
Actes Sud, 2004); Emily R. Kilby, ‘The demographics of
the U.S. equine population’, in D.J. Salem and A.N. Rowan (Eds.),
The state of the animals 2007 (Washington, DC: Humane
Society Press, 2007), p. 176; F.M.L. Thompson, Horses
in European economic history. A preliminary
canter (Reading: British Agricultural History Society, 1983), p. 59.
Courtesy: Monique Tersteeg B.Sc. Department of Population
Health Sciences, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht
University. 205
5.2 Graph showing the tipping point of horses (in millions)
replacement by tractors (x 1000) in Canada and the United
States in the period 1920-1980. Source: William J. White,
“Economic History of Tractors in the United States,” EH.Net
Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. March 26, 2008; Darrin
Qualman: www.darrinqualman.com/high-input-agriculture/canada-
tractor-numbers-and-horse-numbers-historic-1910-to-1980/ Courtesy:
Monique Tersteeg B.Sc. Department of Population Health
Sciences, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University. 210
5.3 Bacteriologist Alice Catherine Evans (1881-1975) working
in the U.S. Agricultural Department laboratory c. 1915.
Source: National Photo Company, portrait c. 1915. 225
5.4 French soldier handling a war dog, both with gas masks,
after the German Army started using poisonous gas in 1917.
Source: Le Miroir 7 (1917) No. 183, May 27, cover. 238
5.5 The animal world salutes Hermann Goring. Cartoon
in Kladderadatsch, September 3, 1933. 252
5.6 “Rabies Inoculation Week” and “Military Group Activity
for Rabies Prevention Propaganda,” Osaka District, Japan,
1926. Source: Н^^И^Ш^^Й^Ш^. '?< • ^ffi Ш
[History of Prevention of Livestock Infectious Diseases of
the Japanese Empire. Taisho / Showa Vol. 1]

x List of Illustrations
(www.dl.ndl.go.jp/api/iiif/1903868/manifest.json ). Image
p. 506. Courtesy: Prof. Myung-Sun Chun, College of Veterinary
Medicine, Seoul National University, South Korea. 269
6.1 Global meat production (in million tons) in the period 1961-2018.
Source: FAO. 279
6.2 . Global meat production by livestock type in the period
1961-2018. Source: FAO. 280
6.3 Drawing showing the changes in the body proportions
of pigs over time due to selection, crossbreeding, and genetic
modification. Modified from Hjalmar Clausen, “Svineracer og
svineproduktion i et udvidet europaeisk faellesmarked,”
Nyhedstjeneste BP Olie-Kompagniet A/S 23 (1972) 71:
1-19. Image p. 6. 284
6.4 Image symbolizing the widespread use of antibiotics in
livestock production. The Netherlands 2011. Source:
A. Sikkema, “Stoppen met spuiten,” Wageningen Resource 6
(2011) September 3: 12-15. 300
6.5 Record from the archive of the veterinary school of Alfort
showing that Marie Kapsevitch (Marija Kapcevic) from
Russia graduated on July 23, 1897. Courtesy: Prof.
Christophe Degueurce, Director Ecole Nationale Veterinaire
d’Alfort and Curator Musee Fragonard, Paris. 313
6.6 Enrollment of first-year female students (%) in the veterinary
college of Helsinki (Finland), Oslo (Norway), and an average of
28 colleges in the United States. Female graduates (%) of
the veterinary colleges of Madrid (Spain), Seoul (South
Korea), Utrecht (the Netherlands), and Turkey (average
of veterinary colleges in Ankara, Bursa, and Istanbul) in the period
1970-2007 and of Ankara (2010-2020). Courtesy: Prof.
Tamay Bajagag Gul, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine,
Ankara University; Prof. Myung-Sun Chun, College of Veterinary
Medicine, Seoul National University; Ann Kristin Egeli,
Study Advisor, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Norwegian
University of Life Sciences, Oslo; Prof. Joaqurn Sanchez
de Lollano, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Complutense
University, Madrid, and Prof. Antti Sukura, Faculty of Veterinary
Medicine, Helsinki University. Data from the U.S. Internal
Report Assoc. of American Veterinary Medical Colleges
1970-2017. Courtesy: Monique Tersteeg B.Sc. Department
of Population Health Sciences, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine,
Utrecht University. 318

List of Illustrations xi
7.1 Position of pets in postmodern society. Mark Ulriksen,

“City Dogs,” The New Yorker, April 11, 2005. 333
7.2 Surgery on a dog’s skull, Utrecht 2018. After removal of a
large tumor, a 3D-printed titanium implant is fixed on the
skull. Printed from porous titanium, the edge allows the bone
to grow into the implant and integrate it into the skull.
Courtesy: Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University. 351
7.3 Globalization of animal feed. Required amount of feed
to produce 1 kg of meat, eggs, or dairy products, measured
as dry matter feed in kg per kg of edible weight output.
Source: Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, “Meat and
Dairy Production,” Our World in Data, 2016/2019,
https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production. 358
7.4 World map of emerging and reemerging infections;
70% are vector borne or zoonotic. Source:
https://onehealthinitiative.com/. 363

Tables
3.1 Phases of the professionalization process of educated

veterinarians. page 123
4.1 Milestones in microbial studies and therapy, 1840-1880. 193
5.1 Milestones in microbial studies and therapy, 1880-1960+. 217
6.1 Number of livestock (in millions) in Europe, Africa, Americas,
and Asia in 1961. Based on R. Froehner (1968), 423, 459-460,
532, 643, 656. 281
6.2 Global livestock populations in 1961, 1970, 2000, and 2010.
Sources: R. Froehner (1968) and FAOSTAT, February
23, 2012. 281
xii

Note on Translations
Translations from the following languages, into English, were completed by

the authors: Dutch, German, Afrikaans, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian.
We thank the late Ivan Katie for translations from the Danish; Ilkka Alitalo for
Finnish; Roar Gudding for Norwegian; R. Tamay Basagae Gul for Turkish;
Myung-Sun Chun for Korean; Junya Yasuda and Marcia Yonemoto for
Japanese; Shawn Foster for Chinese; and Bibor Ban’fi-Klekner for
Hungarian. All errors are the responsibility of the authors alone.
xiii

Preface
In 2010, as members of the World Association for the History of Veterinary

Medicine, we were fortunate to hold our annual congress in the delightful
Mediterranean port of Antalya, Turkey. Over potent glasses of raki, our hosts
immediately got down to business. Turkish law required all veterinary students
to take a course in veterinary history. Where, our hosts asked, could they find a
general textbook on the history of veterinary medicine to use in their courses?
The book needed to be concise, written in English, with an international scope.
We exchanged glances. No such book existed. We began then to think about
writing this book. Our goal is to provide a broad framework, informed by
global and world history, for the past 500 years of animal healing and
veterinary medicine’s development.
There is so much excellent research about the history of veterinary medicine
and animal healing available. Unfortunately, we could not include all important
events and research in a “concise” book. Instead, this book will trace broader
themes that can (and should) be filled in with the exciting stories, discoveries,
and episodes of each proud national tradition. As a global history, we have also
sought to highlight the less well-known voices and stories, and to consider
“veterinary medicine” as a broad set of animal care practices. Some of these
stories are appearing in English for the first time, and they represent the authors’
twenty-plus years of collaborating with scholars from around the world.
The daunting task of writing a global history of modern veterinary medicine
could not be successfully completed without the work of many scholars. From
Spain to South Korea and Kenya to Brazil, many people are interested in the
history of animals and veterinary medicine. It is impossible for us to thank
every person who has contributed to this book, but we have some special debts
we would like to acknowledge. Our colleagues in the World Association for
the History of Veterinary Medicine have generously shared their own research
with us, and we especially thank: Ilkka Alitalo, Tamay Ba^agag Gul, Martin
Brumme, Myung-Sun Chun, Ferruh Dinger, John Fisher, Joaqurn Sanchez de
Lollano, Miguel Marquez, Johann Schaffer, and Abigail Woods. We remem
ber scholars no longer with us whose work informs veterinary history,
xv
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354929.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

xvi Preface
especially: Jean Blancou, Miguel Cordero del Campillo, Angela von den
Driesch, Robert Dunlop, Denes Karasszon, Ivan Katie, William McNeill,
Wilhelm Rieck, Leon Saunders, Calvin Schwabe, and Fred Smithcors. This
book stands on their shoulders.
We thank our editor, Lucy Rhymer, and the staff at Cambridge University
Press; and our employers, the Universities of Minnesota and Utrecht.
Universiteit Utrecht’s Descartes Center for the History and Philosophy of the
Sciences and Humanities and its Director, Bert Theunissen, generously funded
a writing semester together in Utrecht in 2018. Finally, history cannot be done
without the substantial help of librarians, archivists, and museum curators. Of
many, we specially mention Trenton Boyd, Christophe Degueurce, the late
Ivan Katic, the late Guus Mathijsen, and Susanne Whitaker.
We are completing this book during two important historical events: the
COVID-19 pandemic, caused by a coronavirus originating in wild bats and
possibly spread by animals and raw food at open-air markets; and renewed
concerns about worldwide socioeconomic inequality due to racism, discrimin
ation, lack of education, wars, and colonialism, including the dangers of
disease exposure and violence. These events have necessarily influenced
how we address some of the issues in this book, specifically: the history of
zoonotic diseases; the interactions between human populations and wildlife in
the environment; the development of agricultural practices such as raising
livestock in close confinement; and the roles of veterinarians in “One
Health” and other approaches that help an increasing global population of
humans live with disease risks.
COVID-19 has shown how pandemics can still cause serious disruptions of
modern life despite advanced scientific knowledge and technological progress.
At its basis is a reminder that people cannot simply control nature.
Socioeconomic inequality still plays a role in the development of veterinary
medicine in terms of possessing and exploiting food and other animals and
enabling veterinary care for these animals. Therefore, we have sought to make
this book inclusive of cultures, beliefs, and practices from around the world.
Political ideology, religion, wars, and socioeconomic inequality, including
ideas and practices on serfdom and slavery as well as social-Darwinist and
other concepts of racism and discrimination, also influenced the history of
human-animal relationships, and thus the development of veterinary medicine.
Within these contexts we shall also address human and animal suffering from
wars, epizootic and zoonotic pandemics, disturbed production, and supply of
foods of animal origin, as well as the inclusion or exclusion of people from the
veterinary profession based on gender, ethnicity, and other factors.
We have much work to do. Let us all, as informed citizens and dedicated
professionals, pledge to use our abilities to make the world a better place for
people, animals, and their environments.

Introduction
Human-Animal Relationships and the Need for
Veterinary Medicine
The word “veterinary” can be traced back in time to the Latin veterinum,
which meant “beast of burden.” Of course, “veterinary” has come to include
many types of animals, not only beasts of burden, and the history of animal
healers and veterinarians is a rich one. This book is a synthesis of broad
themes, not a catalogue of every important event or individual in veterinary
history; indeed, that would be impossible in a concise history. Yet there are
so many fascinating stories we want to tell from all around the world. In
India, sacred animals (especially cattle) warranted special feeding and care;
what happened when the British colonizers arrived (1800s), with their habit
of eating beef? In eighteenth-century Spain, horses were more valuable than
men on the battlefield; while in France, Charles Vial de St. Bel, first director
of the London veterinary school, died in agony of glanders (a horse disease).
The model of veterinary education still used today developed amidst the
violence of the French and American revolutions (late 1700s), and veterinar
ians found themselves at the forefront of wars and imperial invasions for the
next 150 years. Human-animal relationships and the need for animal healers
have reflected the impacts of environmental changes, cultural encounters,
food production, international trade, economic developments, and imperial
ism and colonialism. By focusing on the uses of animals for food, transport,
the military, and companionship, we situate our history of veterinary
medicine over the past 500 years within these broader perspectives while
highlighting some of the stories and experiences that make this history
so interesting.
“Veterinary medicine” can be defined as the diagnosis and treatment of
animal health problems in the context of human-animal relationships.
Therefore, we use a broad definition of “veterinary medicine” to include many
types of animal healing throughout history. In each place and time, a veterinary
marketplace existed that could include formally educated veterinarians, botan
ical healers, castrators, disease specialists, and many other types of animal
healers (including the animal’s owner). Today’s veterinarians work in the
spotlight of local and global social concerns. Whether an urban “pet vet,”

2 Introduction: Human-Animal Relationships & Veterinary Medicine
a manager of huge cattle populations on feedlots, a wildlife conservationist,

medical researcher, or the last resort for a farmer with a sick animal,
veterinarians mediate between the interests of animals and their owners,
animal producers, consumers, and government authorities. It is a complex
task, requiring more than just technical skills and knowledge. Like other
animal healers through the centuries, today’s veterinarians must understand
the sociocultural and economic pressures driving (or limiting) their activities.
For them, history is a guide that deepens their understanding of veterinary
medicine today. We organize the chapters of this book around different
problems and how people have responded to them over time: keeping
animals alive and well in (sometimes) dangerous places and situations;
communicating with individuals in multiple cultures; and working within
political, economic, and social opportunities and constraints. Our goals are
twofold: to frame veterinary history in the larger social and cultural context
of global and world history, and to help students think critically about their
profession and the broad scope of the sciences that inform it, from anatomy
to epidemiology.
History also offers windows into how animals themselves have functioned
as important actors in human history, and how their roles have affected the
development of veterinary healing and medicine through time. Animals have
shaped the human-built environment around the world: animals’ needs deter
mined the geographical spread of agricultural societies and structured cities
while their labor powered industrialization, human migrations, and wars.
Animal behaviors, as well as human interactions with them, have both guided
and limited their healers’ work. Therefore, every chapter will include attention
to animals’ behaviors, social lives, ecology, and environments as well as
human sociocultural contexts. We also integrate the ever-changing philosoph
ical thinking about human-animal relationships and how this impacted the
treatment of animals. This contributes to our “new veterinary history”
approach, which reflects relatively recent changes in the scholarship. The
history of veterinary medicine is based on texts from antiquity onward, and
scholars around the world specialize in translating and analyzing these classic
texts. Over the past twenty-five years, professionally trained social historians
have joined veterinary writers. They have built on and revised existing veter
inary history, adding critical analysis to translations and narratives, broadening
the focus beyond a handful of professional veterinarians and well-known
scientists, and adopting new sources and methods from anthropology, environ
mental history, and global history. One milestone in global history, the begin
ning of the exchange between the Old and New Worlds, sets our choice of time
period to begin around 1500. Although the scope of this book dictates
narrowing the time period to the past 500 years, we next outline some of the
major themes in earlier human-animal healing that inform this book.

Early Animal Healing 3
Early Animal Healing
Domestication
The story of veterinary medicine begins with the age-old human problem:
food. For thousands of years, humans fed themselves by hunting wild animals
and gathering plants. Domesticating plants and animals yielded more food than
the foraging way of life, resulting in denser human populations in permanent
agricultural settlements. Domestication may be defined as selectively taming,
feeding, and breeding animals in captivity, thereby modifying them from their
wild ancestors for the benefit of humans. (Experts believe domestication
started in the Middle East around 10,000 BCE.) On prehistoric farms, domesti
cated animals replaced wild animals as the main source of animal protein.
Milking sheep, goats, bovines, or camels kept for several years produced much
more food than when they were hunted and eaten as meat. Livestock also
provided manure for fertilizer, contributing to higher crop yields.
Animals’ superior muscle power created bigger fields and revolutionized
agriculture. With the invention of the yoke, collar, hame, and harness, the
power of oxen and horses could be applied to ploughing more soil for growing
crops. The breast-strap or breast-collar, invented in China in the period
481-221 BCE, became known throughout Central Asia by the seventh century
and was introduced to Europe by the eighth century. This preceded the horse
collar, which is a part of a horse harness that is used to distribute the load
around a horse’s neck and shoulders when pulling a wagon or plough. A yoke
is a wooden beam normally used between a pair of oxen or other animals to
enable them to pull together on a load when working in pairs, as oxen usually
do. There are several types of yokes used in different cultures, and for different
types of oxen, horses, mules, donkeys, and water buffalo. When the horse was
harnessed in the collar, the horse could apply 50 percent more power to a task
than could an ox within the same time period, due to the horse’s greater speed.
For this reason, oxen were largely replaced by horses, a technological change
that produced more food, boosted economies, and reduced reliance on subsist
ence farming. All these technologies not only increased the efficiency of
agriculture (to feed rapidly growing human populations) but also increased
the importance and value of the animals using them.
Domestication shaped the development of human societies in other ways.
Taming horses, donkeys, and camels made it possible to transport people and
heavy goods overland for long distances. Next to transport, horses became
crucial in warfare, and their essential military role lasted into the twentieth
century. First, horses were ridden bareback; later, they were yoked to wagons
and battle chariots, which changed warfare in the Near East, the
Mediterranean, and China dramatically. For instance, the Hyksos with their

horse-drawn chariots conquered Egypt in 1674 BCE. Similarly, Attila the Hun
invaded the Roman Empire with his horsemen. In South Asia, elephants were
crucial beasts of war due to their strength, size, and ability to endure harsh
conditions and attacks. Next to large mammals, small animals such as
chickens, ducks, geese, guinea fowls, other birds, and insects (honeybees)
were domesticated because of their usefulness for human societies. Some
wolves co-evolved with humans, becoming dogs that worked as hunting
companions and guards or supplied food or companionship. Cats began to
live near human settlements to hunt mice and rats eating grain. Domestication
meant increasing human control over nature, enabling the growth of ever-
larger human populations.
Veterinary medicine is as old as the process of domesticating and utilizing
these animals. Provision of veterinary care seems obvious because these
animals were so valuable to agrarian societies. To secure and sustain food
production, prehistoric farmers and shepherds worked to keep their horses,
camels, elephants, sheep, goats, bovines, and pigs healthy. Traces of veterinary
activities can be found in prehistory. For example, in 2018 paleo-pathologists
found evidence for trepanation in a cow’s skull from the Neolithic period
found in France. Castration of bulls, healed broken legs in cattle, dog breeding,
and crossbreeding horses and donkeys have also been well documented in the
literature. Such ancient veterinary activities were performed by experts, prob
ably mainly farmers and shepherds themselves. Disease in humans as well as
in animals was probably considered the result of magical forces, a supernatural
intervention, or a divine castigation. Thus, treatment of humans and animals
was based on a combination of ritual healing and medical or surgical therapies
that corresponded to theories about disease causation
Traces of Veterinary Medicine in Antiquity: Keeping

Animals Healthy
We define these early veterinary activities broadly as keeping animals healthy

(the formal veterinary profession only developed much later, as we discuss in
Chapter 3). Archaeological and written sources, including bones, statuettes,
murals, mosaics, and reliefs, show that animal diseases were a major problem
for ancient societies. In 2015, archaeologists analyzed bones of cattle from the
Middle East dating to 8,000 years ago and found the bones to be infected with
bovine tuberculosis. The oldest written account of an animal disease is about
rabies (caused by infected domesticated dogs). This infectious (zoonotic)
disease, which is lethal for humans if not treated, was already feared in
antiquity. One part of the legal code of Eshnunna, from ancient
Mesopotamia (Tell Asmar in present-day Iraq) dated in the twentieth century
BCE, states that the owner of a rabid dog had to pay a fine if his dog bit a

human and caused death because the owner did not control his dog.
Controlling diseases in animals used for food, transport, and agriculture was
essential to the success of domestication, and human intervention in animal
health is as old as domestication.
History helps us to interpret the activities of past peoples; histories show the
continuity of change over time and the fact that past events could have created
very different outcomes. For example, domestication progressed most rapidly in
particular regions due to a combination of environmental and social develop
ments. The existence of several domesticable species in the environment was
crucial, but so was the development of social patterns that encouraged people to
seek more efficient food production. Fast-forwarding several millennia, we see
that we are shaped by the past but that nothing has been inevitable. Wars, famines,
natural disasters: all these events affected different societies in different ways.
We must also remember these lessons of history when we explore veterinary
history. Animal healing has a long history, but, of course, we can recover only
a small part of it because many texts and other sources have not survived.
A popular theme within veterinary history has been the search for the oldest
known veterinarian in the ancient Middle East; however, from our point of
view, this is a futile undertaking because animal healing was so obviously
widespread by this time. We may never obtain the full picture of ancient
animal healing. What we can do is to situate the surviving historical sources
within the social activities and cultural beliefs of the time. We can gain some
insight into how people and animals lived so long ago, and that insight has
great value today. This new model of veterinary history focuses not just on
“finding the first,” but on understanding “the most”: the histories of how the
common people and their animals lived.
This new model of veterinary history also incorporates a global history
approach, because most Western-based veterinary historians’ works have not
included information from unfamiliar cultures, especially those in Asia and
Africa. But to explore early veterinary activities, we must investigate places
such as ancient India, where Vedic tradition says that both human and animal
medicine arose from observing how animals and birds healed themselves.
Veterinary activities were part of the ancient Ayurveda, or science of life.
During the Vedic period (c. 1500-500 BCE), cattle played important roles as
sacred animals and prized possessions, and early animal hospitals and sanctu
aries were dedicated to cattle. Early treatises also focused on the Asian
elephant (prized in warfare and for transportation), but healing practices were
well developed for many species. At this time, veterinary activities were
financed by the state, and the emperor Ashoka the Great sponsored the early
Ayurvedic veterinary hospitals (still visible in edicts engraved on pillars and
rocks). Ashoka’s motivation was reportedly spiritual: the practice of dharma
linked human and animal welfare. Thus, these ancient institutionalized

veterinary activities arose in a sacred society where early veterinary and

medical practice was connected to sacred rituals and spiritual beliefs.
Ayurvedic theories on physiology and health and disease spread from India
into China via Buddhist texts and were successively linked to indigenous
perceptions of human and animal bodies within a religious context.
Medical and veterinary practices in the ancient Arab and Mediterranean
worlds were likewise related to religious rituals at first. Priest-physicians
working in healing temples created theories of health and disease that guided
their activities in human and animal healing. Although religion and rituals
continued to play a role in medical treatments, a secular medicine based on
natural theories of health and disease also emerged. Regular horse-doctors
(jnniarpos or hippiatros) in ancient Greece appeared as early as 130 BCE, with
one treatise naming “Metrodoros” as a hippiatros. The most renowned early
Greek horse-doctor was probably Apsyrtos from Bithynia (c. 280-337 CE),
who served in the cavalry of Constantine the Great and whose writings were
praised for centuries. Apsyrtos outlined a coherent system of belief about
animal diseases and based treatments on his theories. For example, he
observed the contagious nature of anthrax, farcy, and glanders and as a result
recommended isolation for sick animals.
During the Roman Empire, professional animal healers, responsible mainly
for the health of equines, were known as veterinarius and mulomedicus. The
Roman scholar Publius Vegetius Renatus (c. 385 CE) used the term
“veterinarian” in his writings; Arabic scholars translated this to “bitar” or
“baytar,” meaning a surgeon of animals (especially horses). And this observa
tion demonstrates another theme important in this book: both animals and
medical knowledge about them traveled between very different cultures, often
due to the activities of trading (economics) or conquest (war). This was certainly
the case in Iberia (medieval Spain and Portugal), which Muslim armies invaded
to establish the Islamic Al-Andalus region (711-1492), thereby bringing people,
animals, and the learned traditions of Northern Africa and the Middle East into
contact with Europe. The word for professional animal healers in medieval
Iberia, albeitar, was derived from “baytar,” and this was only the Western
appendage of a much larger intellectual empire that extended into central Asia.
The early development of veterinary specialization accelerated during the
ancient period, when large groups of animals were used in agriculture, in armies,
and in supplying the needs of enlarging human settlements.
Veterinary Activities in the Middle Ages: Translation and Exchange

Past historians of Europe characterized the centuries between c. 500 and
1000 CE as the Dark Ages, characterized by warfare, famine, and a decline
in intellectual developments (including those associated with medicine and

healing). Today we understand that the centers of intellectual development did

not disappear; they shifted East and were thriving there by the time of the
Iberian invasion in 711. Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire,
was a center of scientific knowledge (further described in Chapter 1) during
this time. Later, the Islamic Golden Age (786-1258) included probably the
greatest assemblage of scholars from around the world, based on the House of
Wisdom (established 825), the great library of Baghdad. Veterinary knowledge
was also significantly advanced by the scholars of the Mamluk Sultanate based
in Cairo, Egypt (1250-1517).
Islamic human and veterinary medicine, based on the sacred idea that
humans and animals were interrelated, became the most advanced model
worldwide for centuries. Influential veterinary contributions were made by
Ibn Akhi Hizam, commander and stable master to caliph Al-Mu ‘tadid (who
reigned from 892-902). He wrote Kitab al-Furusiyya wa ‘l-Baytara (Book of
horsemanship and hippiatry). Later, Ahmad ibn al-Hasan included horse,
cattle, sheep, and camel medicine in his Kitab al-Baitara (c. 1209). A very
important medieval source for spreading veterinary knowledge was the tenth
century Hippiatrica. This Byzantine compilation by an unknown editor was
based on Greek and Roman texts on horse medicine from late antiquity, among
others from Xenophon, Pelagonius, and Apsyrtos. The Hippiatrica was often
copied and referred to for centuries. It contains no overall medical theory or
etiology, but instead emphasizes practical treatment of injuries, lameness,
colic, cough, glanders, and parasites.
Animal and human health were closely related at this time. Around the
world, most people lived in small shelters, houses, or stables with horses,
cows, goats, or sheep. Such animals carried diseases that could infect humans,
either directly or through the bites of external parasites such as fleas. In
hindsight, it can be concluded that these circumstances were ideal for spread
ing zoonotic diseases. Wars also spread diseases. An important example from
this time period was the eight crusades during which Europeans invaded the
Arabic and Mediterranean regions. With them came diseases adapted to
Western European human and animal populations. The invaders themselves
suffered from poor food and water, lack of personal hygiene, and stress, which
must have weakened resistance among high concentrations of people in a new
and strange environment. Such favorable circumstances for the transmission of
infectious diseases took their toll on the crusading armies. Dysentery, cholera,
typhoid fever, leprosy, and bubonic plague ran rampant in the armies and
occupied regions. The thousands of animals on both sides suffered from
similar conditions, circulating diseases such as glanders among high concen
trations of animals with weakened resistance. Military horse-doctors were
skilled in wound treatment but often remained practically powerless against
such infectious animal diseases.

Animals’ key military roles meant that knowledge about animal healing was
often sponsored by expanding regimes and quickly translated. During the
eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, Islamic medical and veterinary
knowledge spread northward into Europe from the Mediterranean. The
Islamic works were translated back into Latin, and from there into Italian,
Spanish, French, German, English - thus circulating both Islamic and ancient
veterinary knowledge. A few important works appeared from Christian Europe
also. Giordano Ruffo’s De medicina equorum was apparently not derived from
older Byzantine or Arabic sources but is mainly based on his own observations
and experience. It was quickly translated into European languages and
remained a standard veterinary text for centuries. The same happened with
Marescalcia from the veterinarian Laurentius Rusius, who worked in Rome in
the period 1320-1370, and El libro de menescalcia et de albeyteria written by
Juan Alvarez de Salamiellas between 1340 and 1360.
In Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, veterinary knowledge continued to
circulate with human invasions and migrations. The Mongols, by enfolding
other cultures’ knowledge and technologies into their vast empire, had helped
collapse the geographic and intellectual distances between the ancient civiliza
tions of China, Persia, Arabia, and the West. After the conquest of
Constantinople in 1453 by the Ottoman Turks and the consequent fall of the
Byzantine Empire, many scholars fled to Italy where they contributed to the
Renaissance (c. 1350-1600), a golden age in European cultural history. With a
new focus on humans as individual and unique beings (humanism), the
Renaissance also included changes in understanding animals and the animal
body. This was reflected in art and in a new critical approach to anatomy (see
Chapter 1). People, animals, ideas, and the everyday practices of animal
husbandry traveled and encountered each other.
These circulations of veterinary knowledge and practice intensified when
people from the Eastern and Western Hemispheres (the Old World and New
World) contacted each other around 1500. Not only knowledge but also
animals, microorganisms, and parasites themselves traveled and altered the
disease ecologies of both animal and human populations. These transform
ations may have intensified the need for animal owners to act as healers or to
consult professional healers (we take up this topic in Chapter 2). The central
question for anyone concerned with practical veterinary health (and scholarly
treatise-writers) was, How and why did animals get sick?
Theories of Disease and Types of Healing

Although animal healing also addresses injuries and other problems, we will
focus on disease for a moment. Disease has been central to the history of
human-animal relationships, and people have understood the causes and

Theories of Disease and Types of Healing 9
processes of disease in different ways at different times. The way we under

stand many diseases today, using sciences such as bacteriology and virology,
is quite recent: only 80 to 150 years old. And our knowledge is constantly
changing, even at a basic scientific level (think of prions, only discovered in
the 1990s). As we will see in this book, an understanding of diseases did not
begin with bacteriology in the late 1800s. Many disease causation theories, and
the diagnostic and treatment techniques arising from them, dated back thou
sands of years to animal domestication. By 1500, healers of animals and
humans had several logical and well-established theories of disease from
which to choose; and they selected treatments based on their ideas of disease
causation and experiences. Some persist in one form or another today. While
this pre-modern period arguably yielded mixed results, animal healers, then
and now, used the tools that were available according to the beliefs of the
time - just as we do today.
Although no organizational scheme is perfect, we can place animal healing
methods into five categories of systems: (1) self-healing, or methods of
instinctual healing on the part of the animal; (2) mystical (religious, spiritual,
or magical); (3) empirical (therapy based on educated guess); (4) ethnoveter-
inary medicine (traditional methods used by laypeople and professionals); and
(5) contemporary veterinary medicine (“modern” Western professional veter
inary medicine that has developed during the past two centuries, based on
sciences such as bacteriology. Except for self-healing, all these healing
systems were based on theories and observations of how the animal’s body
worked and what caused the animal’s illness or injury. In other words, they all
made sense in their own time and place. This point bears repeating, because we
often assume that the only rational healing methods for animals are those of the
present time. But obviously, knowledge and technologies change quickly.
Today, people around the world consider veterinary medicine and many other
animal healing methods to be effective and rational. We do not want future
generations to judge us negatively for what we do not yet know (we have not
yet discovered a cure for cancer, for example). In the same way, we cannot
judge people of the past who believed firmly in their chosen theories and
methods of healing animals (regardless of whether we now find those methods
to be effective).
The first animal healing system is self-healing, or instinctive healing on the
part of the animal. The most well-known method is the instinct of injured or
sick animals to hide and rest. Animals are also observed to eat certain plants or
substances to self-medicate (such as self-induced vomiting in domesticated
dogs with gastroenteritis). Biologists and evolutionary anthropologists have
discovered several examples of these behaviors in wild animals. Mountain
gorillas eat clay to absorb and neutralize ingested toxins; Ethiopian baboons
eat the leaves of a plant that helps them expel parasitic flatworms. Capuchin

monkeys collect and rub themselves with millipedes, whose bodies contain
benzoquinone insecticides that reduce heavy external parasite infestations.
Elephants in western Kenya travel to the caves of Mount Elgon and eat the
soft, salt-laden clay found there, which helps them to digest toxins in the plants
they eat. Despite these activities, animals still get sick, fall prey to parasites,
and die; but researchers believe that some instinctive animal behaviors have
evolved to address illnesses and injuries. Of course, this is a human interpret
ation of certain animal behaviors that may or may not be true, and therein lies
the mystery (since we cannot communicate directly with the animals). But
researchers assert that animals’ behaviors are “self-medicating” when the
specific medicinal plants (and other things) they use are not normally part of
their diet; provide no nutritional benefit; are not used by all animals in the
group; and are usually used during certain seasons or life stages (for example,
pregnancy). Self-treatment, in other words, is the most likely explanation.
“Zoopharmacognosy” is the academic field that links observations of eating
behaviors with the theory that animals have evolved ways to heal themselves
to survive. The development of this interesting field is beyond the scope of this
book, so we turn now to the other healing systems.
These types of healing are conducted by humans, on animals. Mystical
medicine, empirical medicine, and ethnoveterinary medicine are the oldest
approaches in the human repertoire. Some of these methods continue to be
important around the world today in various cultures. Mystical healing
methods, usually a combination of rituals and petitions to a deity or higher
power(s), correspond directly to a culture’s major spiritual and religious beliefs
about how animals’ bodies function, what causes illness in them, and how they
are expected to respond to magical procedures or prayers. In the first two
chapters of this book, mystical and sacred healing traditions will be an
important context for our discussion of animal healing circa 1500-1700.
However, such healing methods are still important today, especially in
sacred-based cultures and societies around the world. In empirical healing
systems, practitioners select therapies based on observation, experience, and
trying several likely treatments. While empirical systems did not exclude
theories of health and disease, they placed emphasis on clinical experience
and what we would call trial and error. In the modern era, empiricism has been
derided as unscientific; however, contemporary veterinary medicine obviously
still includes reliance on experience, observation, and clinical response to
treatment.
Likewise, ethnoveterinary medicine encompasses the uses of treatments
learned or identified by laypeople, the folk medicine that has been woven into
today’s veterinary treatments. (And as we will see in Chapter 3, natural history
and medical botany were key components of the first veterinary schools in
France in the 1700s.) Most animal healing conducted in the non-Western

How to Use This Book 11
world is still done by laypeople and professionals using traditional methods.

Contemporary veterinary medicine refers to the version of school-based,
Western veterinary medicine that has been practiced professionally since the
late 1700s (Chapters 4-7). This system of animal healing has incorporated
many components from the other systems, yet like any “new” system it has
commonly disavowed them to distinguish itself. With many successes and
many continuing challenges, the practice of contemporary veterinary medicine
today is enriched by understanding how practitioners of the past have envi
sioned and taken action to restore health in their
How to Use This Book

We have organized the book around themes: social/cultural and scientific. This
book may be read chapter by chapter or in toto, either integrated into scientific
courses (such as anatomy) or as a textbook for a veterinary history course. The
book is built around eight learning objectives. A table of these learning
objectives and the chapters that focus on them is found in Appendix
B. Appendix C provides suggestions of which chapters to assign within
standard veterinary courses, such as anatomy, physiology, pathology, surgery,
food hygiene, and ethics/deontology. Appendix A lists early veterinary
schools, and the dates founded, for many nations. Veterinary professors can
therefore easily insert history into existing courses in the veterinary curricu
lum. In this concise history of veterinary medicine, we do not attempt to
include all important topics in the history of animal healing. Instead, we frame
the history of animal healing and veterinary medicine using a global and world
history approach, and we include activities at the end of each chapter that
encourage readers to explore the veterinary history of their own region and
nation. Every chapter considers how animal healing interacted with tensions
between the economic, military, and emotional (religious) value, status, and
uses of domesticated animals. Who were the animal healers? What was their
social status? How were they trained? What skills and knowledge did they
have? How did people explain or theorize animal health problems in each
place and time period?
In Chapter 1, we highlight traditions of animal healing around the globe,
from South American, to Islamic and Ottoman, to Ayurvedic and Chinese. We
broadly analyze early veterinary activities, including professionalization, and
link them to the more well-known histories of military animal healers and the
development of veterinary anatomy since 1500. In Chapter 2, we describe the
impact of large-scale animal epidemics and pandemics enabled by the eco
logical exchanges of animals, parasites, and pathogens. Developments in
international trade, colonialism, and conquest frame Chapter 2 and set up the
military and economic needs that shaped the professionalization of modern

veterinary medicine in Europe, which we explore in Chapter 3. Some ques

tions of importance in these chapters include the following: Which medical
concepts, popular beliefs, and therapies were used in animal health care? How
were animal diseases circulating around the world due to exploration, coloni
alism, war, and trade? What was the impact of these diseases on human health
and well-being, and on the projects of colonialism and state formation? In
terms of the modern veterinary curriculum, Chapter 2 highlights the develop
ment of physiology and new disease causation models; Chapter 3 details the
growth of veterinary surgery. Chapter 3 also asks, How did the Western
veterinary professionalization process of the eighteenth and nineteenth centur
ies proceed? How was the circulation of veterinary knowledge organized,
particularly with reference to the challenges of animal disease outbreaks that
had accompanied war, trade, and colonialism? How did the modern veterinary
school develop, and why did this model spread around the world?
The dramatic political as well as scientific developments of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries frame Chapters 4-6: the rise of germ theories, the
world wars, problems of food insecurity, and the various manifestations of
modernity implied by new regimes of animal production. How did new
domains for animal healing arise (such as preventive medicine in intensive
animal agriculture and the need for veterinarians specializing in “exotic” zoo
animals and pets)? How did veterinary public health grow during this time,
especially as circulations of scientific knowledge (and animal diseases)
increased in scope? What roles did laboratory research, germ theories, and
comparative medicine play? Chapter 7, the final chapter of the book, considers
how veterinary medicine has continued to change in the early twenty-first
century, with the dramatic worldwide increase in companion animal practice,
the availability of new medical and digital technologies, and the politicization
of animal welfare and animal rights.
The Epilogue concludes the book by discussing veterinary medicine circa
2021 and the traditional concerns and new realities it faces. These new realities
include the need to ensure food animal and herd health in a world increasingly
affected by emerging diseases and climate change - while most European and
North American veterinarians specialize in individual treatment of companion
animals (pets). With technological developments, such as the ability to genet
ically modify and clone organisms, we have unprecedented levels of control
over animals’ biology. How are veterinarians navigating these dramatic
changes and potential ethical concerns? These questions and many others
ensure that the future of veterinary medicine will be as dynamic as its past
has been. As mediators between humans and animals, veterinarians and other
animal healers have both shaped and been shaped by the social, cultural, and
economic roles of animals over time.

1 Animal Healing in Sacred Societies, 1500-1700
Introduction
In this chapter, we focus on what historians in the West call the early modern
time period, approximately 1400-1700, although we also provide necessary
historical background from earlier times and several cultures. Along with using
animals for food, transport, and cultural status, many societies incorporated
animals into their sacred traditions and developed elaborate systems of know
ledge about animals (including animal healing). In the early modern period,
animals’ ability to contribute to societies depended on animals’ bodies being
healthy and fulfilling the specific needs of cultures. Regimes of animal healing
developed within these world-ordering cosmologies to provide for specific
material requirements of complex societies.
Animals in Medieval and Early Modern Sacred Societies

“In the year 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” This children’s rhyme
describes one of the early encounters between the Eastern Hemisphere (Old
World) and the Western Hemisphere (New World), a major milestone in
history. The vast and wealthy empire of the Inca (12 million people) predomin
ated in the Western Hemisphere and Incan encounters with Europeans during
the sixteenth century would forever alter both civilizations. But the centers of
power and activity in the Eastern Hemisphere were also changing at this time,
as the old empire created by Mongol conquests dissolved and new centers of
power arose in the West. On the African continent, the Congo and Songhai
kingdoms included some of the world’s most experienced animal pastoralists;
in the North, Africans encountered the Ottomans, and in the east, Chinese
explorers. With the Old World’s centers of power shifting to the Moghul empire
in South Asia, the Ottoman empire in the middle east, and the Spanish and
Portuguese in Western Europe, an already interconnected world became more
expansive and extensive from the turn of the sixteenth century onward.
This world was the beneficiary of knowledge from ancient civilizations and
the medieval Islamic scholars, who had preserved, translated, and revised texts
13

about animal healing from around the world. The most important corpus of
medieval animal healing knowledge was collected in the Bayt al-Hikma, the
Abbasid caliphate’s great Baghdad library, and the Islamic influence spread
this knowledge widely. In addition to circulations of knowledge, printing
technologies and print culture spread westward from China and became
increasingly important. (This development allows historians today to use many
types of sources, including archaeological, oral history, manuscripts, and
printed documents, for the period 1500-1700.) Finally, the Iberian-instigated
connections between the animals and civilizations of South, Central, and North
America in the West with those of Eurasia and Africa dramatically influenced
the animal-cultures of all peoples. By 1700, the Iberian empire was joined by
two other rising world powers: the Manchus’ Qing, successors of the Ming
Dynasty in China in 1644, and the Russian empire, under its leader
Peter I (who became Tsar in 1682).
Animals were central to all these events: equines and elephants for war,
transport, and power; cattle and other food-producing animals; and many types
of animals as markers of social hierarchies and cultural beliefs. Vast empires
could not be created and sustained without healthy animals. In this chapter, we
explore animal healing based on how different societies understood animals’
bodies and how this reflected the sacred and practical values attached to
different domesticated and wild animals from the end of the fifteenth through
the eighteenth centuries. We begin with theories of health and disease and the
positions of animals in the cultural beliefs of different historical societies. We
consider various species and their uses, and we highlight the development of
knowledge about animal anatomy during this time. All these developments
occurred within a time of strong theological and cosmological influences on
beliefs about animals and how to keep them healthy.
Early Theories of Animal Health and Disease

What caused an animal to be healthy or sick? The answer depended not just on
pathogens, but was influenced also by time, place, and the roles different
animals played. Overall, diseases in humans and animals in early modern
times were often considered to be caused by magical forces, supernatural
interventions, or divine punishments for sinful behavior. The old idea of
disease as a divine punishment still appears today (for example, with outbreaks
of HIV/AIDS, Ebola, avian influenza, and foot and mouth disease).
The Americas
When Europeans crossed the Atlantic Ocean and encountered the vast empire
of the Inca (1438-1533), they immediately noticed the different species of

Early Theories of Animal Health and Disease 15
animals and their importance in sacred rituals (as well as for food and fiber).
The Incan people kept large numbers of domesticated guinea pigs, alpacas, and
llamas for meat and wool (llamas could also be used as pack animals). Incans
also kept llamas as sacred animals that could be ritually sacrificed to the gods,
and skilled artisans created solid gold llama-shaped idols. The Ayllu, or local
kinship community, held llama herds in common. Given the llama’s sacred
status, its health is likely to have been understood within the cosmological
framework of the Chakana (three universes) in which all living creatures’
bodies held vital energy and consciousness. We know of very few sources
(none in English) mentioning animal husbandry and animal healing in the
empire of the Inca, but practitioners of this specialized role probably existed in
such an advanced agricultural society. Due to the tremendous practical and
sacred value of llamas, it is likely that healers used well-articulated theories
and practices to heal these animals.
Further north in Central America, the Aztec empire (an alliance of three
societies) was also distinguished by a carefully ordered pantheistic society that
included dogs and turkeys as domesticated animals. Aztec citizens hunted wild
game (peccaries, antelope, and birds), although the main foods were vege
tables, grains, and fruits supplemented by fish; they also consumed specially
bred dogs. Animals played important roles in Aztec beliefs: animals mediated
with and represented the deities, and artists created numerous animal sculp
tures and images. Aztec-era medicine, especially knowledge of medicinal
plants, was highly developed and a wide variety of treatments were available
for specific diseases. (Many of these formulations are still available today.)
Medicine was a holistic practice that included rituals to invoke spiritual healing
as well as material therapies (such as bloodletting) that corresponded to
theories of disease causation. Wounds were sutured; broken bones could be
set with external plasters or as necessary, inserting a stick as an intramedullary
pin. As one poem described the healer’s role: they should examine the patient,
address the symptoms, and experiment with prevention and treatment, within a
holistic framework of theory and practice. As with the Incan empire, we know
very little about animal healers in the Aztec era; but such healers surely existed
within this society’s advanced development and medical knowledge.
East Asia
On the other side of the world, in Chinese medicine (also a basis for Japanese,
Korean, and other Asian healing regimes), generally an animal’s body was
healthy when it was in balance. This balance, in both human and animal
bodies, reflected the harmonic balance of all Nature and the entire cosmos.
This was a system based on rational principles of knowledge rather than sacred
beliefs, but it nonetheless relied on a coherent cosmological framework.

Ancient Chinese philosophy is beautifully complex, and we can give only the
most superficial description here as it pertains to animal health. Bodies were
influenced by the five material elements of fire, water, earth, metal, and wood
and the six abstract concepts of yin, yang, wind, rain, darkness, and brightness.
The functional relationship between organ systems corresponded to elements,
which in turn related to the seasons. Bodies also demonstrated these forces in
different layers, from the most superficial to the deepest, with the qi (vital
energy or life force) flowing throughout.
Bodies changed, and disease resulted, with six stages of qi transformation
described and connected in a diagnostic system by Zhang Zhongjing in his
Shanghan lun (second century). The causative forces included combinations of
wind (feng), heat (re), damp (shi), fire (huo), dryness (zao), and cold (han),
which could affect the normal opening and closing cycles of the body’s
functions. Disturbances to the balance of these forces’ normal cycles could
originate internally or externally. Important sources of external disturbance
were the zhangqi, toxic or poisonous gases and vapors, originating from
specific environments (especially hot and damp places with large amounts of
rotting vegetation). Breathing the air in these places endangered the health of
animals and humans alike, and many medical authorities and laypeople
believed that zhangqi caused epidemics. (This conclusion made sense: many
people or animals became sick at the same time because they breathed the
same poisonous air.)
In the Shanghan lun, Zhang based the complex system of medical diagnos
tics and therapeutics on the practitioner’s ability to detect these changes by
examining signs such as the pulses. Treatments, keyed to signs and diagnosis,
included herbs, special diets, manipulation, and moxibustion (burning bits of
the herb Artemesia at points on the skin to affect the body’s interior), as well as
external interventions such as cautery, cutting, and a type of bone-setting. This
system has been the basis of traditional Chinese medicine for centuries,
although of course it was changed and used in different ways over time.
These changes often incorporated vernacular (indigenous or local) knowledge
since the vast regions of East Asia encompassed multiple types of climate and
various cultures. Circulations and transfers of animal healing knowledge
proceeded most smoothly when incorporating vernacular ideas and practices.
Print culture also ensured the centuries-long popularity and influence of the
most important Chinese texts written during the sixteenth to eighteenth centur
ies. The most important compendium of herbal materia medica was Li Shih-
Zhen’s Ben Cao Gang Mu, which described over 11,000 herbal formulas. The
wide popularity of Yu Ben-Yuan and Yu Ben-Heng’s 1608 treatise on horses,
Yuan Heng Liao Ma Ji, along with the same authors’ books on cattle and
camels, established the Yu brothers as the fathers of early modern professional
Chinese animal healing. The ruling Ming Dynasty greatly expanded foreign

trade, and these books were available outside China and translated into
European languages by the early 1600s.
The treatments described in these treatises corresponded to the underlying
theory of imbalance in the body. For example, moxibustion brought blood and
qi flow and heat to a specific area of the body that was overly cold (han), damp
(shi), or suffering from blocked energy flow. In human medicine, moxibustion
has also been used for chronic conditions and to help turn breech babies. Its
function of redirecting heat to combat cold was synchronized with knowledge
of the energy pathways in the body. Printed texts based on Chinese ideas about
health and disease often included anatomical diagrams of the important points
on the animal’s body for the detection of pulse and energy and for the
corresponding focus of treatment modalities (Fig. 1.1).
These treatment regimens based on theories of imbalance often got com
bined with local folk remedies. Sources on professional animal healing often
dealt with military horses, for instance, the collection on care for such horses
provided by hostlers (innkeepers’ professional stable men): Si mu an ji ji
written by Li Shi in the ninth century. From China, such hippiatric texts were
transferred to Korea and Japan where further combinations with local
Figure 1.1 Diagram with acupuncture points on the body of the horse.
Source: Ma Niu I Fang (China, 1399 CE); reproduced in Lu Gwei-Djen & Joseph
Needham, Celestial Lancets. A History and Rationale of Acupuncture and Moxa
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) 238.

knowledge systems were incorporated. This is shown in illustrated scrolls on

equine medicine from Japan, for instance, one from 1267 that was given to
Tadayasu, a veterinarian responsible for cavalry horses. In Korea, horse
doctors (Maui) were active from the tenth century onward. The oldest
Korean compilation on equine medicine, Sin pyeon jip seong ma ui bang,
contains remedies for thirty-four horse diseases. It was written in 1399 by
Confucian scholars who integrated knowledge from Chinese hippiatric sources
and Korean folk remedies. These early animal treatment systems worked for
the local people because they successfully combined vernacular (folk) ways of
understanding equine diseases (and their treatment) with the more scholarly
theories.
South Asia
Important influences on Chinese medicine were the older Ayurvedic medical
principles, which continue as the basis for traditional medicine in India and
other nations today. Ayurveda, literally “life knowledge system” or “science of
life,” is also based on a rational belief system in accordance with ancient
Indian cosmologies dating back at least to 1000 BCE. Ayurvedic knowledge
was recorded in old Sanskrit texts, the vedas. Anatomy, or Sarira Sthana, is
important in Ayurvedic knowledge. Ayurvedic principles guided the treatment
of elephants and horses, valued as pack and war animals, as well as other
animals and humans in South and Southeast Asia. Cows (water buffaloes and
zebu) were especially valued for milk and milk products, and references to
cows are plentiful in the vedas. Boiled cows’ milk, buttermilk, and ghee
(clear butter fat) were (and are) important components of vedic Indians’ diet.
Cows were also highly regarded as symbols of blessing and sacred life under
Buddhism, the formal religion based on the vedas that arose around 500 BCE.
For Buddhists, cows provide five sacred products: ghee, milk, curds, urine, and
dung (the latter used for fertilizer). The Buddhist prohibition against harming
or killing any living creature applied especially to cows.
These sacred cows were cared for and healed according to the sophisticated
Ayurvedic system of medical knowledge. Ayurvedic medicine (again, far more
complex than we can describe here) is based on five elements that interact with
the body’s vital energy, the prana (analogous to the qi in Chinese medicine):
earth, water, wind, fire, and ether. Together these elements contributed to one
of three doshas or humoral-metabolic body types (including the mind and
consciousness): the vayu (dry and cold; movement and elimination or catabol
ism; or wind), kapha (water and earth; tissue structures and anabolic processes;
or phlegm) and pitta (water and fire; chemical processes or metabolism; or
bile). Assessing these doshas formed the basis of a rich and intricate medical
system that included problem-based diagnosis and treatment.

An individual animal’s normally healthy constitution always included a

combination of the three doshas in a unique individual balance. Disease
resulted when external (breathing bad air; eating improperly) or internal forces
(often a decreased digestive energy) caused imbalances in the body. Diagnosis
was based on the pulses, the condition of the tongue, and careful physical
examination (including bodily excretions, such as urine). The treatments,
consisting mainly of dietary changes and herbal medications, depended on
the diagnosis and corresponded to the missing elements. Treatment aimed to
re-balance the doshas by reducing excesses and remedying deficiencies. If the
animal’s constitution, the nature of the disease, and the season/climate all
belonged to the same dosha, then the case was considered almost impossible
to cure. Thus, early Ayurvedism was a theory-based “ethnoveterinary” prac
tice. Although it underwent many changes over time, Ayurvedism continues as
an important veterinary healing system today
Some of the world’s oldest institutions of animal healing were located in
India where elephants, horses, and cattle were very valuable to the state. Few
veterinarians outside South Asia or Africa will ever treat an elephant today,
unless in a zoo or circus; but elephants were important in military campaigns
and as beasts of burden from ancient times through the sixteenth to the
eighteenth centuries. Some elephants were also kept as sacred animals or sent
as valuable gifts between rulers and emperors. (A famous example was the
Asian elephant Abul-Abbas, gifted by Harun al-Rashid, the fifth Caliph, to
Charlemagne in 802. This elephant traveled from India to Baghdad to Aachen,
and its keepers managed to keep it alive and healthy.) With key roles as both
sacred and working animals, elephants have been the subjects of animal
healers’ attention, and many South Asian Ayurvedic animal healing treatises
are devoted to them. The Shalihotra Samhita, dating to the third century BCE,
is an early treatise on horse and elephant medicine. The author Shalihotra is
praised as the founder of veterinary medicine in the Indian tradition. This
treatise, which covers equine and elephant anatomy, physiology, surgery, and
how diseases of these animals could be prevented and cured, was translated
from Sanskrit into Persian, Arabic, Tibetan, and, much later, English.
In the modern period, Ayurvedic principles guided the diagnosis and treat
ment of cattle along with elephants and horses, according to the
Sivatattvaratnakara, the printed Indian eighteenth-century encyclopedia of
knowledge. Particular attention was devoted to surgical methods, proper diets,
and external manipulations such as inducing sweating or administering enemas
to balance the animal’s three doshas. More invasive or dramatic treatments,
such as cauterization, were reserved as last resorts in particularly difficult cases
of sickness or injury. Overall, animal healers derived their diagnoses and
corresponding treatments from their judgment of how vigorous or well bal
anced the animal’s doshas were. Since the Sivatattvaratnakara included three

chapters on animal medicine - one each for cattle, horses, and elephants - we
can conclude that these valuable animals were the most important patients for
South Asian animal healers in the eighteenth century. Cows, as the givers of
milk, were also givers of life; and protecting cows meant ensuring life and
health for all people.
Mediterranean Region and Arabic World (Near East)

As in Asia, extensive knowledge about animal medicine supported the crucial
roles of camels, goats, sheep, horses, and other animals essential for food,
transport, and military use in the ancient Arabic world. In the desert and semi
desert regions, the nomadic badawi (Bedouins) lived as herders and possessed
a great deal of knowledge about animal care and medicine. (Bedouin peoples
live today in many nations, including Israel, Palestine, Syria, and Saudi
Arabia.) Animal medicine (like human medicine) in these tribal cultures was
mostly empirical and included spiritual rituals and botanical knowledge,
learned through apprenticeship. Camels, thought of as the “gift from God,”
supplied milk, food, fiber, and transport for goods and people because these
animals could survive the harsh desert conditions. For the badawi, keeping
animals alive and well ensured survival. Experts in animal medicine (such as
the famed Al-as ibn Wa’il) would have been important members of the
community. It is notable that, in the pre-Islamic period, famed animal healers
included women such as Ibn al-Qosh. Recovering the history of Bedouin
animal healing practices is important: like other nomadic peoples, the
Bedouin had a great deal of practical experience with animals and theirs was
the most important livestock-based society in the vast desert regions. Although
few written texts survive, historians can consult the rich oral tradition of these
peoples today.
In other ancient cultures in this region, texts focused mainly on animals
valuable for their theological, cultural, or practical roles in societies. The most
important animals were equines and, secondarily, bovines and camels.
Historians have argued over who was the oldest known “veterinarian” in the
ancient Middle East. Some historians believe that a relief on the so-called Ur-
Lugal-edina cylinder seal from Sumeria, circa 2020 BCE, shows an animal
healer with instruments used in obstetrics. Lexical texts from this period also
mention doctors of oxen and doctors of donkeys. Other historians have pointed
to the Egyptian Sekhmet priest Aha-Nakht, who treated oxen. We do not know
much about the practices of these healers. By the 1750s BCE, the legal Code of
Hammurabi established the separate practices of human and animal medicine
and the fees that could be charged by professional animal healers. Rarely,
extant sources mention professional animal healers: a cattle-doctor named
Abil-ilisu is mentioned in a court record from Babylonia (circa 1739 BCE)

and the term “cattle-doctor” (a.zu gu.hi.a) continued to be used in Babylonian

records and laws. Therefore, the sources that survive today support the idea
that an officially recognized class of animal healing practitioners existed in
these ancient societies.
Although regular horse-doctors in ancient Greece existed earlier, the first
testimony of the Greek word for horse-doctor, InniaTpo; (hippiatros),
appeared within a long treatise written around 130 BCE. This document
described the work of Metrodoros the hippiatros. Metrodoros was a native of
Lamia in Thessaly, a region well known for horse-breeding. The most
renowned ancient Greek horse-doctor was probably Apsyrtos from Bithynia
(c. 280-337 CE), who served in the cavalry of Constantine the Great and
whose writings were praised for centuries. He observed the contagious nature
of anthrax, farcy, and glanders and recommended isolation for ill animals.
However, the oldest surviving Mediterranean animal healing texts did not
originate in Greece, but in Egypt (Fig. 1.2). The association of cats with
ancient Egyptian goddesses and sacred rituals is well known. The papyrus of
El-Lahun (c. 1850 BCE) reveals that animal medicine and surgery were
practiced by professional healers in ancient Egypt. The papyrus contained
instructions on how to diagnose and treat diseased bovines, dogs, ducks, and
fish. The first evidence for literature on hippiatry (horsemanship) appeared in
cuneiform tablets from the fourteenth century BCE found during excavations
at Ras Shamra-Ugarit in Syria.x
Figure 1.2 Egyptian tomb relief depicting veterinary care during delivery.
Remarkably, the cow is in a standing position. It also shows a division
between hands-on work by an operator while an experienced herdsman
instructs. The accompanying text says: “Herdsman, catch gently”
(Egypt, Old Kingdom, 1990-1970 BCE).
Source: A.M. Blackman, The Rock Tombs of Meir. Vol 1 (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1914) Table X, detail; text p. 33.

Medical and veterinary practices in the ancient Near East were based on
magic, rituals, religious beliefs, and practical knowledge of healing. Initially,
physicians were also priests working in healing temples. It was the ancient
Greeks who extended sacred healing knowledge into the basis of what is
generally known as the Western medical tradition. Less well known is that
their theories also applied to animals. Although religion and rituals continued
to play a role in medical treatments, a secular medicine based on natural
theories of health and disease emerged. Hippocrates (c. 460-370 BCE) who
lived on the island of Cos, is often praised as the father of Western secular
medicine, which was documented in the Hippocratic Corpus. However,
Hippocrates’ actual contribution to this Corpus is unclear: it is a collection
of about 60 works composed by various unknown authors throughout two
centuries. These treatises included various aspects of medicine which were
later integrated into one framework, Hippocratic medicine.
Hippocratic medicine combined a holistic approach and naturalism. As in
medical traditions from other parts of the world, ancient Greek doctors care
fully observed the whole patient to obtain information about his health status.
Naturalism dictated that the body was able to heal itself, with the role of the
healer to “do no harm” and help the body to restore its own health. Western,
Arabic, and Persian theories of health and disease had some similarities to
those of Asia during the early modern period (although these theories were
framed within very different cultural contexts). An important external cause of
disease was miasma (toxic or bad air); the climate and seasons also influenced
the state of an animal’s body. Health was maintained by vital forces and
balances of fluids and energy within the body according to the theory of the
humors. The four humors of Greek medicine - blood, yellow bile, black bile,
and phlegm - corresponded to the overall Hippocratic system of elements,
temperaments, and seasons (similar to the structure of Ayurvedic and Chinese
medical systems) (Fig. 1.3). The four elements - earth, air, fire, and water -
influenced and corresponded to the behavior of the four humors: the black bile
(dry, cold; earth); yellow bile (hot, dry; fire); phlegm (wet, cold; water); and
blood (hot, wet; air). Different combinations, or temperaments, accounted for
the observed differences between the organs and parts of the body (such as the
bones). We cannot do justice to this complex system here, but overall, it
defined a healthy animal as one whose body contained combinations of these
humors, in correspondence with its external environment, functioning in a kind
of equilibrium.
Disease and some injuries appeared or failed to heal when these humors
were out of balance, reducing the animal’s vital energy or life force.
Therapeutic choices (for both humans and animals) proceeded from the
healer’s diagnosis of which humors were in excess (materia peccans) or
deficient in the body. For example, it was widely believed that horses

Figure 1.3 Scheme of humoral theory with humors and temperaments,

elements, and qualities.
Courtesy: Lisanne van der Voort, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University.
contained too much blood in springtime by which the animals became over
heated (feverish). Bloodletting of horses after wintertime remained a regular
treatment until well into the nineteenth century. As with Ayurvedic medicine,
healers applied enemas, induced vomiting (purging), or held hot cups on the
skin to draw out toxic or surplus bodily fluids. Other treatments to reestablish
balance included changing diets, massage, warm or cold baths, and exercise.
Animal healers worked within a nosology (or classification) of diseases based
on these internal and external forces, and treatment procedures were designed
to restore the body’s balances.
Another Greek scholar, Aristotle (c. 384-322 BCE), is considered one of the
greatest philosophers and scientists of the ancient Western world. He laid the

basis for biology by classifying about 500 different animal species. Once
again, his contributions to animal health and disease are less well known.
Aristotle named several animal diseases with their symptoms but mentioned
only bloodletting as treatment. He described breeding of horses, donkeys, and
mules, as well as the castration of bulls and boar and how these animals grow
fatter. Aristotelian and Hippocratic texts were augmented later by the work of
the influential Greek/Roman physician Claudius Galen (130-210 CE).
Although humors were key elements for the careful observation of patients,
Galen provided some anatomical knowledge to support the humoral theory. He
dissected pigs (which he viewed as most similar to humans) to obtain a deeper
insight into the function of the various organs. For example, he noted that urine
was produced in the kidney and not in the urinary bladder. Next to vomit,
sweat, urine, and feces, pus was an important expression of materia peccans
that had to be removed from the diseased body
Treatises on animal healing from Greek authors were cited, copied, and
translated into Latin by Roman writers after the conquest of Greece. This was
the case with the treatise on horsemanship (hippiatrica) by Xenophon (c.
430-354 BCE), philosopher, historian, and soldier from Athens. Classic
Roman works from late antiquity entirely devoted to veterinary medicine are
Ars veterinaria by Pelagonius and Mulomedicinae by Vegetius. In the Roman
Empire, professional animal healers, responsible mainly for the health of
equines (horses, donkeys, mules, hinnies), were first known as medicus equar-
ius (horse-doctor) and veterinarius, and later (fourth century) as mulomedicus
(mule-doctor). (Often these terms were later incorrectly translated into
“farrier.”) The word veterinarius (caretaker of bestia veterina: equines,
according to Latinist James Adams), appeared in Columella’s treatise on
Roman agriculture, written around 60 CE. Agricultural production was mainly
based on slavery. It is not clear whether the (low) status of the veterinarius,
who also belonged to this group of agricultural workers, was free or servile;
however, it is possible that many were slaves.
The ancient Greek and Roman economies heavily depended on livestock
and crop production. Animals were indispensable because they provided for
transport, food, animal traction, and warfare. But equally important was the
cultural role of animals in menageries and for entertainment in the circus,
including horse chariot racing in amphitheaters. Animal healers were needed to
support all these activities. Ancient Roman mosaics and reliefs provide evi
dence for veterinary care, including racehorses wearing leg bandages. The
most common representations of instruments include variations of the nose
twitch, the hipposandal (soleae ferreae), and instruments for cauterizing,
trimming hooves, and castration. Besides horse races, fights between gladiator
s and wild animals were also part of public entertainment. Over the centuries of
the Roman empire, thousands of exotic animals were captured to supply the

more than seventy amphitheaters. (Ecologists have argued that this practice
caused permanent declines in wildlife populations, particularly in Africa.) As
for practical veterinary medicine, the boundary between the work of herdsmen,
owners, interested laymen, stable masters, breeders, other healers, and the
professional hippiatros, veterinarius, and mulomedicus was small.
A final cultural role for animals and animal healers was the widespread
aristocratic sport of hunting. Animal assistants in the hunt included horses,
dogs, and hunting birds such as falcons and raptors. These practices ranged
widely across Eurasia and persisted for centuries (even into the twenty-first
century in some places), thus providing a thread of continuity for the longue
duree history of human-animal relationships. Elite hunting was common in
early Mesopotamia, China, and India; and it persisted into the modern era in
Iran, Northern India, and the Middle East. Its practices instigated innovations
in animal breeding, care, and healing. For example, the manuscript “On
Hunting” presented in 1247 to al-Mansur (the Hafsid Sultan of North Africa)
also detailed the proper treatment of the sultan’s saluki hunting dogs. The dogs
were carefully bred, fed special diets, and given expert care for diseases and
injuries. Historians can often find information about animal healing practices
in documents and other sources describing the use of animals in cultural
activities.
The Islamic Scholarly Tradition

After the fall of Rome in the fifth century CE, Constantinople, the capital of the
Byzantine empire, became an important center of scientific knowledge - and a
return to the importance of theological knowledge. A shift occurred from the
Latin West to the East where Jewish, Islamic, and Christian authors added to
the existing medical and veterinary writings. For example, Maimonides
(1135-1204) worked as a rabbi, philosopher, and physician in Spain,
Morocco, and Egypt and wrote texts that included veterinary treatments.
With the rise and expansion of the Islamic empire around the Mediterranean,
Greek, Latin, and Indian sources were translated into Arabic, Persian, and
other Middle Eastern languages. Medieval Islamic scholars integrated Greek,
Roman, Persian, and Ayurvedic concepts and adapted human and veterinary
medicine based on new anatomical and physiological research (pulmonary
circulation of blood, the eye as an optical instrument, physiology of the
stomach), drugs (the use of papaver), and practices (mercuric chloride to
disinfect wounds, cauterization of wounds to prevent infection and to stop
bleeding). Islamic human and veterinary medicine became the most advanced
worldwide for centuries. During the Middle Ages (fifth-fifteenth centuries),
the most important collections were written by Islamic scholars in Mamluk
Egypt, including Abu cAli b. Abd Allah b. al-Husayn Ibn Sina (Avicenna,

980-1037) for human medicine; Ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1126-1198); and

Muhammad al-Bakhshi al-Halabi (1246-1324) and Ibn al-Mundhir (writing
c. 1339-1340) for veterinary medicine. These medical texts applied the theory
of the humors to understanding human and animal diseases and linked treat
ment to anatomical knowledge.
Although the more scholarly authors had little hands-on experience with
animals, their extensive reading and sophisticated analytical abilities meant
that their texts were highly influential. Al-Bakhshi al-Halabi, for example, was
primarily a poet, calligrapher, and important generator of documents for the
governor of Damascus and other Mamluk leaders. He wrote his treatise on
horses because his high-ranking patrons were interested in horses for practical
reasons (hunting and racing, for example) and for theological reasons
(explained below). According to another scholar, every ruler needed a range
of professional services to be provided by his staff, including veterinary
medicine, falconry, chess, medicine, music, astrology, and agriculture.
Veterinary treatises were essential to court life and to the ongoing success of
every ruler in the fourteenth century.
For the more middling classes of hands-on veterinary practitioners, the most
famous book on veterinary medicine, the Kashif or Al-Kitab al-Nasiri, was
written by Abu Bakr al-Baytar in the 1330s. “Al-Baytar” meant “veterinarian”
or “horse-doctor.” (Derived from this term, albeitar became the word for
professional animal healers in medieval Spain.) Abu Bakr was the son of a
highly ranked court veterinarian and a distinguished practitioner in his own
right. While serving as chief veterinarian for the powerful sultan Nasiri, Abu
Bakr combined his family’s practical knowledge with Greek, Byzantine, South
Asian, Arabic, and Persian texts; he cited Vegetius, Aristotle, Hippocrates, and
Galen as well as Persian and Indian experts. He also tested some of the
treatments recommended by his predecessor authors, and his analysis could
be quite critical. Of course, the state of knowledge had changed over seven
centuries; but Abu Bakr was one of the few writers who could speak authori
tatively about both the classical texts and the current practices of his time.
Abu Bakr’s work allows us to envision how Islamic scholars analyzed,
questioned, and revised classical texts, often adding new ideas and practices
to the accumulated wisdom. The volumes of the Kashif demonstrate that the
basis for knowledge about animal health and disease was the theory of humors.
Humoral imbalance (as well as external factors such as miasma) led to the
manifestations of disease, as the ancients had believed. But the originality of
the Kashif lies with Abu Bakr’s recommended treatments, particularly formu
lations of medicines, which reflected his experiences and his times. Historian
Hosni Alkhateeb Shehada cites the example of al-baqar disease (Arabic: ox or
cattle disease), which classical texts deemed incurable. He argues that Abu
Bakr rejected this, instead recommending a complex medication made from

several minerals and plants such as kahraba, tabashir, seeds of the rijlah plant,
and a decoction of the lisan al-hamal plant. Another treatment for al-baqar
disease was based on the seeds of hummad, qatunya, and kathirah, mixed with
the lisan al-hamal decoction. Modern ingredients, such as sugar, also appeared
in Abu Bakr’s medical recipes. To us today, Abu Bakr’s recommendations
look more humane overall than some of the treatments advocated by classical
texts (bleeding and purging).
This brings us to a final point: most of these treatises and texts were meant to
be used by practitioners, and surviving examples demonstrate just how innova
tive veterinary practitioners were (Fig. 1.4). As we mentioned earlier, the
Figure 1.4 Treatment of a horse with diarrhea. A drug is administered with

a horn.
Source: Fourteenth-century copy of Corpus Hippiatricorum Graecorum. Courtesy:
Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris, Ms Gr. 2244, folio 74v.

Islamic works were translated back into Latin, and from there into Italian,
Spanish, French, German, and English, indicating how widely they spread
around the West. Veterinary knowledge traveled from the Near East and
Northern Africa through southern Italy, Spain, and Armenia. The court of
Emperor Frederic II from Hohenstaufen (Barbarossa, 1198-1250) in Sicily
became an important clearinghouse of knowledge about veterinary medicine
from the Islamic and Latin traditions. For example, Jordanus Rufus (c.
1200-1256), Frederic II’s marescallus (marshall or master of the cavalry),
wrote De medicina equorum, a systematic work on equine medicine. In De
medicina equorum, Rufus addressed the learned stable masters: he described
the symptoms of illnesses; tried to determine a material or mechanistic cause
(beyond magic or superstition); and subsequently chose a therapy that he had
tested in practice himself. De medicina equorum was quickly translated into
several European languages and remained a standard for centuries. Another
treatise from Frederic II’s court, written by the blacksmith and stable master
Albrant, became the most widespread booklet on practical equine medicine in
German during the Middle Ages. The therapies of Albrant remained in use
until around 1900 because they were translated and copied into numerous
books of recipes for equine medical treatment.
Circulations of veterinary knowledge between cultures also took place in
Cilicia (part of modern Turkey), which circa 1200-1375 was a largely
Armenian Christian enclave at the crossroads of the Mongol and Mamluk
(Egyptian Islamic) empires. In 1258, Cilician forces under King Het’um
I conquered Baghdad and obtained possession of Arabic manuscripts on horse
medicine; these were among the sources used for the Cilician horse medicine
books written during the next century. A quite remarkable book showing the
spreading of veterinary knowledge is a compendium on equine medicine, the
horse book sponsored by King Smbat, co-written by an Armenian multilingual
monk and a Syrian horse-doctor in Cilicia between 1295 and 1298. Among its
sources, the book mentions an Indian manuscript and two Arabian works;
however, a study of these original references has shown that this book was
more than a mere translation of earlier work. Rather, the Smbat-era equine
medicine book synthesizes ideas from animal healing in the Indian, Arabic,
and Persian literatures and provides a critical overview of contemporary expert
knowledge on horse medicine in the Near East. The equine medicine treatises
of thirteenth-century Cilicia demonstrate how knowledge about veterinary
medicine was appropriated, translated, added to, and disseminated widely
between the many learned cultures of the early modern period. This veterinary
knowledge, in turn, contributed to the later corpus of works in European
languages.
Among contemporary European treatises was the Mulomedicina from the
Italian bishop Theodoricus Cerviensis (1205-1298), an influential equine

New Ideas: Breaking from the Ancient Traditions 29
medicine book in Latin. Cerviensis’ book tells us the types of herbal-based

medications used in the early modern period, for example, henbane as an
anesthetic to calm horses before surgery. Later, mandrake and poppy were
used for this purpose - precursors to the opioids still used in veterinary
anesthesia today. The invention of printing (circa 1450) dramatically stimu
lated translations and compilations of writings on animal breeding and healing
from antiquity onward. Older classical texts were re-published, such as Artis
veterinariae sive mulomedicinae from Flavius Vegetius Renatus (Basel 1524);
expanded editions were now possible. The most striking example is La Gloria
del Cavallo (Venice 1566) written by Pasquale Caracciolo. This treatise of
about a thousand pages with a comprehensive number of references mainly
deals with horses and horsemanship. It also includes a chapter on cattle
diseases. Another important encyclopedist was Conrad Gestner with his
Historia animalium (Zurich 1551-1558) in which he described the natural
history, breeding, and veterinary treatment of the horse. Eventually, the
printing press would make animal healing books available to larger sectors
of societies, at least, to literate animal owners.
To write treatises and books, however, authors needed patronage from
sultans, kings, or religious institutions. Next to courts and monasteries, med
ical schools of universities increasingly became centers of veterinary know
ledge with libraries containing veterinary manuscripts. For example, around
1080 the first medical school started in Salerno, Italy, while the first university
in Europe was opened in 1188 in Bologna. Medical faculties formed the basis
for university-trained physicians. Lectures were mainly based on Greco-
Roman and Islamic texts and students did not get training with hands-on skills.
This led to the occupational division between the educated doctor medicinae,
who theorized and instructed; and the (lower-class) surgeon and apothecary,
who obtained their knowledge by apprenticeship, performed the practical
manual labor, and regulated their professions in medieval guilds. These and
later European traditions of veterinary knowledge owed a great debt to the
Islamic scholars who created this rich global corpus of veterinary knowledge.
Blending the healing traditions of secular systems (such as the Greco-Roman)
and sacred ideas, these early modern animal healers most often worked within
sacred traditions and institutions.
New Ideas: Breaking from the Ancient Traditions

However, this dynamic transfer of veterinary knowledge almost came to a
standstill during the devastating spread of bubonic plague (Black Death)
during the fourteenth century. Originating in wild rodent colonies in eastern
Central Asia and western China, bubonic plague spilled over into populations
of hunters, farmers, and invading armies during the late 1200s into the

mid-1300s. The disease then spread throughout Asia and to Europe along trade
routes (plague infects not only rodents and humans, but also camels, cats, and
other domesticated animals). Bubonic plague devastated parts of South and
East Asia, killed around one-third of Europeans, spread to the continent of
Africa, and continued to cause sporadic epidemics for 400 years. In local areas
around the world, the plague outbreak changed agriculture and livestock
production significantly. In some places, whole cultivated areas were aban
doned. As crop-farming decreased, more meadows became available for
livestock production. As human populations began to recover from the devas
tation, meat consumption increased in some areas, and higher livestock
numbers demanded veterinary care. Existing veterinary knowledge did not
disappear, and it continued to be recorded in treatises that survive today. In
Europe, for example, farms belonging to feudal courts and monasteries were
the centers of hunting, agriculture, and livestock production, where veterinary
knowledge and practices were concentrated. At one monastery, Abbess
Hildegard von Bingen’s (1098-1179) Causae et Curae, for instance, included
treatments for livestock diseases along with those for human diseases; these
treatises were kept safely in the monastery’s library and survived the centuries
as one of the few written by a woman. As in the Islamic tradition, religious
institutions were important centers for knowledge in the European tradition,
both before and after the Black Death era.
Legal texts and trade rules represent another source of information about
animal disease, especially among livestock for food and other products, in the
fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. In Europe, for example, liver fluke parasites
in sheep are mentioned in late medieval trade rules. A seller of sheep guaran
teed that the buyer would be given a refund if the animals proved to have internal
parasites or a liver sickness within six weeks of purchase. Along with writings
on horses and livestock, works were also dedicated to care for dogs and birds
used at courts for hunting. A famous example is the Livre de chasse, a medieval
book on hunting, written in the late fourteenth century by the French count
Gaston Phebus. One part of the work is about the nature and care of dogs. This
classic was translated many times with editions available even today. Besides
the skilled handlers caring for hunting dogs, great value was attached to falcon
ers, who were responsible for the health of birds of prey. Falconry books with
extended descriptions of bird diseases were already written in early medieval
Persia. Arabic knowledge on falconry was then translated into Latin and used at
European courts. The higher educated nobility and clergy used these treatises to
instruct their servants on practical animal health care for centuries.
Recovery of agriculture, governance, and learning was slow; but after this
dark period of bubonic plague, a new era emerged. In the West, the
Renaissance (c. 1400-1600), a golden age in European cultural history, began
when many scholars fled to Italy after the conquest of Constantinople in

1453 by the Ottoman Turks and the consequent fall of the Byzantine Empire.
From Italy, Renaissance ideas spread across Europe and stimulated art, phil
osophy, and the sciences. This cultural context not only shaped the relationship
between veterinary and human medicine but also potentially challenged the
Christian doctrine that God had created humans to be separate from (and
superior to) animals.
Ars nova: Anatomy in Europe

The Renaissance changed the ways animals and animal bodies were understood
and represented, and this was reflected not only in art but also in a new critical
approach to existing knowledge of anatomy. No longer was anatomical training
conducted mainly from Galenic treatises; it was now based on active observa
tion and dissection of animal (and occasionally human) bodies. By 1500, all of
Europe’s approximately seventy medical schools included anatomy lectures
based on animals and, increasingly, dissection demonstrations. As part of
comparative medicine, elite doctores medicinae studied animal anatomy and
physiology, as well as animal diseases, for centuries. One early anatomy text
(dating to the beginning of the twelfth century) dealt with the pig, the animal
considered the closest to humans in terms of anatomy and physiology. This text
was used as the anatomical instruction book for students in the medical school
of Salerno. A major contribution was made by the universal genius Leonardo da
Vinci (1452-1519), who as an artist studied the anatomy of various domesti
cated animals as well as humans. Following in the footsteps of earlier Islamic
scholars working to correct the errors of Galenic anatomy, da Vinci made his
superb drawings of human and animal anatomy based on his own observations
during dissections. Based on a comparison of human and equine anatomy, he
concluded that horses walk on their tiptoes. He also left a very detailed drawing
of a gravid bovine uterus, placenta, and innervation of blood vessels.
The scientific basis for human anatomy was laid in 1543 by the Flemish
physician Andries van Wesel (Andreas Vesalius, 1514-1564). Vesalius
learned to dissect animal bodies during his study at the university of Paris,
but he criticized the usual methods of instruction. Ignorant surgeon-dissectors,
he wrote, did nothing more than cut up body parts to be examined by students
according to the instructions of a physician-lecturer (who never touched the
body) reading from a Galenic treatise. For a long time, dissecting human
corpses was forbidden and criticized due to cultural and religious restrictions,
but from the fourteenth century onward, anatomical demonstrations during
lectures slowly became more common. Dissections even attracted the curious
public to anatomical theaters, sometimes creating a carnival atmosphere or
public spectacle. After dissecting several human corpses (often executed
criminals), Vesalius concluded that Galen had probably never seen a human

body on the inside, and had obtained his anatomical knowledge from dissect
ing pigs, dogs, and monkeys. For example, Galen had written that the human
liver consisted of four or five lobes instead of two, as Vesalius observed. Based
on his own observations on internal structures and functions of the body, and
after comparing these with those of ancient Greek, Roman, and Islamic
scholars (which was typical for science in the Renaissance) Vesalius wrote
De humani corporis fabrica [On the fabric of the human body]. De humani
corporis fabrica was a breakthrough: a new detailed and comprehensive
anatomy of the human body, including a systematic Latin nomenclature of
organs, bones, nerves, blood vessels, and muscles which we still use today.
The magnificent drawings to illustrate Vesalius’ text were probably made in
the studio of the great Renaissance artist Titian. Linked with art and spectacle
as well as science, anatomy became the leading scholarly discipline within
European human and animal medicine in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen
turies. Mostly, veterinary anatomy focused on the horse because this was the
most valuable animal (with some attention to bovines and other animals).
By 1600, art, science, and aesthetics merged in a fascinating style in printed
veterinary anatomical texts. The most important text, a veterinary equivalent of
Vesalius’ anatomy, was Dell’Anatomia et dell’Infirmita del Cavallo (On
anatomy and disease of the horse, 2 volumes, Bologna 1598) from the
Bologna lawyer and senator Carlo Ruini (c. 1530-1598). Ruini was inspired
by Vesalius, and although he did not attend the University of Bologna, he
became one of the famous horse anatomists of the late sixteenth century. As a
member of a rich family, Ruini owned and rode horses and thus had a great
deal of experience with them. (He likely learned a great deal from the family
stable-masters and other practitioners as well.) Ruini’s treatise, the first one
exclusively devoted to the anatomy of a species other than humans, appeared
shortly after his death. The Dell’Anatomia set a new standard for high-quality
anatomical illustrations, remaining unsurpassed for centuries. It contains
detailed studies on osteology (bones), myology (muscles), splanchnology
(viscera), the nervous system, and blood vessels - all captured in very accur
ately drafted and beautifully rendered woodcut images (Fig. 1.5). The identity
of the artist who created these images remains a mystery, and some historians
have speculated that he wished to remain anonymous due to the humble
practicality and lowly artistic status of his subject, veterinary anatomy.
Numerous editions of Ruini’s book were published, and errors made in the
first edition (even in the title) were corrected in the second edition of 1599. As
scholars have argued for human anatomical treatises, Ruini’s work represented
the high value placed on the horse, both for its practical importance and the
natural majesty of the equine body in the animal kingdom. His treatise’s
success in capturing this cultural, as well as practical, value was demonstrated
by how widely Dell’Anatomia would be copied in the ensuing years.

Таипк v яд т ,;ц v
Q. 4
Figure 1.5 Woodcut plate from Carlo Ruini, Anatomia del cavallo, infermita,
et suoi rimedii (Venice: F. Prati, 1618) 243.
Courtesy: U.S. National Library of Medicine Historical Anatomies Collection.

The text, as well as the 49 beautiful woodcut images, regularly reappeared in

later anatomical works without acknowledgment. (International copyright laws
did not exist at that time.) Andrew Snape (London 1683), Valentin Trichter
(Nuremberg 1715), Gaspar de Saunier (The Hague 1734), and Frangois
Garsault (The Hague 1741) all “borrowed” images from Ruini. Andrew Snape,
the court horse-doctor of Charles II from England, even claimed that he was the
first person to describe the anatomy of the horse, despite the fact that he copied
22 plates from Ruini (reversing the plates in an attempt to hide the plagiarism,
which placed the viscera on opposite sides of the body and confused students
using his book). De Saunier went even further, asserting that the 61 plates in his
horse anatomy were drawn from his own observations when 51 of them were
plagiarized from Ruini. Unfortunately, quality did not always improve after the
new standard was set by Ruini. An example is Gervase Markham’s Maister-
Piece (London 1610), which has been criticized for its inaccuracies. One histor
ian has declared that Markham’s Maister-Piece harmed progress in veterinary
medicine more than any other text. However, it did circulate widely, including to
the British colonies in the Americas. An interesting fact is that the American
version, The Citizen and Countryman’s Experienced Farrier (1764), included
treatments that European settlers had learned from the local Native Americans
(referred to as “Discreet Indians” in the text). These were botanical remedies
based on local plants that were unfamiliar to the European newcomers; thus, the
Experienced Farrier reflected circulations of veterinary medical knowledge
between natives and newcomers in North America.
The final European veterinary anatomical text we will highlight was written
in English and illustrated by the London artist George Stubbs (1724-1806).
Stubbs, who was largely self-taught, embodied the realist tradition in art and
sought to connect the horse’s underlying anatomical structures with its external
appearance. He conducted his own dissections and, like some of his predeces
sors, sought to depict the equine body as noble and well designed. In The
Anatomy of the Horse (1766), Stubbs depicted the skeleton, muscle layers,
fascia, ligaments, nerves, blood vessels, glands, and cartilage of the horse from
three positions (side, front, and back). Stubbs’ book was published, as we will
see in Chapter 3, at about the same time as the development of modern
veterinary schools. Anatomical dissections for veterinary purposes revived in
veterinary schools from the 1760s onward, and anatomy has remained a central
subject within the veterinary curriculum ever since then.
Differentiating Animals and Humans

Our focus on anatomy, especially veterinary texts, raises an important cultural
question: what do these books reveal about European beliefs regarding the
relationship between humans and animals, circa 1600-1750? By studying

human and animal bodies, many scholars found similarities. Since ancient
times, curious dissectors had studied animals’ bodies as proxies for human
bodies. Some parts of animal bodies looked almost identical to those of
humans, and the notion of “comparative anatomy” was based on homologous
structures (such as the human forearm and the horse’s front leg). Natural
philosophers studying animals’ bodies also linked their findings to observa
tions about animals’ ability to reason and communicate, like humans.
However, there was a problem: in the European Christian sacred context of
this time period, only man was created in the image of God, not animals. The
observed anatomical similarities forced theological scholars to find another
way to divide humans from animals, and they focused on debating whether
animals had souls, as humans did. In this way, the developing sciences of
anatomy (and embryology and physiology, as we will see) challenged the firm
theological boundary between humans and animals by uncovering layers of
material similarity between species’ bodies and stimulating debates about how
closely related animals were to humans.
Anatomy was not the only developing science to challenge the human
animal boundary: embryology and physiology added more knowledge about
how human and animal bodies developed and functioned. Girolamo Fabrizio
(Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente, 1537-1619) is often considered the
father of embryology. He was professor of surgery and anatomy at the
University of Padua, and based on dissecting horses, bovines, sheep, pigs,
dogs, and mice, he wrote the first comprehensive study on comparative
embryology: De formato foetu (1600). It contains a detailed description of
the outer shapes of the various fetuses and the characteristics of the mem
branes. In addition, Fabricius studied the anatomy of the eye, ear, intestines,
stomach, larynx, and esophagus. Three years later he published a treatise on
valves within veins. (The small pulmonary circulation was already described
by the Arab physician Ibn al-Nafis (1213-1288), the Spaniard Miguel Serveto
(1511-1553), and the Italian Realdo Colombo (c. 1515-1559).)
The University of Padua became the center of comparative anatomy and
physiology, led by Fabricius’ brilliant student (and later competitor), Giulio
Casseri (Julius Casserius, 1552-1616). Casseri, a physician, performed dissec
tions for students on different animal species and human cadavers. Based on
these, he authored three reference books on comparative anatomy and physi
ology. Both Fabricius and Casseri (who succeeded Fabricius as professor in
1604) were teachers of the British physician William Harvey (1578-1657).
Harvey’s observation of valves within veins triggered his theory and experi
ments on capillaries and the large blood circulation, which was published in
1628 (see Chapter 2). Further supporting similarities between humans and
animals, Harvey also wrote that humans and other mammals originated from
eggs and that the reproductive cycle was the same for all. These were

milestones in the history of the modern sciences; and they were challenges to
the Christian doctrine that God had created humans to be completely different
from (and superior to) animals.
However, the anatomical and embryological scientific evidence was not
strong enough to make animals “more human” for two major reasons: theo
logical doctrine and religious rituals were more powerful than science at this
time; and most people had no opportunity to study scholarly texts and thus
continued relying on older, well-established beliefs and healing practices.
Although many anatomy texts (including Ruini’s) included sections on
treating injuries and diseases, these findings did not greatly affect disease
causation theories or change contemporary healing practices (in part because
Ruini’s therapeutics were quite traditional). Methods of surgery could have
benefited from greater knowledge of internal anatomy; however, seldom did
surgeons attempt to work on the internal organs because neither antisepsis nor
anesthesia were yet available. Animal healers continued to rely on correcting
an imbalance of humors with bleeding or purging; fighting inflammation in
horses’ legs with blistering and cauterizing; and administering medicines made
from plants and simple chemical compounds. They learned these skills through
apprenticeship with a more experienced practitioner (this was also true of most
physicians for humans). In the medical marketplace in most of Europe, a strict
hierarchy existed: a few educated scholars at the top, then the physicians for
upper-class and wealthy people; followed by more humble physicians; and
then, at the lower levels, surgeons and apothecaries and veterinarians. The
social distinction between physicians and surgeons was preserved through the
mid-1800s (and that between veterinarians and the various human medical
practitioners even longer). Surgery, apothecary work, and veterinary medicine
were considered (in most places) to be trades, not professions; and they all did
the manual labor disdained by the more socially exalted physicians. The social
differences between physicians and veterinarians reflected the differentiation
between humans and animals in the Western Christian tradition: according to
the Bible, God placed animals on the earth to serve man, and the value of
animals lay in the resources and services they could supply to the growing
numbers of humans populating the earth in the 1600s and 1700s.
Conclusions
From this very brief survey of several centuries, we can conclude that:
1. The domestication of elephants, horses, poultry, bovines, and other animals
supplied animal bodies for food, transport, power, and cultural status. Also,
many societies incorporated animals into their sacred traditions and
developed elaborate systems of knowledge about animals (including animal

Conclusions 37
healing). All these uses made animals valuable economically and culturally
within human societies.
2. Animal healers, like human medical practitioners, gained knowledge
mainly through experience and apprenticeship. Some texts were written
and kept in libraries (especially by Islamicate scholars), and a few writers in
Europe began publishing printed texts about animal anatomy and medicine
by the 1500s.
3. Globally, the most common theories of disease causation in humans and
animals in early modern times were probably supernatural ones: magical
forces, divine intervention, or punishment for sinful behavior. Within the
same time, place, and culture, supernatural or sacred theories could be
combined with natural ones; they were not mutually exclusive.
4. Natural (not supernatural) theories were important in Southeast and East
Asia, and in ancient Greece and Rome. In the Greco-Roman tradition, they
included the theory of the humors; the miasma theory; and contagion.
Ayurvedic theories (India) incorporated the theory of humors into a univer
sal cosmology of elements and seasons. Traditional Chinese medicine
sought to balance and nurture the essential energy of the body, the qi.
5. Treatments corresponded logically to the theories. Depending on the trad
ition, sacred rituals could be combined with bodily treatments in attempts to
cure patients. Treatments for the imbalance of humors included removing
excess blood (bleeding) and bile (vomiting and purging); for nurturing the
qi, these included acupuncture and guided movements or massage. Sacred
rituals included invocations to the gods, prayer, blessings, and others.
6. Knowledge about animal healing circulated between different cultures. For
example, Abu Bakr al-Baytar wrote an important veterinary medical text in
the 1330s that combined his family’s practical veterinary knowledge with
Greek, Byzantine, South Asian, Arabic, and Persian texts; he cited Vegetius,
Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen as well as Persian and Indian experts.
Islamicate scholars in the medieval and early modern periods were especially
important to collecting, revising, and circulating veterinary knowledge.
7. In Europe during and after the Renaissance, the development of sciences
such as anatomy and embryology had the potential to challenge the
Christian doctrine that God had created humans to be separate from (and
superior to) animals. Comparative anatomy demonstrated many similarities
between the bodies of humans and other mammals, for example.
8. However, the anatomical and embryological scientific evidence was not
strong enough to make animals “more human” for two major reasons:
theological doctrine and religious rituals were more powerful than science
at this time; and most people had no opportunity to study scholarly texts
and thus continued relying on older, well-established beliefs and
healing practices.

9. In the early modern period, animals’ ability to contribute to societies

depended on animals’ bodies being healthy and fulfilling the particular
needs of that culture. Regimes of animal healing developed within these
world-ordering cosmologies to provide for specific material requirements of
complex societies.
Many complex societies were built with large numbers of domesticated
animals. However, keeping animals close to or inside people’s houses effect
ively altered the environments of both. People and their domesticated animals
shared microorganisms (which also co-evolved with them over time). A major
problem with the closeness of human and domesticated animal populations
was the spread and evolution of pathogens, and healers for both humans and
animals faced the challenges of emergent diseases then (as we do now).
Increasingly, human activities shaped the ecologies of health and disease
around the world. When the peoples of the Western and Eastern
Hemispheres encountered each other in the late 1400s, for example, the
invading Europeans brought their domesticated animals, plants, and diseases
with them. As we will see in the next chapter, these demographic and eco
logical transformations ushered in a new era for animal healing and veterinary
medicine.
Question/Activity: Can you find examples of how healers in your region or

nation contributed to knowledge about animal disease, from ancient times until
1700? What were the major theories about disease causation, and what were the
major treatments used on sick animals?

2 Animal Healing in Trade and Conquest,
1700-1850s
Introduction
Globalization is not new. People and other animals, plants, and microbes
traveled great distances from the time of ancient migrations to the Americas,
and the Polynesians; through the early Chinese dynastic empires; to the
invasions of the Crusades and the Mongols. Besides archaeological evidence,
we have few sources for understanding how the transfers of ancient civiliza
tions and ecologies affected the world inherited by later generations. Traces
disappear and become naturalized, as if they had always been present; but this
is an illusion. Our world has been continually re-made by peoples (and
microorganisms, plants, and animals). What roles did animal healing play in
early modern globalization, and how did global forces affect the development
of veterinary medicine? We must necessarily limit our scope in this chapter to
only two centuries (circa 1650-1850) and a few case studies. Overall, we show
how the history of animal healing in this time period was mainly shaped by
two important aspects of globalization: trade and conquest.
By the late 1600s, human activities had dramatically interconnected
the world’s continents, transforming environments as well as societies. By
engaging in colonialism, opening trade routes, and geopolitical conflicts,
humans knowingly and unknowingly transported animals, plants, microbes,
and diseases across vast distances (this is known as ecological exchange). All
these activities required healthy domestic animals for food, warfare, power, and
transport. Keeping these animals alive and well in new environments or danger
ous conditions was a major challenge. A more interconnected planet also meant
new circulations of human and animal diseases. Responding to these challenges
caused significant changes in animal healing and veterinary medicine.
This chapter analyzes three phenomena and their influences on the develop
ment of animal healing: ecological exchanges, imperialism, and animal epi
demics; how people responded to animal epidemics; and the development of
military veterinary surgery. Ecological imperialism, as defined by historian
Alfred Crosby in the 1970s, is the theory that domesticated animals (and
plants) were crucial to conquering newly discovered lands and newly
39

40 Animal Healing in Trade and Conquest, 1700-1850s
encountered peoples. One example is Portuguese and Spanish adventurers

bringing horses to the Americas, where horse-like animals had been extinct
for millennia. Likewise, diseases traveled on ships and overland, infecting
groups of people who had never encountered these microorganisms (as
described by the historian William McNeill). A similar (but less well-studied)
effect occurred with animal diseases, such as rinderpest and contagious
pleuropneumonia in cattle. Finally, armies began appointing professional
animal healers to keep cavalry and artillery horses healthy.
These problems were not new, but by 1700 new social institutions began to
offer new solutions. These included the spread of book printing by which
knowledge could be quickly disseminated to literate people; the establishment
of universities; and the birth of modern scientific studies of animal bodies
(such as physiology and pathology). These institutions developed within the
frameworks of the European Enlightenment, the Qing Dynasty in East Asia,
and other learned cultures. They built on the traditions and institutions that
already existed from the ancient through early modern periods discussed in
Chapter 1, but the scope was wider and pace of development relatively faster.
Yet books, universities, and the developing sciences probably did not change
the treatments used by animal healers very much. Treatments corresponded to
centuries-old theories about animal bodies, and popular beliefs and practices
were slow to change. But in this era of global interconnection, animal healing
systems could incorporate knowledge from multiple cultures on multiple
continents. Overall, the animal diseases and problems that mattered were those
that threatened the society’s cultural, commercial, political, and military inter
ests - and these interests shaped early modern developments in animal healing
and veterinary medicine.
Ecological Exchange: Natives, Newcomers, and Invaders
The Americas, Western Africa, and Europe

What happened when different cultures of animal healing and veterinary
medicine encountered each other? Did these healing cultures communicate
information to each other at first? (Few historians or anthropologists have
analyzed these first encounters, and this is an exciting area for further veterin
ary history research.) In Chapter 1, we introduced the travels of European
adventurers that brought the Western and Eastern Hemispheres into contact
with each other. Christopher Columbus’ second voyage in 1493 brought
European species of domestic animals to the West Indies on the small ships
that crossed the Atlantic. These animals not only survived but also multiplied
well and served as the foundation stock for the Spanish colonies in Mexico.
When animals escaped their owners, they established wild herds. (There is a

Ecological Exchange: Natives, Newcomers, and Invaders 41
EUROPE
NORTH
AMERICA
AFRICA
------ Horses, cattle, swine,

birds, sheep SOUTH
------Horses, poultry AMERICA
........... Birds, snakes, rodents
------ Guinea pigs, racoons, rabbits,
mink, rodents
All: Knowledge, micro organisms,
insects, medicinal plants
Figure 2.1 Map showing the New World, the Atlantic, and Western Africa
with arrows indicating the exchanges of animals and knowledge.
Courtesy: Lisanne van de Voort, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University.
famous example of most Central American rabbits descending from one

pregnant female who escaped her cage.) This is ecologically interesting:
sometimes species die in new places, and sometimes they succeed as invasive
species. European domesticated animals (horses, cattle, dogs, chickens) proved
themselves to be successful invaders in the Americas, adapting to new envir
onments. With each voyage, more animals arrived: in 1520 European cattle
were introduced in Florida (now part of the United States) by the voyage of
Juan Ponce de Leon, and large animals (horses, cattle) came to the Virginia
colonies about 1611. (Few larger livestock animals were brought into New
England until 1620) (Fig. 2.1).
Domestic animals’ needs shaped social and economic relations between the
Native peoples of North America and the European colonizers. At first,
European ideas about animals and land as property astonished North
American Native peoples, many of whom had a holistic cosmology that
considered animals and people to be closely related. European newcomers,
whose lifeways were built around domesticated animals, in turn viewed Native
beliefs and lifeways as “uncivilized,” partly because they did not raise live
stock. For their part, Native peoples recognized the Europeans’ animals as both
a resource and a threat. They often killed European animals that strayed onto

Native lands for the meat; and they sometimes attacked animals in pastures,
sparking conflicts with the Europeans. For Native peoples, the animals were
also colonizers, appropriating land and resources and signifying the advance of
the European invaders. In this situation, although Native North American
peoples had well-developed (often plant-based) medical systems of knowledge
and practice, they may not have shared much knowledge with the European
newcomers when they first encountered them.
In Mesoamerica, we have more evidence about animal healing practices
because domesticating animals was more common in the urban and agricul
tural areas of this highly developed society. The mestizo chronicler Garcilaso
de la Vega (1539-1616, Peru) observed that the Incan peoples’ reactions to
first seeing oxen and horses was astonishment and admiration; but they quickly
recognized that these were animals - and useful ones at that. Incans had their
own indigenous domesticated animals, the llama and alpaca, for example,
which supplied meat, fiber, and transportation of goods. Medical treatments
for animals (similar to those of humans) were based on spiritual beliefs, herbal
knowledge and empiricism. For example, Garcilaso de la Vega described a
great epidemic of carache (llama mange) and Incan experiments with several
herbs trying to cure it. (Finally, only warm pig-fat rubbed on the skin helped.)
He catalogued medicinal plants indigenous to what is now Peru, and he
described how the Incans used them medicinally. In this way, de la Vega’s
treatises demonstrate a robust system of healing practices for humans and
animals already present in Central America when Europeans arrived. From
the early modern treatises such as de la Vega’s that survive today, we surmise
that the European invaders did get medical knowledge (especially useful
plants) from Indigenous Central Americans.
In North America by 1630, domesticated animal numbers in the Virginia
colonies exceeded 5,000, despite many animal deaths during Native
American-European battles in 1622. This included mainly chickens, swine,
and cattle but not yet many horses. Horses were less useful in Virginia because
they required more care than cattle. Also, oxen were better suited to plowing
new fields, which was very hard work for horses. There appears to have been
some transfer of animal treatments from England, as there are references to an
expert cow-doctor practicing in Virginia as early as 1625. We do not know
what types of treatments were being used; however, the colonists probably
brought the veterinary practices of their homelands with them. Several hand
books and treatises for the treatment of animals existed in vernacular languages
(English, Spanish, Portuguese) at this time and we will briefly discuss
them below.
The other major influences on this complex culture of animal healing were
the people from the continent of Africa who were forcibly relocated or
migrated to the Americas. By 1600, about 500,000 Africans lived in the

Americas. Historians have recovered evidence that Africans brought with them
extensive knowledge about agriculture and animal husbandry. Western Africa
(the homelands of many African Americans) was (and is) home to large
animals such as antelope, gazelle, wildebeest, primates, hogs, giraffe, and wild
dogs. Africans successfully domesticated guinea fowl and donkeys and bred
groups of cattle and goats acclimated to the local conditions. Western Africans
were also familiar with horses. The great Malian empire (1217-1255) had been
united by the powerful leader Sunjata and his generals using horses purchased
from North African traders. By 1500, when larger numbers of African people
began to arrive in the Americas, African pastoralists brought their experience
and knowledge about keeping cattle alive and well in difficult environmental
conditions (high temperatures, for example). Because ticks and flies were a
constant problem in sub-Saharan regions, Africans from certain regions had
much more experience with insect-transmitted tropical diseases than Native
Americans or Europeans did. Their knowledge was probably crucial to suc
cessful livestock-keeping, especially in the hot climates of the southern and
equatorial Americas
In current studies of animal-keeping in Africa and surviving historical
documents from early modern America, we find evidence of African know
ledge about cattle disease that influenced early modern American animal
healing. In Tanzania and Zimbabwe, pastoralists have demonstrated a vigorous
understanding of ticks and tick-borne diseases and a complex system of
materia medica based on local plants. Maasai cattle owners, for example,
described eight different tick-borne diseases they said were caused by the bites
of six tick species. They used hand-picking and application of kerosene-based
skin treatments to clean ticks off the animals and burning and smoking to kill
ticks in pastures. If the animal became sick, cattle owners applied botanical
remedies based on plants such as Aloe, Cissus, and Terminalia (all with
medicinal properties recognized by Western medicine today). In the midlands
of Zimbabwe today, ingredients such as snail shell and more than twenty plant
species, compounded into drenches and ointments, are used by livestock
owners and animal healers to treat injuries and diseases (mainly common
diseases such as diarrhea). Of course, we do not know if this accurately
represents the state of knowledge in the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries; but it
gives us some idea of the traditional types of animal healing still practiced by
people in these regions of Africa.
Historical studies demonstrate the transmission of plants and medical know
ledge from Africa to the Americas, as part of the ecological exchange across
the Atlantic Ocean. Africans provided crucial expertise for growing rice, for
example, and brought new plants such as okra (Abelmoschus esculentus) and
watermelon (Citrullus lanatus). Kola nuts (an ingredient in the original
“Coca-Cola”) and the Ethiopian coffee plant (Coffea arabica) also originated

in Africa and traveled to the Americas. Both kola and coffee were used as
components of medicinal preparations and as stimulants. Africans also brought
knowledge about inoculation (causing immunity in a healthy animal or person
by introducing small amounts of infectious materials) to the Americas.
Inoculation, long used in China to prevent smallpox, spread west through the
Turkish empire via Circassia and into eastern and northern Africa. (Chinese
naval expeditions reached eastern Africa even earlier, so it is possible that
knowledge about inoculation arrived with them in the sixteenth century.) We
are only beginning to uncover the rich history of medical knowledge circula
tions between East Asia, Africa, and the Americas. But domesticated animals
were very valuable, and they traveled. Knowledge about keeping them healthy
surely traveled with them, just as botanical knowledge, plants, and seeds
journeyed from one continent to another.
Early printed treatises and books, which were widely available by 1600,
targeted animal owners and lay healers as well as professionals. One of the
early sources of veterinary knowledge is El Libro de Albeitena, written in
1575 in New Spain by Juan Suarez de Peralta (1541-1613). This equestrian
was born as son of one of the conquistadores in the city Mexico-Tenochtitlan.
With this work, Suarez de Peralta imported the albeitena legacy from Spain
into Central America. Written English texts traveled to the Americas in both
handwritten and printed form, including recipes that described how to make
medications. These texts tell us that Europeans learned from Native
Americans and Africans, creating a New World veterinary tradition that
braided together the knowledge people chose to share. For example, based
on Gervase Markham’s English book, American treatise The Citizen’s and
Countryman’s Experienced Farrier was updated and edited by John Millis (a
farrier) and George Jeffries (a gentleman farmer). In this book, reprinted in
Delaware in 1764, the editors consulted Native American healers and included
this information in the recipes. For example, to treat a horse’s wounds, they
reported that Native Americans strongly recommended using the root of the
“fringe-tree.” If the root’s bark was steeped in spring water and applied
continuously to the wound, it would heal well even if ligaments and tendons
were damaged. These texts were published for ordinary livestock owners as
well as gentleman farmers. Text about herbal treatments, pamphlets, and
almanacs were also popular in colonial North America and would have been
widely used by both men and women to manage animal health and
reproduction.
East and South Asia, the Middle East, and Europe

In considering circulations of animals and knowledge about healing, we cannot
overemphasize the importance of the Muslim world in the late medieval and

early modern periods (circa 1100-1500) and beyond. The great Ottoman
empire encompassed many cultures, facilitating knowledge exchange. Many
Muslim men (and some women) traveled to the Middle East on the hajj
(pilgrimage to the holy city, Mecca). Others, such as the pilgrim Ibn Battuta,
continued traveling for years, relying on the Muslim networks that spanned
Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Ibn Battuta’s accounts of his travels (circa
1325-1350) survive today and give us a glimpse into the uses of horses and
other animals during this time. For example, he described a thriving trade in
horses between the ports of Yemen across the Indian Ocean to India (in return,
Yemeni gardens received Indian betel-trees and coconuts). Although Ibn
Battuta does not mention the standard Islamic texts, the Baytara or the
Hippiatrica, the courts of his Islamic hosts during his travels would have
included horse-masters because horses were the main mode of overland travel
and an important military tool. Ibn Battuta’s notes about animal feeding are
particularly interesting: in a Yemeni port city, he found that the “beasts” were
fed in part with fish; in the deserts of present-day Uzbekistan, the cattle ate the
native “herbs” (which must have been sparse). From him we learn that princes
and sultans across Asia and northern Africa were often the only people allowed
to own and ride horses. They maintained large stables (where they would have
employed professional animal healers familiar with classic veterinary texts)
(Fig. 2.2). The common people cared for their own donkeys, goats, and (when
they had them) cattle.
During the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, dramatic changes
took place in the Old World’s empires: the Manchus invaded northern
China, ending the Ming Dynasty around 1644; the Ottomans under Suleiman
the Magnificent made a final (unsuccessful) attempt to conquer Europe in the
late 1600s; and under Akbar the Great’s rule, the multicultural Mughal empire
(Indian subcontinent) greatly expanded in wealth and size by 1600. The
Mughals were well connected and constantly moving overland and across
the Indian Ocean (where they met with the Ottomans and with Portuguese
and other Europeans). As Muslims, Mughal rulers went on hajj to Mecca; and
their diplomatic and trading networks were probably the greatest in the world.
Overall, the Mughal Emperor Akbar encouraged tolerance and the incorpor
ation of foreign knowledge and materials. But his armies’ conquests and
trading networks were built in part by wealth generated close to home: the
elephants of Gondwana and conquering this mountainous region containing
wild elephant herds was one of Akbar’s first priorities. Along with the adop
tion of cannons and matchlock guns, Akbar’s “Gunpowder Empire” could also
be called the “Elephant Empire.” Akbar’s war elephants, once collected from
the wild in Gondwana, were tamed and trained to charge and break enemy
lines (Fig. 2.3). Their size and ferocity terrorized their opponents and enabled
riders to fight from advantageous positions.

Figure 2.2 Eye operation on a horse.

Source: Shalihotra Samhita [treatise on horses] India eighteenth century. Courtesy:
Wellcome Library, London, Illustration and Text 18th Century Collection: Asian
Collection.

Figure 2.3 Emperor Akbar training an elephant. Miniatur der Moghulschule,

Indien, dated circa 1609-1610.
Courtesy: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Museum fur islamische Kunst.
Mughal victories and stability in the conquered areas depended greatly on

healthy animals. Important animals are featured in artistic representations of
this empire. Besides the war elephants, every unit of the Mughal army main
tained a cavalry of Arabian horses and used bullocks to transport artillery.
Especially with the war animals, animal keepers and healers needed to be able
to perform minor surgeries quickly and cleanly. In elephants, wounds often
developed into abscesses that required draining and cleaning. Southeast Asian
elephant keepers packed fresh wounds with sugar and applied maggots to
clean out gangrene. Herbal treatments were also commonly used in elephants
(in large doses, we surmise). Lameness in horses was treated with poultices or
hot irons (cautery), while drenching was used in both horses and cattle to

administer medications and to treat colic. But the most important medicine was
prevention, especially maintaining proper feeding for optimal digestion. For all
animals traveling far away from home territories, or working in difficult
conditions, making sure that they had enough high-quality food was probably
the most critical aspect of keeping them well. For an elephant, that meant
locating about 600 pounds of digestible fodder daily; in some places and
circumstances, this would have been a monumental task. Horses, on the other
hand, were both more mobile and easier to maintain.
Mughal rulers traded animals (and knowledge about them) and
fought over borderland territory with the Persians, who were based in what
is now Iran. In the time of the Shah Abbas (the Great, 1571-1629), the Persian
empire included vast territories north into the traditional horse-breeding
regions of the Caucasus, east to the territories of the Uzbeks, and south
to Kandahar in present-day Afghanistan. Abbas’ court was a multicultural
center, with Chinese ceramics and silk-makers, Armenian merchants, and
English generals. Circassians, Armenians, and Georgians served in the military
and as administrative officials, and scholars have found that these people
contributed their own knowledge about animal healing. Circa 1600, Abbas
probably had the largest cavalry in the world. Persian success was based not
only on the conquests of Shah Abbas’ armies, but also on his court’s diplo
matic connections with the English East India Company and other trading
factions, bolstered by several diplomatic missions to Europe between
1599 and 1615.
Moving east, knowledge about horses circulated between the steppe peoples
of Central Asia and Chinese horse breeders and veterinarians. Some of this
knowledge was described in texts such as the Qimin yaoshu (Essential Arts of
the Common People), an encyclopedia of Chinese culture and society attrib
uted to Jia Sixie (circa 540 CE). Art historian Robert E. Harrist has argued that
this text and others strongly influenced the early science of equine physi
ognomy, the study of bone structure, and its influence on the horse’s tempera
ment, performance, and value. Physiognomy was an important foundation for
anatomy, in both veterinary medicine and in Chinese art. The great Chinese
veterinarians of the sixteenth century, Yu Ren, Yu Jie, Yu Ben-Yuan, and Yu
Ben-Heng, described clinical judgments and treatment as deriving in part from
a horse’s physiognomy. This is especially evident in versions of the authorita
tive treatise Yuan Heng liao ma ji zhushi (Ming Dynasty, ca. 1550). As
Chinese historians have shown, the horse physiognomy texts demonstrated
the underlying theory of perfection in the cosmos, through perfect measure
ments of the horse’s body and perfect balance of the yin and yang. Knowledge
about evaluating horses and addressing their illnesses and injuries was both
practical and philosophical; and it owed its origins to the blending of East and
Central Asian expertise.

We can also trace the interactions between Asians and Europeans in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by focusing on the role of horses
during the late Qing Dynasty in China. The Qing Dynasty (1636-1912)
succeeded the Ming when the Jurchen (Manchu) people swept down from
the north, allied with Mongol cavalry archers, and conquered northern China
(although it took 40 more years to subdue southern China). During the Qing
Dynasty, the tributary system brought not only money and goods but also
people and animals into northern China from the hinterlands. In this way, the
Qing were interconnected with the Russian empire and the kingdoms of
Central and Southeast Asia while officially remaining an isolated culture by
choice. However, with the increasing contacts made by Europeans during the
1700s, the Qing created cantons, or trading places, to keep the foreign influ
ence under their control. From the surviving accounts of Europeans who lived
there (and traveled into China), we get a good picture of their admiration for
Chinese sciences and technologies (not only gunpowder and printing, but also
metal shoes for horses and bullocks had been first developed in Asia). From
Marco Polo to travelers in the 1800s, Europeans noted the similarities between
Western and Eastern animal husbandry and healing practices. The British
veterinarian George Fleming, visiting China in 1862, noted that Chinese and
British farriers similarly used the twitch and stocks to restrain horses. Fleming
did not lack the unfortunate European sense of superiority common to this time
period; but he also recorded many details about Chinese animal healing
practices that revealed his genuine interest and even sometimes his admiration.
Fleming described the Yi-ma, a type of northern Chinese horse-doctor, as
“intelligent” and as having “the dignity and self-possession of a skillful
practitioner, and a useful member of society” (Fig. 2.4). To Fleming, the
Yi-ma was a curious blend of the learned veterinary surgeon and the “empirical
farrier.” While the Yi-ma, “like our own empirical farriers ... has a lot of idle
notions, vague traditions and mouldy recipes,” he also often could quote
“Choo-tsze” and “other learned authors of works on Chinese Veterinary
Medicine published more than five generations ago.” (Most British farriers
of this time period could not have done this, nor would they have thought
“book-learning” to be useful.) The Yi-ma was trusted by his clients, was
familiar with many diseases, and “was very confident of being competent to
contend successfully with them.” He was a mainstay of the medical market
place for animals in nineteenth-century China.11
1 Fleming, G. (2010, 1863). Travels on Horseback in Mantchu Tartary: Being a Summer’s Ride
Beyond the Great Wall of China (Cambridge Library Collection - Travel and Exploration in Asia).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511709531, pp. 402-403; “very
confident,” p. 406.

Figure 2.4 The Yi-ma or northern Chinese horse-doctor, Mantchu Tartary.

Note the use of drenching, using a horn to administer oral medication, while
the Yi-ma’s assistant carries the necessary instruments and ingredients.
Source: George Fleming, Travels on Horseback in Mantchu Tartary (London: Hurst
and Blackett, 1863) 406.
Today, we consider medical knowledge as something that should be freely

disseminated; but until the 1900s, political and mercantile considerations often
determined how knowledge traveled. A good example is Japan, which care
fully controlled its contacts with China and the rest of the world in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Japanese government restricted con

tact with Europeans to the Dutch, who had invaded parts of today’s Indonesia
and established income-generating colonies there. The Dutch East India
Company was allowed to trade with the Japanese on the man-made peninsula
Dejima during most of the Edo period. In the eighteenth century, this trading
post became a center of knowledge exchange between Europeans and the
Japanese, including medical and veterinary theories and practices. For
example, Willem ten Rhijne (1647-1700), a Dutch medical doctor and botan
ist, visited Dejima in 1674-1676, where he introduced Western medical ideas
and in turn learned about Japanese and Chinese medicine, including acupunc
ture and moxibustion. In 1683, he wrote the first account of acupuncture
published in Europe and in turn imported Dutch anatomical atlases into
Japan. The most popular Dutch booklet on horse medicine, written by the
master farrier Pieter Almanus van Cour in 1688, was translated into Japanese
in 1730. It is the oldest source on Western equine medicine in Japan. Each year
the Dutch had to pay tribute to the shogun in Nagasaki, and the most important
wish of the shogun was that the Dutch present him with horses imported from
the Dutch East Indies. The shogun’s court horse-keepers crossbred the Dutch
horses with Japanese animals, breeding larger horses that could thrive on
Japanese territory and also provide cavalry mounts for the military. Cavalry
building was an important part of the nation-building taking place in Japan
during this early modern period of samurai rule.
In these examples and many others, the importance of animals to political
and commercial power drove development and circulations of knowledge
about animal healing in many parts of the world between the seventeenth
and nineteenth centuries. Whether these knowledge circulations affected local
practices throughout largely rural animal economies is still an open question.
Nonetheless, during this time period the winds of change disturbed stasis in
many quarters, including long-standing cultural beliefs and philosophies about
the relationships/connections between animals and humans.
Competing Cosmologies and Beliefs about Human-Animal

Relationships
An important theme of this book is that people treat animals according to how
they value them: basically, for food and work, but beyond that, philosophically
and ethically. In Chapter 1, we glimpsed some of these values and concerns
within the sacred traditions associated with animal healing. In North America,
for example, many of the Algonquian peoples understood animals and humans
to possess equally the manitou, or spiritual life force. This moral framework
linked humans directly to other animals and encouraged practices such as
respecting the independence, autonomy, and power of animals. Many ancient
belief systems incorporating shamanism (such as Tengrism in central Asia)

attribute souls to animals as well as humans. The soul-connection structured

human-animal interactions because human actions were based on the animal’s
interests - not just the interests of humans. This distinction shapes cultures of
animal healing.
For centuries in the West, most scholars deemed human interests to be more
important than those of animals. In ancient Greece, Aristotle believed that
animals possessed a vegetative and a sensitive (animal) soul, but not a rational
one or morals like humans. Therefore, animals were inferior to, and should
serve, humans. Even observing and teaching about animals contributed to a
logical system that subsumed them. Later, sacred Christian texts and beliefs
maintained the Aristotelian hierarchy. In his theological works, Christian
scholar Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE) argued that humans could use
animals at will but should treat them kindly because cruelty to animals led to
cruelty to other humans. Likewise, the Christian scholar Thomas of Aquinas
(1225-1274) wrote that animals needed no respect because they were not
rational creatures as humans were. Only when human suffering could be
avoided by treating animals kindly should the animals’ interest be taken into
account. This vision was challenged by Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592),
French politician and philosopher, who advocated for the feelings and ration
ality of animals, including their unspoiled moral virtue. In 1580, he wrote:
“When I play with my cat, how can I know whether she is amusing herself
with me, rather than I am with her?”2 De Montaigne and his successors
believed that animals were wise and virtuous, possessed reason, and knew
passions, love, hate, affection, jealousy, joy, sorrow, and pain. They asserted
that animals lived consistent with nature, were morally superior, and, hence,
served as an example for humans.
In the pre-modern Islamic treatises of the Ottoman empire, the moral
imperative to learn about and care for horses was based on their exalted status
as preferred weapons of Allah. Nourishing the horse as well as the devout rider
was important to ensure success in jihad, the holy struggle on behalf of Allah;
even angels were said to ride horses. Horses’ temperaments and value (as well
as their health) were evaluated according to the doctrine of the humors. Like
humans, individual animals had a dominant humor, dictating the animal’s
behaviors and attributes. Even its color and conformation (external anatomy)
indicated the mixture of the humors within its body. A horse with a generally
hot and dry humoral disposition was well suited to training as a warhorse. Its
particular personality and humoral disposition were paired with those of its
owner or rider for the purpose of creating the most effective force for jihad.
The Muslim holy book, the Qur’an, clearly stated that the beasts and birds
2 Montaigne, Michel de; tr. Charles Cotton (1686). Apology for Raymond Sebond, Essays, Book
2, Chapter 12, paragraph 63.

were members of “communities, just like you” (humans); all were essential
participants in the created world.
These are only very brief sketches of complex philosophical systems that
changed dramatically over time. We have space to discuss in detail only one
example, early modern European philosophy, to illustrate how changing moral
dictates affected animal use and animal healing. During the seventeenth
century, the writings of Rene Descartes (1596-1650) brought a new under
standing about the relationship between humans and animals. Descartes separ
ated humans from all other living things because only humans possessed the
res cogitans, a special non-physical substance that today we might call aware
ness or consciousness. Based on his mechanistic model, Descartes explained
that animals were irrational because they lacked language and a rational soul
like humans, and, hence, could not be consciously aware of their sensations
(including hunger, thirst, or pain). Animals were nothing more than soulless
complex living machines, like a clock. Nevertheless, Descartes himself was
not fully convinced of his doctrine on animals; it could not be proven if
animals are able to think, because nobody could look inside the heart of
animals.
French priest and rational philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715)
agreed with Descartes: “... in animals there is neither intelligence nor soul, as
one ordinarily hears of it. They eat without pleasure, cry without grief, grow
without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing ”3
However, this interpretation only represented a small minority of thinkers.
Philosophers such as Henri More, Pierre Bayle, and John Locke protested that
observation, reason, and common sense all argued that animals had thoughts
and feelings. French medical doctor Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709-1751)
even argued that if animals were complicated machines, so were humans
because the bodies of both followed mechanical laws and principles of the
natural sciences. Still, these philosophical uncertainties meant that many
people felt free to treat animals without any concern for their comfort or
well-being during this time period.
The subsequent European Enlightenment period during the eighteenth cen
tury brought a change in philosophies, partly due to attention paid to earlier
Islamicate and Hindu texts. For example, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), an
English philosopher, economist, and theoretical jurist, advocated kindness to
animals for their own sake because they could feel pain. In a footnote of his
treatise An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation he referred
to the “Gentoo and Mahometan religions’... interests of the rest of the animal
creation,” continuing with the oft-quoted rhetorical question: “The question is
3 Malebranche, N. (1842; 1674). De la recherche de la verite in (T.vres de Malebranche, vol. 2

(Paris: Charpentier), pp. 561-562.

not, can they [animals] reason? nor, can they talk? but, can they suffer?”4 For
both animals and humans, the greatest happiness for the largest number should
be the basis for morality and laws of behavior, he wrote. This utilitarian
approach meant that decreasing pain resulted in more pleasure and, thus, in
more happiness for each individual. In terms of how animals should be treated,
Bentham saw them as part of a larger moral system that should be encoded in
the laws that affected women and slaves as well. For instance, he advocated
slaughtering animals for meat quickly and without pain. Then these animals
would be better off than if they had died a slow and painful death in nature.
Bentham’s radical break with Cartesian ideas on differences between
humans and animals, and his utilitarian plea for kindness to animals, didn’t
change the treatment of animals overnight. Nevertheless, it did fit in a general
societal movement of increasing opposition against cruelty toward animals.
Historians have demonstrated how English elites developed close emotional
relationships with animals, particularly with their horses and dogs, during the
sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Although we have less evidence
about poorer people’s attitudes, empathy toward animals and condemning
animal abuse were not uncommon. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804) also condemned animal abuse but for a different reason: those
who were cruel to animals would also be cruel to humans. For Kant, treating
animals in a humane way was in the self-interest of humanity because animals
existed to serve humans (a widespread belief in popular cultures).
These philosophical debates influenced the developing sciences and educa
tion in European societies. For example, Immanuel Kant’s philosophical
position justified experimentation on living animals. He argued that vivisec-
tionists’ goals benefited humankind and thus their cruelty to animals could be
justified (although cruelty for sport was not justifiable). On the other side of the
Atlantic Ocean in 1799, the American physician Benjamin Rush told his
medical students that they should also learn how to treat the diseases and
injuries of domesticated animals. Not only were these animals valuable, but
humaneness toward them would encourage the same feelings toward human
patients - thus making the students better physicians. Finally, he argued,
philosophers and theologians disagreed about whether animals had souls, as
humans did. In case animals did have souls, physicians must treat them as their
own patients or risk God’s wrath.
These developments promoted the rise of animal protection movements in
the late eighteenth century and legislation to protect the interests of animals
during the nineteenth century. For example, the British Parliament approved
the Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act in 1822, which mandated humane treatment
4 Bentham, J. (1789), Introduction to Ch. XVII, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation (London: Payne), p. cccviii.

of animals being driven to market. Two years later, the British Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was established, receiving its royal charter
from Queen Victoria in 1840. In Germany, it was a priest, Albert Knapp, who
founded the first animal welfare society and established an animal shelter in
Stuttgart in 1837. In the next 20 years, animal protectionists formed societies
and worked to establish new legislation against animal cruelty in several other
European countries. By the 1800s, these changes in philosophical and ethical
attitudes toward animals, however, often came into conflict with the practices
of natural philosophers determined to understand how human and animal
bodies functioned.
How Bodies Functioned in Health and Disease:

European Physiology
From antiquity, people have sought to understand the fundamental life pro
cesses of animals and humans. How did the body work? Did human and
animal bodies work in similar ways? What made a creature alive? Ayurvedic
and Chinese philosophies had a long tradition of understanding vital processes,
especially how energy moved through the body and functions of the internal
organs. In the West, Aristotle and other ancient philosophers - and their
successors during the next 2,000 years - speculated about how the body
processed food and maintained the spark of life. Galen (c. 129-207 CE)
dissected animals, both dead and alive, and he offered anatomical and physio
logical explanations of what happened in the healthy and diseased human
body. For example, he noticed that urine was produced in the kidney and not in
the urinary bladder. He discovered the recurrent laryngeal nerve and intro
duced physiological theories on health and disease and wound healing.
According to him, the normal bodily function depended on spirits (pneuma)
instead of humors. He developed a model of human physiology in which he
explained the elaboration and distribution of the natural, the vital, and the
animal spirit in the liver, heart, and brain, respectively. Although he vivisected
and dissected pigs, apes, and other animals and extrapolated what he dis
covered to humans, his model of human physiology remained the standard
for more than a thousand years.
In the thirteenth century, Islamic scholars reexamined the ideas of Galen and
revised them dramatically based on their own observations. Ibn al-Nafis
(1213-1288), an Arab physician educated in Damascus but working in
Cairo, wrote a Commentary on Avicenna’s anatomical treatise. This treatise
discussed Galen’s belief about the circulation of blood: that it formed and
acquired a vital spirit in the liver, flowed to the right ventricle, and then moved
into the left ventricle through invisible pores (openings) in the interventricular
septum. However, no one had ever seen these pores; and based on his own

observations, Ibn al-Nafis corrected Galen by stating that pores did not exist in
the interventricular septum. Instead, he argued, the blood could only travel
from the right ventricle to the left by circulating through the lungs. Blood was
heated in the right ventricle, mixed with pneuma (air) in the lungs, and then
entered the left ventricle where it was infused with the vital spirit and sent out to
the body. Ibn al-Nafis speculated that there must be some kind of passage
between the pulmonary artery and pulmonary vein. Unfortunately, his treatise
was not translated into other languages until 1547, but after that it influenced
Europeans. The Swiss natural philosopher Michael Servetus (1511-1553)
quoted Ibn al-Nafis’ explanation and agreed with it, saying that the blood was
refined by passing through the pulmonary circulation. Because his radical ideas
offended religious leaders, Servetus and his writings were burned at the stake in
Geneva. He was followed by the much more well-known Andreas Vesalius
(1514-1564) and William Harvey (1578-1657), both of whom followed Ibn al-
Nafis by arguing that blood was exchanged in the pulmonary circulation.
In Europe between about 1500 and 1850, natural philosophers applied
chemical and mechanical principles to the functions of living human and
animal bodies, and these approaches were foundational to the nineteenth
century development of the modern science of physiology. In trying to analyze
life, various physiological processes such as digestion, growth, movement, and
reproduction were systematically studied using early chemical and physical
principles. The Swiss Paracelsus (c. 1493-1541), for example, considered
chemistry a way to explain how the human body works and also as a source
of drugs to cure disease. He and his followers, the iatrochemists, began using
mercury and arsenic as medications. They saw digestion as a chemical process,
while the advocates of mechanistics, the iatrophysicists, believed the body
digested food by mechanically crushing it. Iatrophysicists compared the organ
systems of the body to levers, pulleys, and gears. Later, the theories of British
natural philosopher Isaac Newton (1642-1727) influenced physiologists who
tried to measure muscular contraction and other bodily functions using
Newtonian ideas about matter and force. This stimulated physiological
research on living animals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Experiments, increasingly performed in special locations such as laboratories,
revealed measurable and repeatable anatomical, chemical, and physiological
data to support medical knowledge. For example, the Swiss polymath Albrecht
von Haller (1708-1777) performed many experiments on living animals to
observe the external stimuli on muscles and sensitivity of nerves.
Recalling the mechanical philosophy of Rene Descartes, the French medical
doctor Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709-1751) wrote in his treatise L’Homme
machine that humans and animals were both complicated machines. For
Offray de la Mettrie, both the human mind and body followed mechanical
laws and principles of the natural sciences. His treatise was part of an ongoing
philosophical debate about the differences and similarities between humans

and animals. He was inspired by his teacher Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738),

a professor in medicine at Leiden University who taught the principles of
organ function and the sensitivities in the tissues of the human body.
(Boerhaave’s other famous pupil was Albrecht von Haller.) Along with philo
sophical debates, it was research on integrated physiology, then generally
called animal economy. This research brought the bodies of humans and other
animals closer together in natural philosophy and institutionalized the practice
of using animal bodies for experiments and demonstrations.
This had some unintended consequences. European Enlightenment prin
ciples of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries encouraged the recognition
of suffering, both animal and human, and social principles that would maxi
mize happiness and humanitarianism. By establishing similarities between
humans and animal bodies, natural philosophers contributed to concerns about
animal suffering and its effects on humans. Conducting public or semi-public
demonstrations about animal physiology, such as suffocating birds and small
animals in Robert Boyle’s air-pump apparatus, inadvertently brought their own
observational and experimental methods under broader scrutiny. Was vivisec
tion justifiable? Even Albrecht von Haller found his animal experiments to be
gruesome, and he questioned whether they were justified on moral grounds. It
is important to remember, also, that these new ideas were seldom accepted
right away - especially if they contradicted long-standing medical practices,
since most experimenters were philosophers or physicians.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also witnessed a debate between
those scholars who felt that the known mechanics of chemistry and physics
would eventually explain the difference between life and non-life and “vital-
ists” who argued that the processes of life could not be reduced to such
mechanistic processes. Vitalism was based on the conviction that living
organisms have a non-physical element, a vital principle, called life force,
energy, spark, elan, or soul, that distinguishes them from non-living organ
isms. (This concept, however, should not be confused with divine spirits.
Although some proponents of vitalism were religious thinkers, this was a
different concept that did not necessarily depend on a supernatural creator.)
Neither vitalistic nor mechanistic ways of thinking could answer all questions,
and both continued to be important throughout the nineteenth century. For
example, in 1828 Friedrich Wohler challenged the vitalist hypothesis when he
synthesized urea from inorganic compounds, but this didn’t mean the end of
vitalism. Even Louis Pasteur, in his famous rebuttal of spontaneous generation,
stated that fermentation was a “vital action.” Only with the development of
biochemistry in the twentieth century did vitalist explanations slowly decrease.
Nevertheless, living organisms were more than simply machines; and they did
more than mechanically react to external stimuli.
Explanations of bodily functions as vital physics and vital chemistry
changed theories about understandings about health and disease in humans

and animals alike. However, just as with the new human and animal anatomy
of Vesalius and Ruini, the development of new thinking about physiology in
the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries did not essentially change medical and
veterinary healing practices. For example, Alexander Numan (1780-1852), a
Dutch physician and professor at the Veterinary School of Utrecht
(1822-1850), operated according to theories of vitalism and humoralism,
combined with an early form of comparative physiology. Sickness was an
individual manifestation that Numan characterized according to his own
nosology, organized by organ systems and informed by vitalism as well as
chemistry. Practitioners had many theories from which to choose. Most of
them probably worked like Numan did, by combining parts of different
theories with their own training, observations, and experiences.
By the mid-1800s, veterinarians were important contributors to physio
logical research, especially in France. For example, the career of Jean
Baptiste August Chauveau (1827-1917) demonstrated a remarkable range of
investigation. Chauveau was an accomplished comparative anatomist and
authored an important veterinary anatomy textbook. At the Ecole Nationale
Veterinaire de Lyon, he taught comparative anatomy and physiology to veter
inary students for decades. Along with his more well-known contemporary,
experimental physiologist Claude Bernard (1813-1878), Chauveau was a
pioneer in physiological research. He studied the spinal cord and electrical
potentials of spinal nerves, and he joined Bernard in demonstrating glycogenic
functions of the liver. He invented instruments used to measure the pressure
and blood velocity in the arterial circulation and was the first to achieve
successful cardiac catheterization (on a horse). In the mid-1800s, especially
in France, anatomy, physiology, and pathology were not completely separate
disciplines. Although Chauveau’s accomplishments were extraordinary, it was
not unusual for a scientist to investigate questions that crossed species and
disciplines. This is important to remember as we turn now to discussing
pathology, the science that explained how exactly disease disrupted the body’s
normal physiology and anatomy.
The Science of Suffering: European Pathology

Historian of medicine Jacalyn Duffin noted the Greek origins of the word
“pathology”: pathos (suffering) and -ology (science of). Pathology is the study
of mechanisms of disease and disability in humans and animals. Duffin listed
four purposes for pathology: to explain suffering; to diagnose or name the
abnormal condition; to predict an outcome for the patient (prognosis); and to
guide therapy. Pathology in animal healing has a long history of asking
questions to fulfill these purposes. Pathology has also been comparative:
animal bodies served as the most common sites of understanding pathological
mechanisms for both human and animal diseases. Probably the most venerable

type of pathological belief is that suffering results from supernatural interven

tion. Because the disease or suffering is caused by the displeasure or whims of
gods, the appropriate therapies lay in the realm of priests and oracles. The best
treatment was the one that would bring the sufferer back into a good spiritual
relationship with the supernatural power. Animals could be sufferers but also
often served as sacrifices to placate the spirits or gods. In many parts of the
world today, spiritual understandings of disease and suffering continue to play
an important role in healing both humans and animals.
In Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine, as we have seen, the
basis for pathological explanations lay with the body’s life force. Suffering
and disease resulted from imbalances within the body; diagnosis followed
from understanding how signs of disease corresponded to these imbalances;
and the healer decided upon therapies (such as herbal medications,
acupuncture, or moxibustion) to rebalance the body both internally and
within its environment. This individualized understanding of bodily pro
cesses has guided healing even as thinking about pathology has become
increasingly generalized during the past 400 years. By generalized, we
mean a nosology: a set of principles and disease classification that applied
to every patient. A patient’s disease was not only theirs, but part of a
category such as “cold illness” or “purulent fever.” The disease could be
expected to progress in predictable ways once it was identified, and its
identification also narrowed the appropriate therapies from which the healer
could choose. Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese systems of classifying and
understanding diseases continue to be used successfully in human and
animal medicine today.
The third way of understanding suffering and disease is that of materialism:
understanding how signs and symptoms relate to changes in material compon
ents of the body (blood, urine, tissues). This, too, has a long history. In Chinese
traditional medicine, for example, a very finely detailed examination of the
patient’s pulse was (and is) conducted because the pulse often reflects changes
in the pattern of the life force, the qi. In Egypt, priests conducting ritual
sacrifices carefully examined bodies before and after death to ensure that the
healthiest and most handsome animals were offered to the gods. In many
healing systems, the body’s excretions - urine, feces, blood - also provided
material clues to the causes and progression of suffering. Recalling the devel
opment of anatomy, dissections of diseased animal bodies revealed organs and
fluids that appeared to look (and smell) different from those of healthy animals.
Some anatomists began to gather their observations and even to relate them to
the symptoms of disease during life. The Italian physician Antonio Benivieni
(1443-1502) has been called a father of pathology for conducting autopsies on
humans and relating changes in the internal organs to the symptoms during
life. Benivieni’s remarkable treatise De abdibis morborum causis (1507)
summarized over 100 cases of human disease that he was able later to autopsy,

including canis rabiosi, or canine rabies. Benivieni and his contemporaries

dissected animals, of course; but we do not know whether he associated animal
diseases with material changes in the animal’s body after death.
In Europe, materialism slowly became the major basis for the development
of early modern pathology in animal as well as human medicine in the early
1800s. The ideas of vitalism did not disappear, of course, but took on more
materialistic forms as they affected thinking about disease. For example,
William Harvey wrote in 1653 that contagions (such as plague and leprosy)
came from outside the body; but they caused disease dynamically, by reacting
with the body’s internal vital processes. Early physiologists sought to under
stand these processes, and comparative physiology (comparing how the same
bodily functions worked in different animal species) was a foundation
of pathology.
Comparative anatomy also contributed to the development of pathology,
although, as Duffin points out, knowledge of anatomy did not strengthen
physicians’ ability to treat diseases in most cases. But by the late 1700s,
comparative anatomy (the study of different species of animals as well as
humans) had become a powerful way to explore underlying general principles
of how living creatures were constructed. As historian Abigail Woods has
argued, important sites of investigation for comparative anatomy were speci
mens in museums (often associated with medical education) and menageries
and zoological gardens, which were home to many different species of
animals. Animals in zoos and menageries, exotic and valuable, received
medical care from their keepers, physicians, and occasionally veterinarians;
and they were often dissected after death. In this way, the many species of
animals present made the zoo an excellent location to test ideas about the
biological unity of animal bodies’ structure and function.
Dysfunctional and suffering bodies generated material signs of distress, and
this was particularly evident in animals. Sick animals may not have com
plained of their suffering in the same ways that sick humans did, although
animals’ behaviors often indicated that they were not feeling well. Without an
overt psychological component in animal patients, healers probably placed
more emphasis on material signs such as weakness or lack of appetite and
exterior signs, lesions, or exudations to help them diagnose disease. Moreover,
an animal’s anatomy was often more easily observed after death and correlated
to specific signs of disease. Veterinarians, with easy access to large numbers of
(living and dead) animals, were uniquely positioned to link anatomy, physi
ology, and pathology and to correlate form, function, and dysfunction.
Veterinary medicine, particularly in France, provided an important milieu
for the establishment of modern comparative physiology and pathology in the
late 1700s and early 1800s. Historian Lise Wilkinson has even argued that
“medical research adopted the veterinary approach, including animal

experiments, to study ... diseases.”5 Veterinary schools and active scientific

societies nourished observation, experimentation, and discussion on a wide
variety of topics (Chapter 3 details the establishment of French veterinary
schools). Jean-Baptiste August Chauveau (mentioned above) graduated from
veterinary school, investigated questions in comparative anatomy and physiology,
and became interested in the developing cross-species approach for pathology. At
fifty years of age, Chauveau completed his second degree, in human medicine,
with a thesis on vaccinia and the relationships between horsepox, cowpox, and
smallpox in humans. In 1865, he plunged into research on such questions as what
made vaccine matter virulent and the prevention of rinderpest (then raging in
England). After hearing Chauveau’s paper on vaccinia at a meeting of the French
Academy of Medicine, Louis Pasteur encouraged Chauveau to expand his investi
gations in comparative pathology. Chauveau then developed his famous diffusion
technique to separate out components of the blood (white blood cells, red blood
cells, and unidentified particles). He showed that glanders and sheep pox could be
transmitted only by these particles and not by a type of toxin dissolved in the
serum of sick animals (see Chapter 4).
Although most histories of pathology point to the laboratory and dissection
theater as the sites of pathological discovery, the best place to observe large
numbers of bodies before and after death was the abattoir, or slaughterhouse.
Animals such as cattle, pigs, and sheep arrived alive and could be observed for
signs of illness, then killed and their internal organs examined. Curious profes
sional slaughterers and butchers, who observed hundreds of animals every year,
thus joined natural philosophers as collectors of anatomical knowledge and how it
might relate to signs of disease. Recognizing this, the German physician Rudolf
Virchow (1821-1902) frequented abattoirs to make observations and collect
samples of diseased tissues and organs. Virchow, who was also a champion of
meat hygiene, came from a family of butchers (which was at that time, in
Germany, a humble but respectable trade); for him, the abattoir was a familiar
place. Virchow supported the development of veterinary pathology as well as the
profession of veterinary medicine in Germany (see Chapters 3 and 4). Virchow is
also famous as a proponent and elaborator of cell theory.
For Virchow, elucidating the general principles of pathology and medicine
was a comparative project. Virchow’s comparative pathology explicitly linked
theories and methods of understanding human and animal diseases in the
service of establishing normal and abnormal for tissues and organs. This
natural philosophical agenda fit hand in glove with Virchow’s social agenda
of science in the service of public health. A member of the German Parliament,
Virchow tirelessly advocated for the “scientific” linkages between animal
5 Wilkinson, L. (1992) Animals and Disease: An Introduction to the History of Comparative

Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 148.

health and human health, especially in food hygiene. In the late 1850s, his
research on the life cycle of the parasite Trichina spiralis connected this
nematode with the cysts formed in porcine muscles and the parasitism of
humans eating undercooked pork. Virchow advocated inspection of meat by
professionals trained to find the parasite, a process greatly aided by low-power
microscopy. Although microscopes had been used by natural historians before
the mid-nineteenth century, technological advances and falling prices made
these tools much more widely available by 1850 and increased the resolution
with which people could observe insects, parasites, and even microorganisms.
Microscopic pathology contributed to changing notions about what caused
diseases (as we discuss in Chapter 4), thus helping to reorient the science of
suffering from individual bodies to groups and populations of animals. Indeed,
the suffering of whole populations - epidemics - became a major feature of the
globalizing early modern period and continued during the nineteenth century.
Trade and Conquest: Responding to Animal Disease Outbreaks

Today we believe that many zoonotic diseases emerged because animals,
humans, and microorganisms co-evolved over thousands of years as part of
the process of domesticating animals. Increasingly dense populations of
animals created fertile conditions for the development of epizootics (epidemics
of animal diseases), and these local epizootics spread to new areas with
pastoralists, traders, and armies. This brings us back to the ecological
exchanges of the 1500s-1800s, with which we began this chapter. Most histor
ical research has focused on human diseases. In Europe, diseases such as
smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis had already been introduced centuries
before through trade with Asia and Africa. Over centuries, the theory goes,
people evolved some resistance to these and other diseases, thus rendering them
far less lethal. When Europeans traveled to new lands, they carried these
diseases with them. (Scholars believe, however, that tuberculosis was already
endemic in the Americas.) When such diseases were introduced for the first time
to Native Americans with no resistance, the effects on these populations were
catastrophic. Depending on the location, 30 to 90 percent of Indigenous peoples
died, and the resulting sociocultural disruptions destroyed their civilizations.
This invasion of diseases was a crucial factor in the success of European
invasions of the continents and isolated islands of the Western Hemisphere.
By 1800, marauding Europeans had relocated peoples and animals over long
distances, especially from the west coast of Africa to East Africa, India, the East
Indies, and South America. Animals and their products became important parts
of an expanding international trade, especially with the increasing use of steam
ships in the mid-1800s. When animals moved from one place to another, their
microenvironment moved with them: new microorganisms and parasites, and
often new plants, accompanied the insects, rats, cats, dogs, sheep, horses, and

Trade and Conquest: Responding to Animal Disease Outbreaks 63
cattle that invaded new places (usually accompanying humans). Today we

understand these biological invasions, along with diseases, as weapons for
conquest. Animals served as shock troops, with feral domesticated animals often
preceding human invaders. We know that European domestic animals transmit
ted diseases among indigenous American animals: bovine tuberculosis from
European American cattle spread to bison and other wild ungulates, for example.
Zulu Disease Causation Theories

These global exchanges were the broadest manifestation of well-established
local and regional patterns of disease: diseases had homelands, from which they
spread throughout regions. For example, animals traveling between different
disease environments presented a threat that was well understood by pastoralists
in Africa. The region inhabited by the Zulu, in southern Africa, is a good case
study. The Zulu people had been raising cattle for centuries before their home
lands began to be encroached upon by European colonists. Between 1836 and
1838, the Cape Colony farmer Louis Tregardt kept a diary during the time he and
other Boers (farmers) emigrated to Zululand in the interior of South Africa. There,
he recorded several types of cattle diseases, including a highly lethal disease called
nagana, which the Zulu believed was spread by the tsetse fly. (Tregardt did not
describe some of the other diseases he mentioned, such as the “stop disease” of
oxen and the “thick disease” of calves, which are unknown to us today.) The local
names for cattle diseases hint at a well-defined indigenous nosology already in
place when Europeans arrived.
If the Zulu homelands are any guide, groups of African pastoralists in the
early 1800s already recognized that the activities of trading, raiding, and
invasion facilitated the travel of animal diseases and the tsetse fly. Moving
cattle from other places to (or through) tsetse fly regions was understood to be
dangerous and to be avoided if at all possible. Besides harboring tsetse flies,
KwaZulu-Natal (today’s name for Zulu homelands) also harbored ticks that
could kill cattle, especially young animals. Knowledge about animal disease
environments and the transmission of parasites and microorganisms probably
guided treatments and preventive measures (such as restricting contact
between animals), and much more historical and anthropological research is
needed on this topic for the many cultures and nations of Africa. But it is clear
that Indigenous Africans understood these animal diseases as related to
moving animals between environments - and that they characterized some
environments as unhealthy and dangerous to animals.
Zulu beliefs about healthy and unhealthy places also appeared in the
writings of the British scientist David Bruce, who worked in Zululand in the
1890s. He wrote that the Zulu believed nagana was indigenous to places that
harbored the tsetse fly; places without the fly were healthy districts. Dogs,
horses, and cattle that were moved from healthy districts to unhealthy places

soon became ill. Dogs and horses suffered acute nagana, with signs of emaci
ation, extreme weakness, and swelling under the belly and in the lower legs.
Cattle experienced a more chronic disease course, but most still died within a
month of the signs first appearing. Bruce respected the Zulu belief that where
there is no game [wild animals], there is no nagana. The Zulu therefore
attempted to kill or drive away all the large wild animals as a preventive
measure against nagana in their domesticated animals. This reduced fly popu
lations and restricted transmission from wild to domesticated animals, which
the Zulu clearly understood as the source of nagana.
The Cordon Sanitaire

Nagana is only one example of diseases understood to be enzootic (always
existing) in certain places and environments, and whose spread was linked to
moving animals from place to place. Within Europe, the early modern period
witnessed the rise of the northern and eastern cattle trade. The overland or overseas
transport of huge numbers of cattle connected remote agricultural production areas
with new markets for beef cattle in urban populations in Western European
societies where consumers wanted more meat in their diet. Drovers (herders)
conducted long-distance cattle drives from the fourteenth century onward from
production regions in Denmark, Romania, and Hungary to Central and Western
Europe along fixed routes, over distances sometimes exceeding 1,000 kilometers.
To avoid spreading disease, contact with the local human and animal populations
was avoided as much as possible at the inns and during the purchase of fodder
from local farmers, and drovers stayed away from the main state roads.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, a special veterinary police service
was established in Austria to regulate the flow of drovers and animals across the
border and prevent the importation of diseases. As part of a cordon sanitaire
(literally in French: a thick cord fence, a sanitary fence, or protecting closure ring),
these mounted civil servants patrolled the long eastern border to prevent illegal
livestock imports. Unfortunately, we do not know how (or if ) herders and drovers
provided veterinary treatment or therapies to these traveling livestock. Drovers
were paid for each animal that arrived at the destination, and while this suggests
some attention to health care it also sometimes meant cruelty. Drovers whipped,
stabbed, and prodded animals to keep them going, even if sick. These long
distance livestock drives in Europe and elsewhere continued until railroad trans
port replaced them in the second half of the nineteenth century.
By raising large numbers of cattle in Denmark, northern Germany, and on
the Hungarian and Romanian plains, Italians, French, and other Western
Europeans were able to access unprecedented supplies of animal protein
without sacrificing their own arable land. In addition, imported oxen were
crucial for traction and plowing as agricultural output increased. Hence,
important economic interests were threatened when epizootics decimated

livestock. Farmers, traders, and authorities were well aware of the potential
disease threats to local livestock populations and cattle markets posed by
military action, colonization, cattle drives, and international livestock trade.
Perhaps the most devastating - and feared - livestock disease of the
seventeenth-nineteenth centuries was what we know today as rinderpest.
Epizootic Diseases: Rinderpest, Foot and Mouth Disease,

and Sheep Pox
Rinderpest, a highly contagious viral disease lethal to cloven-hoofed animals
with no exposure to it, had many names: Pestis bovina (Latin), taoun (Arabic),
cattle plague (English), peste bovine (French), sadoka (Swahili), miljan/myal-
zan (Mongolian), and tachi (Japanese) are only a few examples. In this book,
we will use the term rinderpest for convenience. It is important to remember
that the causes and symptoms of diseases in the past, and how people under
stood them, may differ from those of today. Therefore, it is often difficult, if
not impossible, to diagnose rinderpest or any other epizootic that occurred in
the distant past. Instead, historians work to study epizootics from the point of
view of the people who lived through, and reported about, those often-
disastrous events. We know much about the history of rinderpest because the
measures taken by authorities to prevent spreading of this disease and to deal
with the socioeconomic implications have been fairly well documented in
many places. Rinderpest led to major state interventions in rural society and
played an important role in the development of veterinary medicine (including
as a stimulus to establish veterinary schools in some countries; see Chapter 3).
In addition, because it was so highly contagious and lethal (killing 60 to 90
percent of infected animals), rinderpest played an important role in ecological
imperialism during the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries. Its history as a dis
ease in motion, entangled with both trade and conquest, is well worth focusing
on here (the rinderpest story continues in Chapter 4).
Rinderpest, the Cattle Killer

The first account of rinderpest is described in first-century Roman sources. More
is known about mass outbreaks that occurred at the beginning of the ninth
century during the reign of Charlemagne and around 1300 as a result of raids
from Asia into Europe by the forces of Chinggis (Genghis) Khan. Europeans
believed that this disease was imported to Europe, a notion reflected in the name
“steppe murrain.” Steppe murrain supposedly originated from the steppes
between Asia and Europe, from where it regularly spread eastward to the
Pacific and westward toward the Atlantic along with cattle trading, ox carts,
and Central Asian invaders (such as Chinggis Khan’s soldiers). Apparently,
cattle from the steppe had an innate resistance and could infect cattle and buffalo

Figure 2.5 New Year’s print about rinderpest. Amsterdam 1745.

Courtesy: Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.843, public domain.

herds in the invaded countries without showing clinical signs. Once local herds
became infected, international cattle trade routes caused further spreading, for
example, from Ukraine and Hungary into Italy, Austria, and southern
Germany, or from Denmark, Northern Germany, and the Netherlands into
England. In East Asia, the Japanese compendium on cattle, Gyuka Satsuyo
(1720), mentions mass outbreaks of a highly contagious disease which killed
80 percent of cattle in Korea (in 1541, 1577, 1636, 1668) and Japan (1638,
1672). Because of the reported signs and symptoms, historians believe this
disease was probably tachi (Japanese for rinderpest). Rinderpest spreads by
invasion, conquest, and war, as well as trade; and this fact often shaped
responses to epizootics. For example, an outbreak of rinderpest in the 1740s
was the sequel of the Austrian War of Succession when infection moved from
Hungary into other European countries.
In the eighteenth century, Europe was struck three times by waves of mass
outbreaks of rinderpest: around 1713, 1744, and 1768. The disease became
endemic and reappeared regularly, killing millions of cattle. These outbreaks
affected large areas, but smaller local outbreaks also occurred over this time
period. The consequences - loss of food, animal power, transport, and wealth -
were deeply felt in European societies, and rinderpest was greatly feared.
There were many theories about what caused these outbreaks, and how to
respond to them, but these were religious societies. Confronted with these
disasters, religious authorities organized meetings of public prayer and public
processions asking God for help. Livestock owners requested spiritual remed
ies, exorcism, and blessings of herds and stables. In Figure 2.5, a translation of
Figure 2.5 (cont.)

The complaining houseman
Fear, Netherlands, fear, this sad story,
Which sounds in our ears, this first of the year;
If this is the beginning, then what will be the end,
Who shall, oh Christian, to God unsurpassed,
Pray away this punishment, sent to us by his wrath,
So that he will turn it to our favor.
How rages the fire of war in our neighboring countries,
Another fire of war comes to ignite in our country
Death among cattle, the foreboding that death,
Is following us on our heels in this sad need,
Raise then, oh man! with me your heart and hand to God,
So that he will not send to us a much worse lot;
But that we may see, that all will revive,
And for that we give God gratitude and honor.

a Dutch religious appeal compares rinderpest to war and urges people to pray
for the disease to end. Until well into the eighteenth century, outbreaks of
rinderpest were considered a divine punishment for a sinful population. The
end of the outbreak was celebrated with a day of thanksgiving in all churches.
Superstition also played a role: in Denmark, a calf from each herd was buried
alive, or livestock were driven through a fire to prevent infection. Next to
prayer, songs about disasters such as floods, earthquakes, insect plagues, and
rinderpest were common in the early modern time period. This genre is an
important source to understand how people in the past coped with such
catastrophes. Such songs were used to spread the news, to interpret them as
signs of God’s vengeance and warning to repent in order to prevent new
disasters. They could shape a shared sense of solidarity and religious or
geographical identity.
Lancisi’s Principles
Believing this disease to be contagious, local, regional, and national author
ities took measures to prevent the spreading of the disease. These included
embargoing cattle imports, closing livestock markets, banning transhu-
mance and animal transport, quarantining infected areas, disinfecting
stables, and burying or burning dead livestock. Such measures hindered
the spreading of cattle plague to some extent. More effective was the
systematic and rigorous culling of all infected livestock, a method applied
for the first time in Italy in 1711 on the authority of Giovanni Maria Lancisi
(1654-1720), personal physician of the pope. He had studied the outbreak
among the papal herds and concluded that rinderpest was due to a fer
mented substance released by the bodies of sick cattle. The contagious
agent, he wrote, consisted of very small deadly particles that could pass
from one animal to the other via mucous membranes and direct skin
contact. Consequently, Lancisi drew up eleven recommendations to prevent
infection, including killing all infected animal s, which became law by papal
edict (see Box 2.1 for one of Lancisi’s recommendations). These measures
seemed to help rid the Papal States of rinderpest; but they were put into
effect only under threat of severe penalties. Livestock owners who would
lose their valuable animals protested and often attempted to hide sick
animals from officials trying to control the disease.
The same approach was advocated by Thomas Bates, surgeon to
King George I of England, when the first pandemic struck England in
1714. Bates was ordered to study and control rinderpest. He knew
Lancisi’s work from a period spent as a naval surgeon in Sicily, and

Box 2.1 Recommendation 4

Before treating sick animals, the veterinarian (marescalchi) should put on a waxed
overall. After the treatment, the overall should be left in situ and the veterinarian
should wash his hands and face with vinegar before going to look after the animals
in other cowsheds, or later returning to the same place. It would, however, be better
to kill the infected cattle rather than to treat them, since veterinary intervention may
increase the risk of contagion.
Recommendation 4 (out of 11) made by Giovanni Maria Lancisi to Pope Clement
XI in 1715 to prevent the spread of rinderpest to the Papal States.
Bates applied the same control measures as those used in the Papal States.
However, instead of severe penalties, he followed a policy of indemnifying
(paying or compensating with money) the unfortunate farmers. After a
campaign of three months, rinderpest had disappeared in Britain.
Continental countries without a strong central government did not imple
ment such cull-and-slaughter campaigns, and nor did Britain when it was
struck by the second wave of rinderpest mass outbreaks in 1744 - and many
more animals died.
The pattern of each epizootic was the same. The disease spread rapidly
after introduction and killed most animals in the first two years. Mortality
then quickly decreased because fewer animals remained, most of which had
developed immunity (which we now know to be lifelong). The disease
prevailed in the high-density livestock areas. Reintroduction of rinderpest
remained low as long as trade barriers were maintained by official meas
ures. In various countries, committees were established in which agricultur
ists, medical doctors, clergymen, and civil servants were appointed to
advise local and national governments on how to control cattle plague.
Numerous recipes for medicines to prevent and to cure the disease were
published in edicts, decrees, and pamphlets. The veterinary police, estab
lished in some European countries, also supervised quarantine measures at
the borders (although some drovers found ways to evade them). In the
beginning of the nineteenth century, a German veterinarian described how
seemingly healthy livestock imported from Russia and Ukraine still
infected cattle populations in East Prussia and Poland. In many European
countries, rinderpest appeared again as soon as the ban on cattle imports
was lifted, infecting young and susceptible animals. This pattern proved
very hard to break for social as well as epidemiological reasons.

Controlling Rinderpest
Epizootics were social crises, causing tensions between farmers and local
authorities and between local and central governments. The outbreaks called
for severe state interference; however, local farmers often considered the
imposed measures to be too draconian. Their opposition is understandable.
Forced to slaughter their cattle, sometimes even healthy-looking animals, some
farmers became so poor they could not feed their families or lost their farms.
State interference, including military cordons sanitaire and mandatory slaugh
ter, also challenged the customary rural self-sufficiency in animal husbandry.
On the other side, consumers faced skyrocketing meat prices. After the
epidemic slowed down, recovery in animal populations took a long time. In
some areas, for instance, in southern France, it took years for livestock
husbandry to be reestablished. Arable farming became difficult in places that
had relied on oxen for farm labor. Outbreaks also led to temporary or perman
ent land abandonment, and the victimization of farmers by unscrupulous
money lenders and cattle “insurance” salespeople. Other regions were more
fortunate. Farmers who were able to keep a few animals profited from higher
meat and dairy prices and temporarily shifted to cheese production, sheep
breeding, fattening of calves, or arable farming.
Outbreaks of rinderpest also influenced the development of veterinary
treatments for individual animals. Recommendations focused on isolation of
sick animals and general hygiene of stables, disinfection of cow sheds, and
providing nutritional food and fresh water. In Denmark, farmers burned
tobacco leaves in stables to keep out infection. All kinds of (folk) remedies
were applied, particularly the administration of various kinds of potions and
herbs. In Bavaria it was recommended to administer theriaca (special mixtures
of various herbs and medicinal substances) dissolved in wine. In Hungary,
healers used a mixture of sulfur, antimony, gentian, and juniper. An alternative
was adding two spoonsful of salt and sulfur to bread soaked in human urine
and feeding it to sick animals. These are but a few examples of remedies
applied to sick animals by animal owners and professional healers alike.
Although these folk remedies and sacred remedies (such as prayer) con
tinued to be important, the control of rinderpest in the course of the eighteenth
century increasingly focused on animal populations. Population-level treat
ments varied from quarantine measures and hygiene to polypharmacy to mass
slaughtering. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, researchers of
rinderpest agreed on one empirical finding: animals that had survived rinder
pest were able to resist further infection. It was known that in China and
Turkey people tried to protect themselves from smallpox infection by previ
ously infecting themselves artificially with pustular material from a patient
with a mild infection: so-called variolation. Inspired by this practice, European
researchers tried to protect healthy animals against rinderpest by preventively

infecting them with an attenuated form of the disease (inoculation). Many

experiments with inoculation were conducted in various countries. These were
based on the observation that the mortality rate of naturally contaminated cattle
was about 85 percent, while many fewer died when they were inoculated on
purpose with blood, saliva, or secretions taken from the mouth or nose from
animals that had survived initial infection. The inoculation experiments con
tributed to the knowledge of active immunization against infectious diseases.
The technique of variolation famously inspired the English physician Edward
Jenner (1749-1823) to develop and apply vaccination against smallpox in
humans. (He derived the term “vaccine” from the Latin word vacca = cow.)
Despite these early attempts to vaccinate individual animals to create effective
disease control, regions hit by rinderpest emphasized population-level treatments
in this period. This was due to several influences. First, municipalities and
regions needed to stop the epidemic as quickly as possible to prevent the social
crisis that usually resulted. If animals could not be moved or exported, huge
amounts of money would be lost. Draconian stamping-out (slaughtering all
animals in the affected region, even if not sick) was the quickest method.
Second, stamping-out was also probably the most reliable method. In spite of
some isolated successes, inoculation against rinderpest did not stop the out
breaks. Despite the protests of farmers, damage to agriculture, and the risk of
social crisis, governing officials quickly learned to attempt to stop the disease as
soon as possible. As we discuss in the next chapters, rinderpest would not be
under control around the world until the late twentieth century.
The domain of veterinary empiricism was a mixture of popular and learned
cultures; eighteenth-century almanacs and other published sources played a
role in knowledge transfer between these two cultures. To us today, the
recommendations and treatments of that time appear very primitive.
However, one should not judge the degree of efficacy of the interventions
from a present-day (veterinary) point of view, but rather measure their scope
within the functioning of a society confronted with a major crisis.
Nevertheless, is it striking that long before the development of germ theories
in the late nineteenth century and the discovery of vaccines against some of
these epizootic and zoonotic diseases, people found ways to control the disease
such as stamping out and strict quarantine. Still, it is estimated that more than
200 million cattle perished from the rinderpest in eighteenth-century Europe.
This disease would continue to challenge European authorities until the 1860s
and also to devastate the parts of Africa and Asia to which European animals
traveled (see Chapter 4).
Foot and Mouth Disease and Sheep Pox

If rinderpest was the rapid killer of cattle, vesicular diseases were often more
chronic and insidious. Vesicular diseases (causing vesicles or blisters) usually

did not kill the animal immediately. Instead, the animals refused to eat, lost
weight, and gave little milk, thus decreasing their market value. These conta
gious diseases spread rapidly; today, we know that viruses cause foot and
mouth disease (FMD, or aphthae epizooticae) and most other vesicular dis
eases. The symptoms of FMD familiar to us today appear in ancient texts:
blisters and ulcers on the feet, around the lips and inside the mouth; hyper
salivation, difficult swallowing, loss of appetite; and low mortality in adult
animals (2 to 5 percent). Along with bovines, camels, goats, and swine, the
disease was sometimes reported to affect horses (which are resistant to FMD).
Moreover, since our categorizations of diseases today are different from those
of history, we avoid diagnosing disease outbreaks of the past and simply
consider them “FMD-like” based on their historical descriptions. A detailed
description of an FMD-like disease (according to present knowledge) was
given by Italian physician Girolamo Fracastoro (1478-1553) in 1546: It was
also in the northern Italian states of Piedmont, Venice, and Lombardy that an
outbreak of febre aftosa (vesicular fever) occurred in 1799-1800. The highly
contagious nature was then recognized, and officials implemented isolation
measures for animals from infected areas to prevent the spread of the disease.
Nevertheless, the debate about whether these FMD-like diseases were
strictly contagious or could be caused by other factors such as miasmas lasted
until well into the nineteenth century. As with rinderpest and smallpox, early
scientists tried inoculation experiments with matter from infected animals at
least since 1810. However, most of these “aphtization” or inoculation attempts
failed. Next to inoculation, veterinary healers treated the pustules by
cauterizing them, followed by dressing them with salt and butter. Another
common therapy involved extracting blood from the gingiva by leeches or by
cupping glasses, followed by a mouthwash based on mallow roots, linseed,
milk, or honey. Although animals usually recovered, they often did not gain
weight, gave less milk, and remained weakened for the rest of their lives. The
cost of feeding and transporting such animals was greater than the profit
realized by selling them or their products (such as milk or wool). The highly
contagious FMD-like vesicular diseases were greatly feared because they
dramatically decreased the economic value of cattle and sheep and spread so
rapidly from place to place.
Another disease that disrupted the international trade in sheep and wool was
sheep pox (known today as a viral disease caused by variola ovina). Next to
anthrax and foot-rot, it represents one of the main scourges of sheep produc
tion. Some historians claim that this disease killed almost the entire sheep
population in England in the period 1275-1300. Sheep pox appeared repeat
edly: France suffered in 1515 and again in 1819 (when one million sheep
died), as did England (with a huge outbreak in 1862). Both nations had large
textile industries that depended on the wool supply. Sheep pox-like diseases

were also known to herders in northern Africa and were reported by observers
in the Arabic and Turkic worlds. The disease was characterized by the forma
tion of whitish and stinking cutaneous pustules, respiratory problems, and foul
breath. Young sheep and lambs often died of sheep pox-like diseases.
In his Traite de la Clavelee (1822), veterinarian Louis Hurtrel d’Arboval
(1777-1839) presented a detailed description of the various stages and clinical
symptoms of sheep pox. German anatomist Friedrich G.J. (Jacob) Henle
(1809-1885) classified sheep pox, anthrax, and rinderpest under the disease
category of miasmatic origin, which could later develop to be contagious in its
course. In cases of an outbreak, diseased sheep were isolated from the healthy
ones. Healers tried to get the miasmatic “poison” out of diseased sheep by
letting the animals sweat in an enclosed space, followed by bloodletting.
Finally, this therapeutic regimen was finished by fumigating these sheep by
burning horsehair, ground horn, or woolen rags.
An interesting fact about sheep pox is that it was one of the earliest animal
diseases for which owners and herders attempted a form of inoculation. This
may have been due to the disease’s signs and symptoms, which were clearly a
pox similar to smallpox in humans. The ancient Asian practice of inoculation,
known to Arabic, Turkic, and northern African herders, was used against both
smallpox in humans and sheep pox in ovines. In West Africa, a form of
inoculation called “clavelization” was applied by Indigenous pastoralists long
before the French invasion and colonization. They scratched open the skin of
the animal’s ear with a thorn, and inserted material from a sick animal’s
pustules under the skin. Similar to inoculation with rinderpest, Europeans tried
to protect their sheep by subcutaneous clavelization or “ovination” with matter
collected from the pustules. From the eighteenth century on, some of these
inoculation practices seemed to prevent the disease to some extent. However, it
seems that sheep pox clavelization was less successful than the prophylactic
against smallpox in humans. To answer the question of whether sheep pox was
a zoonosis, European physicians apparently carried out inoculation experi
ments on humans. They found that the infection could not be transmitted to
humans either by direct inoculation or by eating meat from infected animals.
The danger of sheep pox was its epizootic potential, with the deaths of almost
all young animals in an exposed herd. This disease and others were feared for
their potential to spread like wildfire through herds and between different
geographical regions along with the international trade in live animals.
Disease of Trade: Anthrax

Anthrax (Latin), charbon (French), Milzbrand (German), antrax (Spanish),
dalak ate$i (Turkish for “spleen fever”), and сибирская язва (Russian for
“Siberian ulcer”) represents another feared disease that was already known in

antiquity. The name of this zoonotic disease literally means “coal” due to the
characteristic dark discoloration of the spleen and blood, and the blue-black
eschars it causes on the human skin (carbunculus = little coals). Authors like
Hippocrates, Galen, and Apsyrtos described an anthrax-like disease and con
firmed its contagious nature. Within the humoral theory, anthrax was linked to
heat (the carbuncles gave a burning feeling underneath the skin of infected
humans) and to a surplus of black bile, which caused the evil ulcerations
occurring with carbuncles. In southern India, pinnadapan (splenic apoplexy),
with symptoms similar to anthrax, was described as one of the four
fatal diseases.
In medieval Europe, many accounts were written of outbreaks of ignis sacer
(sacred fire) anthrax in various countries, causing high mortality among people
and cattle. The disease often occurred during and after particular climatic
conditions and was believed to have arisen from infected pastures (telluric,
arising from the soil). Herdsmen were familiar with this risk and designated
certain fields as cursed. Traditionally, herders prevented animals from grazing
on cursed fields for seven years. Sheep could obtain anthrax due to an
abundance of thick blood. Medieval Arabic writers recognized two fatal forms
of anthrax: Da el-Bakar (cow sickness), with typical dark diarrhea, and Zibah
(tumorous anthrax).
Many accounts of anthrax in cattle and horses were written in the
seventeenth-nineteenth centuries in various European countries, but also in
Siberia and the French West Indies. The disease was common in Siberian
horses; western Russians believed that it originated there (thus the name
“Siberian ulcer” in Russian). Frequencies of anthrax outbreaks were higher
in certain years, for instance in 1682, 1732, and in the 1770s and 1780s in
Western Europe. The written accounts often mention mass outbreaks and
describe a highly contagious nature for anthrax. The disease appeared in
certain places, disappeared, then returned in later years. Observers noticed that
particular climate conditions favored development of the disease. Anthrax
tended to appear after periods of heavy storms and rain that followed long
dry periods in summertime. Today we recognize that this pattern was created
by the storms stirring up existing spores of the causative bacillus in the soil;
but until the late 1870s, no one knew why certain weather patterns could
trigger anthrax outbreaks.
Anthrax was widely known to be transmissible to humans. It was recognized
as a professional disease posing a higher risk of infection for herdsmen,
butchers, knackers, tanners, and veterinary healers. Contamination and infec
tion could occur via direct contact between animals or animal products and a
person’s skin. In Turkey, a specialized branch of human medicine dealt
exclusively with anthrax infections, spread by handling wool, hair, and hides
from infected animals. The dalak-doctors could prevent severe effects and

death from the disease if an exposed person received treatment early in the
disease course. In Europe, a well-known case of anthrax transmission was that
of a German knacker (slaughterer) who consulted the physician F.A.A.
Pollender (1800-1879) in 1841. The knacker had carried the bloody hide of
a cow on his shoulder; unfortunately, the cow had died of anthrax. The knacker
developed a carbuncle in his neck and died two days later. Pollender reasoned
that the deadly infection had somehow been transferred from the cowhide, and
his suspicion brought up the question of whether the meat from sick animals
was safe to eat.
As with rinderpest, scholars and scientists disagreed about whether meat
from animals that had died of anthrax was fit for human consumption. Many
decrees ordered those carcasses and meat from animals with rinderpest and
anthrax should be buried or burnt. Swiss physiologist Albrecht von Haller
(1708-1777) believed that meat from anthrax-infected animals was deadly to
humans. However, according to Dutch physician Petrus Camper (1722-1789),
people who had eaten meat from anthrax-infected animals during food short
ages suffered no ill effects to their health, particularly when the meat was well
cooked. This was confirmed by members of the Paris Conseil de Salubrite,
who declared that soldiers from Napoleon’s Grande Armee had consumed
meat from cattle presumed ill with anthrax and rabies without becoming ill.
The safety of meat from anthrax-infected animals remained an open question.
It is often difficult to distinguish between animal diseases in the past or to
associate diseases that occurred in the past to seemingly similar diseases of
today. This is also the case with anthrax. Many descriptions of symptoms of
anthrax given in the past remain controversial, because these were often
confused symptoms of other diseases and clinical complications linked with
anthrax. A typical example illustrating this is the buccopharyngeal form of
anthrax, the so-called glossanthrax, which seems to have been far more
widespread in the past than it is today. Glossanthrax, also called tongue
cancer or tongue-blister, was a type of disease that struck cattle and caused
white blisters on the tongue that turned red, then black. The blisters enlarged
and deepened into pustules, and at the back of the tongue the pustules ate away
at the tongue until it literally fell out. Some gruesome accounts of this disease
claimed that the fields were covered with tongues. Because of the blisters,
glossanthrax was and is often confused with FMD or rinderpest. This is very
doubtful in light of the facts that horses were also affected, and that various
sources indicated that animals could die very quickly, within 24 hours.
Therefore, from today’s point of view, this disease was probably part of the
anthrax complex. (Moreover, in the second half of the nineteenth century,
biomedical scientists clearly delineated FMD with a different name and
pointed out that FMD was far less lethal.) Why glossanthrax seemingly
disappeared is still a mystery.

For centuries the opinion prevailed that anthrax was incurable. Animals died
so quickly from this disease that it was confused with poisoning or lightning
strike. Nevertheless, healers tried various treatments: bloodletting, the applica
tion of setons based on the root of hellebore, deep incision of the carbuncles
followed by cauterization, and the administration of various herbs and potions.
During the 1682 and 1732 epizootics of glossanthrax in Western Europe,
healers, cow-doctors, and farmers treated affected animals with tongue
scrapers, which were supposed to prevent the disease from killing the animal.
This instrument consisted of a handle with a sharp point on one side to open
the blisters and a blade comb with silver teeth to scrape off the pustules until
bleeding. Then the tongue should be rubbed with salt and wine vinegar and
smeared with honey. This treatment probably did not save the animal’s life, but
it was a way for livestock owners and veterinary healers to take some action
against this dreadful disease.
As historians, we cannot impose today’s definition of diseases onto histor
ical outbreaks, but we can try to understand how people of the past thought
about them. Anthrax is one of the oldest known diseases, and it is an excellent
example of how curious natural historians (and microbiologists, later) classi
fied the same disease differently in different times and places. Our twenty-first-
century classification of anthrax as the disease caused by Bacillus anthracis is
remarkably different from that of the 1700s. In France circa 1700, for example,
there were two distinct diseases that we might call anthrax today: “malignant
pustule” (skin or cutaneous anthrax); and “splenic fever” (a fever disease of the
whole body). Beginning in the 1770s, these two different diseases were
connected to each other, based on the patient’s history of exposure to
anthrax-infected animals. Figuring out ways to use government powers to
prevent anthrax outbreaks took even longer. This was due to the soil-borne
nature of infection, which caused confusion about the direct transmissibility of
anthrax between animals and from animals to humans. In addition, the two
forms of clinical expression and the similarities of symptoms with other
diseases such as rinderpest, blackleg, and glanders made it hard to diagnose.
Disease of War: Glanders

Finally, we will discuss a disease that caused serious problems for solipeds
(horses, mules, donkeys) in transportation, agriculture, and especially the
military, namely, Malleus (Latin) glanders, farcy (English), Rotz (German),
morve (French), ruan (Turkish), and сап (Russian). It is one of the oldest
known horse diseases. The symptoms of this disease - ulcerating lesions of the
skin and mucous membranes, coughing, fever, and the release of nasal dis
charge - were first described in antiquity. Although the highly infectious
nature was well known, disputes about exactly how the disease was transmitted

Warfare and the History of Veterinary Surgery 77
continued into the nineteenth century. In hindsight, this can be explained by

the various expressions and symptoms of the acute or chronic course of
glanders, which were confusing and not always clearly related to each other.
In 1797, the Danish veterinarian Erik Viborg (1759-1822) proved that glan
ders could be transmitted by inoculation or by putting infected and healthy
horses together.
Glanders is zoonotic, although the incidence of animal to human transmis
sion is low. But when humans do get infected, mortality is high. Therefore, this
disease was long feared among blacksmiths, farriers, flayers, hostlers, soldiers,
and veterinarians. Among animals, infection usually occurs by intake of
contaminated water or feed or direct transmission. Transmission to humans
takes place through direct contact with infected animals (including handling
dead animals), or by inhalation. Only a relatively small exposure to contamin
ated material is necessary to cause infection. This fact was known for centur
ies, and infection with glanders is considered one of the first biological
weapons during warfare. Of course, horses were crucial to warfare and an
outbreak of glanders would incapacitate an army. Therefore, armies tried to
infect horses of the enemy with glanders by sending infected animals to the
enemy camp or leaving them during retreat. It is quite certain that during
various wars, great numbers of horses died due to this disease. Along with
disease, another major killer of horses during military campaigns was injuries,
wounds, and infections. At this point, we briefly review the crucial role of
horses and their healers in the history of warfare - a major factor in the
development of veterinary medicine and surgery in the early modern and
modern periods.
Warfare and the History of Veterinary Surgery
War Animals: Horses

Horses, mules, and donkeys have been used for cavalry, artillery, communi
cation, reconnaissance, and supply; at times, they have even provided food for
armies. Central and mounted warfare was revolutionized by the introduction of
saddles and stirrups; horse saddles with trees were first used in Asia around
200 BCE. After their invention in China in the first centuries CE, stirrups
spread west and south through the nomadic peoples of central Eurasia and east
to Japan. The Avars introduced the stirrup to cavalry in Europe in the eighth
century, enabling horsemen to mount more easily, sit more tightly in the
saddle, handle the lance, and stand up to use the bow and arrow. Due to these
advantages, cavalry replaced infantry in Carolingian France and contributed to
the rise of Samurai rule in Japan. By the early 1300s, these technologies had
spread throughout the Muslim world. For example, the Malian ruler Sunjata

demonstrated the power of cavalry in overcoming enemy armies and estab

lishing a vast empire in Western Africa.
Since domestication, people have tried to protect horses’ and mules’ hooves
from wear, and this was particularly crucial during long military campaigns. In
ancient Asia, hooves were wrapped in rawhide, leather, or other materials for
both therapeutic purposes and protection from wear. The first widely used iron
horseshoes probably originated with metalworkers in central Asia, where the
art of blacksmithing and farriery traveled east into China. The Romans used a
type of horseshoe and mule-shoes. These so-called hipposandals consisted of
leather boots, reinforced by an iron plate. Evidence for the use of nailed
horseshoes in Europe is relatively late, first known to have appeared around
900, indicating a transfer of blacksmithing knowledge from Asia to Europe
around that time. Protection for animals’ hooves was crucial to successful
long-range military actions, during which the distances traveled would wear
down the hooves and cause lameness. In the sixteenth-century Ottoman trea
tise Tuhfet’ul-muluk ve’s-selatin, the author summarized a great deal of
existing knowledge about hippiatry because horses were essential to Islamic
Holy War and were God’s own weapons. Sections of the treatise instructed
readers on defects of the forefeet, how to nail horseshoes, common horse
shoeing mistakes, and the symptoms and treatment of lame horses. These
practical instructions, interspersed with religious commentary and sections
on training horses for battles and competitions, were intended for the
nalbantlar or farriers doing the daily work of horse care.
While specializing in the care of horses’ hooves, farriers provided other
health-care services as well. While traveling with an army or working in
encampments, farriers worked with horses who went lame. They treated
animals with diseases (such as glanders, which was probably the most
common disease problem) as well as parasitic infections. Without healthy
horses, armies were incapacitated: supplies and artillery could not be moved,
and military leaders lost the significant advantages of cavalry units. Military
operations depended on horses, elephants, mules, camels, and other war
animals until the early twentieth century. In the fifty years leading up to the
end of World War I, the farrier’s role in keeping the army moving transitioned
into an official attachment of a veterinarian or veterinary surgeon to cavalry
and infantry units (see Chapter 5). Finally, the use of horses in warfare helped
to stimulate the development of veterinary surgical techniques and practices
Quick, Clean, and Kind: Surgery in Animal Healing

Healers have practiced surgery since ancient times. Every culture throughout
history has used its own methods and, of course, those methods have changed
over time; but the need to treat traumatic injuries and external conditions has

been constant throughout the history of human-animal interactions. Treating

wounds, injuries, and external infections was hands-on work that involved
manipulations of the body, cutting or lancing, cautery (burning or searing
wounds), and applying salves, oils, and bandages. In ancient India, the
2,500-year-old text Sushruta Samhita details shalya-chikitsa, the Ayurvedic
surgical practices (see Fig. 2.2). The text describes learning surgical skills and
anatomy from dead animals. Since Ayurvedic principles were applied to both
animals and humans it is likely that surgeons worked on living animals as well
as humans. Procedures included tooth extractions, eye operations, draining
abscesses, and cauterization (searing the wound, usually with a hot iron rod).
Early Chinese surgery was likely based on a combination of practical skills
(such as bone-setting) and the theory about the flow of the qi (essential
energy). The essential redirection of the qi in cases of illness and injury
required treatments such as acupuncture, placing slender needles in the skin
to direct the qi, and moxibustion, burning herbs on the skin at critical locations
to stimulate the flow of qi. These treatments would be used for diseases, pain,
and injuries. Over time, Korean and Japanese medical cultures also developed
their own medico-surgical systems based in part on that of China.
In the Middle East and Europe, surgery developed according to simple
experience and principles articulated by Hippocrates, Galen, and the other
ancient thinkers. Surgical practices were, generally, slow to change over time;
but it’s essential to remember that surgeons were very practical and probably
individually creative and innovative. In this section, we will describe the
surgical marketplace, with many different types of animal surgeons available
from which to choose. We also discuss how surgical care helps us to see how
closely human and animal bodies were thought to be related. If the body
reacted by generating inflammation or pus, for example, this was interpreted
in similar ways for animals and humans over time. In general, we see surgical
ideas and practices on humans deriving in part from experiments on animals.
Knowledge about human surgical treatments, and the related topics of pain
relief and anesthesia, then informed developments in veterinary medicine.
Many types of treatments were used, and we trace some of the developments
in animal surgery, 1500s-1700s, here. Surgical practices were slowly adapted
to three goals over time: to be quick, clean, and kind. “Quick”: lacking
effective anesthetic methods, surgeons needed to work quickly. “Clean”:
Increasingly during this time, surgeons developed ways to avoid deadly wound
infections using cleanliness and antisepsis. Finally, “kind” surgeons over the
past two centuries have shifted from a belief in dramatic and destructive
treatments to being taught to treat tissues gently and kindly for better healing.
Although veterinarians practice both surgery and medicine today, many
groups of specialized surgeons, each performing a narrow range of procedures,
existed in the past. There were castrators, dentists, firers (used hot irons), cow

leeches, and farriers, each of whom competed for clients. Over time, the social
and professional positions of these specialists changed based on the society’s
needs and how people valued different types of animals. Surgeons held higher
social positions during certain time periods, for example, in ancient Egypt and
for a time in the European Middle Ages. However, these were exceptions, and
historically the social status of human and veterinary surgeons reflected sur
gery’s emergence from the lowly barbers and knackers. In contrast with
educated and learned physicians, surgeons trained by apprenticeship and
dirtied their hands setting bones, cauterizing wounds, extracting teeth, remov
ing skin warts and tumors, applying leeches to remove blood, and amputating
limbs. During military action, their duties also included euthanizing soldiers
and animals wounded too badly to survive
Surgical practices reflected how people of the past understood the similar
ities and differences between human and animal bodies. Inflammation looked
similar in human and animal bodies, with swelling, heat, pain, and redness. An
ancient concept dating at least to Hippocrates (fifth century BCE), a certain
amount of inflammation was considered a necessary component of healing
after injury. Surgically, inflammation was a localized condition often accom
panied by bodily secretions. In both humans and animals, if inflammation was
not properly managed, it could advance to wound putrefaction, gangrene, and
loss of function or death. Both Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine
used (and still use) herbal decoctions to reduce the heat of inflammation; these
decoctions were made from plants such as huang lian (Coptis chinensis) and
huang qm (Scutellaria baicalensis), which also effectively stopped bleeding.
In the European tradition, healers since at least the twelfth century had
carefully watched the formation of pus in a wound. “Laudable” pus, the thick,
yellowish discharge from a wound, was viewed as helpful to healing, and some
practitioners encouraged its formation by applying irritating substances to the
wound. A wound discharging thin, reddish-tinged pus, on the other hand, was
not healing well and might progress to gangrene. To prevent gangrene, animal
and human healers both used poultices containing honey, butter, clay, herbs,
and plant extracts. Additionally, the Arabic practice of cauterizing wounds was
used to stop bleeding and to combat suppuration of wounds, both in humans
and animals.
As always, violence and war stimulated the development of new surgical
knowledge and techniques. From the 1500s onward, the most important
change in warfare around the world was the adoption of gunpowder-based
weapons. The injuries resulting from these weapons were complex: they often
involved both soft tissue (muscles) and bone and caused burns from the
powder or shrapnel wounds and concussive head injuries that required
trephination (drilling a hole in the skull to relieve intracranial pressure).
Once the Chinese techniques of gunpowder-based weaponry spread to

Europe, surgeons began to consider how to treat these new types of wounds in
both humans and animals (usually horses, although elephants, mules, oxen,
and other animals were also used in warfare). They first tried traditional
cautery, using boiling oil; then during the 1536 siege of Turin, surgeon
Ambroise Pare realized that soldiers treated with healing ointments instead
of the boiling oil actually recovered more quickly and fully. Surgical know
ledge about humans influenced veterinary practices, in part because animal
bodies were thought to function like those of humans in surgical terms. An
excellent example pointing to this mode of thought is the use of standard
diagrams in surgical treatises from the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries: the
“Wounds Man” and his veterinary counterpart, the “Wounds Horse” (see
Fig. 2.6). These diagrams showed the most commonly injured parts of the
body during battles and warfare, and the representation of the “Wounds Horse”
was clearly borrowed from that of the “Wounds Man.”
Until the development of antisepsis in the early 1800s, a wound to the
interior of the body (thorax or abdomen) was usually fatal in both humans
and animals. The ideas of cleanliness and dressing wounds to keep out dirt and
insects made practical sense to many surgical practitioners. But cleanliness did
not address the basic problem of healing: the imbalance of the qi or the doshas
or the humors that created out-of-control inflammation. By the 1700s, some
physicians and surgeons used bandages dipped in wine to cover wounds. In a
rare example of women healers appearing in the historical sources,
Frenchwoman Genevieve d’Arconville (1720-1805) has been credited with
using mercury chloride in the 1760s to keep wounds clean. However, to most
human and animal surgeons, a “clean” wound was one free of foreign bodies,
cauterized, and perhaps with its edges debrided and brought together and
bandaged. Surgical instruments played an important role: there were dozens
of different types of cauterization irons, forceps, bone saws, trocars, trepans,
scalpels, and lancets and fleams for bleeding. Interestingly, some surgical
instruments looked like or were named according to animal species, for
example, “alligator forceps.” (This originated with traditional medicine in
India; the texts of Samhita and later vedas discussed the merits of animal
shaped tools that invoked spiritual forces to assist the surgeon.) While the
shapes of basic surgical tools used in veterinary medicine have not changed
dramatically over the past several hundred years, the late 1700s and early
1800s witnessed a growing interest in wound cleanliness and antisepsis, which
we discuss in the next chapter.
Lacking sufficient anesthesia for surgical patients, surgeons had to be
“quick” as well as “clean” and “kind.” Although anesthesia and analgesia
were not discussed much in historical veterinary texts, the lack of effective
pain relief is clear from frequent descriptions of the best ways to restrain
animals. Ropes for casting livestock (throwing the animal to the ground), the

XVII
<WWwfrl id) bin Vol firatd) vfi |1id}! ®°d> bofficb (Sott/tfinfllid) Artjttcy
oi’i'.'itoicjr/vcnvunbct тйййпйф/ ©фуИмив bit' wevb tt)itbdflF«i ftcr.
fifyn
Figure 2.6 Representations of battle wounds in veterinary texts were modeled

after those in books about human medicine and anatomy. Above is the
“Wundenmann [Wounds Man],” Strasbourg, Germany, 1530.

Figure 2.6 (cont.) “Wundenpferd [Wounds Horse],” Germany, 1683.

Source: “Wundenmann [Wounds Man],” Hans von Gersdorff, Feldtbuch der
Wundartzney (Augsburg, H. Stayner, 1542) 17; public domain. Source: “Wundenpferd
[Wounds Horse],” Johannes Carlyburger, Rossarzneihandschrift 1683. Courtesy:
Dr. Veronika Goebel, Bibliothek des Instituts fur Palaoanatomie,
Domestikationsforschung und Geschichte der Tiermedizin der LMU Munchen,
IPGTM Hs germ. 1, p. 63.
twitch (twister for the horse’s nose), and many other mechanical techniques
speak to surgeons’ difficulties with animal restraint during operations.
Nonetheless, materia medica for pain relief existed (although we have little
evidence that these compounds were routinely used on animals). A famous
historical physician-surgeon, Hua T’uo (died c. 200 CE), developed an anes
thetic from opioids and wine; performed abortions, castration, and other
operations; and used moxibustion on human patients. (We do not know if he
treated animal patients.) Opium and alcohol have long histories in many
cultures, but these were mainly used for humans. They were expensive, and
in larger animals the dosage needed to have an effect was cost prohibitive. The
plant henbane, which contains active anticholinergic properties, was used in
China and the West for pain relief.

Finally, the use of analgesia and general anesthesia for animals depended on
how the people of that historical time and place viewed pain in animals. Did
animals feel it as humans did, and, if so, was pain helpful or harmful for
healing? Was it morally necessary to alleviate animal pain? We do not have the
space to adequately address the topic of pain relief in animals, although we
return to this discussion in later chapters. Much more historical research needs
to be done on the topic of how different cultures viewed animal pain. Clearly,
both humans and animals endured treatment we consider brutal today (such as
cauterization). In humans, setting fractures, limb amputations, and tooth
pulling were conducted without anesthesia even after the British dentist
William Morton made his famous 1846 public demonstration of ether as an
anesthetic. Although anesthetic agents such as nitrous oxide, chloroform, and
carbon dioxide were tested on experimental animals and pets (as proxies for
humans) in the early 1800s, these agents were not widely used in veterinary
practice for another century - and then only for smaller animals. Debates
within the veterinary profession about the uses of analgesics and anesthetics
continued into the late twentieth century.
By the 1800s, surgical care for animals began to be incorporated more with
medicine, although this was an extremely slow process that varied from place
to place. In some cultures, in the modern period veterinarians have been called
“veterinary surgeons.” Bringing together veterinary medicine and veterinary
surgery and reducing the importance of the surgical specialties (castrators,
dentists, and the like) were components of the professionalization strategy for
veterinary medicine. For veterinary medicine to be a valued, recognized
profession in the modern era, veterinary leaders sought to control the veterin
ary marketplace through education, regulation, and licensing. How they
accomplished these goals and the unintended consequences of their strategies
are our topics for the next chapter.
Conclusions
From this very brief survey of several centuries, we can conclude that:
1. The domestication of elephants, horses, poultry, bovines, and other
animals supplied animals for food, transport, power, and cultural status.
2. Ecological exchange, international trade, and wars resulted in global
spreading of animal diseases.
3. Beliefs about human-animal relationships determined the position and use
of animals in various cultures, as well as methods of treating
diseased animals.
4. In Europe, humoralism continued as the dominant theory to explain
disease causation in humans and animals. In Asia, similar theories

Conclusions 85
centered on balance and/or energy in the body were used to explain

diseases. Treatment corresponded to disease causation theories.
5. The 1700s and early 1800s witnessed the rise of knowledge about how
bodies functioned in health (physiology) and disease (pathology).
6. Mass outbreaks of rinderpest continued into the 1700s, increasing in scope
due to increasing globalization. In many places, observers considered this
and other livestock diseases (such as foot and mouth disease and sheep
pox) to be a divine punishment.
7. The most effective responses to reduce the spread of infectious diseases
included isolation; quarantine; a ban on trade, markets, and transport; and
a cull-and-slaughter policy for infected herds. Using these measures,
livestock diseases could be contained without knowledge of pathogens.
8. In the course of the eighteenth century, inoculation and vaccination were
introduced to contain rinderpest, foot and mouth disease, and sheep pox.
These new ideas in healing and medicine were quickly incorporated by
some societies and more slowly by others.
9. Anthrax is a zoonotic disease associated with trade; glanders is a zoonotic
disease that has long been associated with horses used in wars.
10. Because they inflicted an endless variety of wounds on people and
animals, violence and war have stimulated the development of new surgi
cal knowledge and techniques. Surgical practices reflected how people of
the past understood the similarities and differences between human and
animal bodies.
11. Surgical ideas and practices on humans derived in part from experiments
on animals.
12. By the 1800s, surgical care for animals began to be incorporated more
with medicine, although this was an extremely slow process that varied
from place to place.
Question/Activity: Find examples of how your region or nation contributed to

knowledge about animal disease, medicine, and surgery, circa 1700-1850. How did
the people of your region or nation keep animals alive and well, especially during
times of stress or war?

3 Formal Education for Animal Healing
From Riding Schools to Veterinary Schools, 1700-1850
Introduction
Historians often date the official beginning of the veterinary profession or the
start of veterinary science to the first permanent veterinary school founded in
Lyon, France (Ecole Veterinaire de Lyon, 1762). They argue that Lyon and
other European schools made veterinary medicine “modern” and “scientific,”
implying that veterinarians could heal animals much more effectively. But
there are problems with this founding myth. Although the rise of veterinary
schools in Europe represented an important step in the history of veterinary
medicine, the education was not quite scientific (from today’s point of view),
and it didn’t change veterinary practices much either. Professional veterinary
healers had already existed for centuries, and these healers cannot all be
disqualified as ignorant empiricists or dangerous quacks; after all, their prac
tices were very similar to those of more “educated” animal healers. Nor were
veterinary educational institutions new in the late 1700s. As we have seen,
veterinary schools teaching the most up-to-date information had existed in
ancient China, India, and many other advanced ancient medical cultures for
centuries. The Islamic madrassas trained veterinarians who practiced, wrote
texts, and trained apprentices. These practitioners were esteemed in their own
times for their education, knowledge, and experience, just as the graduates of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European schools expected to be.
In this chapter, we reconsider the significance of these European veterinary
schools, which were the most recent in a long history of educational innovations
in animal healing. We argue that, like the Chinese, Ayurvedic, and Islamic
systems of education that preceded and coexisted with them, European veterinary
schools grew from particular contexts: the intellectual developments of the
European Enlightenment; the competition within the veterinary marketplace;
and the expectations that professional animal healers would support the military,
colonial, and agricultural goals of national governments and empires. The devel
opment of veterinary educational and professional institutions was greatly
affected by major events in Europe and around the world: the aftermath of the
Black Death, political and religious turmoil, the increasing continental circulation
of animal diseases, and European and Ottoman imperialism. New theological and
86

How Veterinary Education Emerged from “Enlightenment” in France 87
secular philosophies shaped European veterinary education just as they had

during the height of the Islamic schools. The needs of the state dictated the types
of animals treated by veterinarians, and those treatments in 1762 looked a lot like
the ones available in 1500.
Still, the question remains how a professionalization process took place in
Europe, from animal healing practiced by all sorts of empiricists, to the
increasing importance of veterinarians trained according to particular principles
developing in a rapidly growing number of similar schools. Much of today’s
infrastructure of professional veterinary medicine is descended from the insti
tutions and regulatory framework of the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries.
Veterinary education in the modern period developed against the background
of competing traditions and turfs, and we follow this story as it developed in
Europe and spread with imperialism to many parts of the world. Why did these
schools start in France, why in the 1760s, and why did similar institutions
multiply and spread to other nations and continents? We begin with the specific
circumstances in eighteenth-century France: veterinary education’s philosoph
ical roots in the intellectual developments of the European “enlightenment.”
We present an overview of the market for veterinary services with demand and
supply from various animal healers around 1750, and how the graduates of the
new veterinary schools tried to obtain their share of the veterinary marketplace
from then on. We show how, increasingly, the enlightenment ideals built into
the early years of French veterinary education bent to more pragmatic concerns:
physiocrat economics with its emphasis on the value of agriculture (including
animals); the challenges of disease outbreaks; and the need for healthy army
horses. Subsequently, we outline the institutionalization of graduate veterinar
ians alongside shoeing-smiths and farriers in armies against the background of
wars, the process of industrialization, and the growth of empires.
Building on the recent work of a new generation of veterinary historians, we
consider why the French model of veterinary education and professionalization
spread widely, and how other nations and territories adapted it. We treat the
development of the eighteenth-century European veterinary regime as a prod
uct of its times, arguing that it succeeded in spreading because it fulfilled
crucial social, political, and cultural needs during subsequent decades of
increasing industrialization and imperialism affecting the globe.
How Veterinary Education Emerged from the

“Enlightenment” in France
The Natural History Tradition

To answer the question, “why were European veterinary schools first estab
lished in late eighteenth-century France?” we begin with the Enlightenment
period in Europe (c. 1700s-1800s). The way in which people treat animals

depends on how they value them and think about them, and this period
witnessed a change in how animals were considered: from objects of intellec
tual curiosity, animals also became subjects of the state. First, we define what
we mean by the Enlightenment and its ideals: overall, it was a set of major
changes in ideas and social institutions that moved away from older sacred
traditions, with a greater emphasis on the agency of humans to alter their
environment. Historians have characterized this enlightenment period as a
transition from strictly theologically based societies to more tolerant and
secular ones, increasingly focused on rationality and pragmatic ways to solve
specific problems. European intellectuals gathered observations and know
ledge, applied strict rationales (modes of reasoning), and expected that increas
ing knowledge would lead to improved conditions for human life.
Enlightened principles proved useful to developing nation-states - for
example, helping to consolidate power and wealth. Of course, this was a
potential problem if the peasants also expected to reap the benefits of social
progress; this problem contributed to the outbreak of the French Revolution in
1789, for example. Nation-states depended at this time on high-level agricul
tural production, and one of the greatest threats to agriculture in the eighteenth
century was the peste bovine, or rinderpest, which killed large numbers of
European cattle for at least 70 years. Consolidating agricultural wealth meant
harnessing knowledge about animal health. A vibrant print culture, the growth
of medical knowledge, and royal (later republican) governmental sponsorship
enabled formal veterinary education to grow quickly in France. The appreci
ation of reason, the study of nature, and the development of cosmopolitan
knowledge were closely linked to their practical uses. (Cosmopolitan
knowledge is knowledge that successfully traveled and took hold in many
places, albeit adapted for local use.) Historians have characterized France as an
important center of the European enlightenment, and this context explains why
veterinary education first developed there. (Of course, the presence of strong
individual leaders and some luck also contributed.) We have begun this
chapter by reviewing “the enlightenment” because these developments shaped
the first permanent modern-era veterinary schools: the French Ecole
Veterinaire de Lyon and Ecole Veterinaire d’Alfort. Both were products of
the enlightenment period, and specifically of the French Enlightenment.
Consider the work of Claude Bourgelat (1712-1779), who instigated the
establishment of both Ecoles and served as the first director of the Lyon
school. With extensive experience in horsemanship, access to high-ranking
royal officials, and as a member of Paris’ Academy of Sciences, Bourgelat had
already contributed to French enlightenment knowledge about animals with
his text, Elemens d’hippiatrique (Lyon, 1750-1753). For Bourgelat, an animal
(such as the horse) should be studied using newly articulated principles of
natural history, mathematics, and statistics. For example, Bourgelat developed

How Veterinary Education Emerged from “Enlightenment” in France 89
Figure 3.1 The geometrical proportions of the horse.

Source: Claude Bourgelat, Elemens d’hippiatrique (Lyon: H. Declaustre and les freres
Duplain, 1750-1753), Vol. 1, 476.
the “hippometer,” an idealized set of measured proportions of the horse’s body

based on the length of its head. The ideal horse should comply with these
geometrical proportions (Fig. 3.1). This type of mechanistic explanation of the
animal body was new, and it fit well within the methods and ideals of the
French enlightenment. Bourgelat was influential: he had the ear of the king and
he corresponded with the celebrated thinkers of his time, including Voltaire
and Frederick the Great, King of Prussia. Moreover, Bourgelat contributed
235 chapters on horses, horsemanship, and animal diseases to the most influen
tial contemporary collection of natural history knowledge: Denis Diderot and
Jean d’Alembert’s Encyclopedie ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des
arts et des metiers [Encyclopedia, or Classified Dictionary of Sciences, Arts,
and Trades, 1751-1772]. This 28-volume compendium of knowledge covered
the whole world in a systematic way, and historians characterize it as the
classic enlightenment text. Bourgelat was asked to write the veterinary chap
ters because he was a friend of d’Alembert and considered France’s greatest
enlightenment thinker on the subject of domesticated animals. The content and
style of Bourgelat’s contributions were in line with the free spirit of the
enlightened philosophers: he based his work on the study of nature while
ignoring most of the older literature. His focus was on preserving the health of
animals and improving them. His “hippometer” was meant to be used, to
accumulate the evidence of observations on animals and analyze its

contributions to human social goals. Bourgelat’s “hippometer,” and his

resulting ideas, owed its authority to nature, not to the writings of the
ancient philosophers.
Another way to accumulate observations about animal bodies was to collect
them, and this was a major goal of the veterinary school established at Alfort in
1765. The school owned one of the largest natural history collections in
France, considered by some to be superior to that of the Jardin du Roi (the
royal collection). This collection included body parts, organs, and whole
animals - including anatomist Henri Fragonard’s masterpiece Le Chevalier
(also known as “The Flayed Rider”), a boy riding a galloping horse, with the
skins removed and the muscles, nerves, and vessels exquisitely preserved.
Collectors at the school acquired everything from a llama to a dolphin
(acquired by students on a collecting trip to the coast), filling out a collection
meant to encompass representatives of all known animal types on earth. Ecole
Veterinaire d’Alfort’s anatomical collection and cabinet of curiosities were
famous in its own time (and still today). Collecting specimens was a founda
tion of natural history and natural philosophy, the central enlightenment-era
studies of life on earth. At Alfort, the collection was the basis for veterinary
students’ study of comparative anatomy, not just for horses but also cattle,
sheep, pigs, goats, and others. Reflecting Bourgelat’s military expertise and
interests, horses dominated the students’ education at Lyon and Alfort; but the
king’s treasurer also expected that students be trained in controlling economic
ally devastating livestock diseases (especially a concern in the agricultural
areas around Lyon). Both schools combined natural history with the more
practical training in horse husbandry and livestock diseases. The example of
Alfort, especially, demonstrates that early French veterinary education grew in
part out of Enlightenment philosophy and shared its goal of generating cosmo
politan knowledge about animals from around the world - not just the local
domesticated animals
The mission of veterinary schools changed, however, becoming more atten
tive to the practical problems of epizootics and keeping military animals
healthy. Lyon and Alfort had begun as institutions generating knowledge
about all life on earth (natural history) as well as providing medical care for
domesticated animals; indeed, these two intellectual goals were seen as inter
linked. However, after 1789, government officials separated natural history
(and human medical) education from that of veterinary students. Gone were
the days of learning natural history broadly and traveling to the French coast to
collect aquatic animals for the collection. After the French Revolution, officials
of the new government split up Alfort’s collection, leaving only the specimens
from cows, horses, and other domestic animals. Now, the veterinary schools’
mission would focus on domestic animal health to increase the nation’s wealth.
By 1800, this shift to a narrower, economic focus allied veterinary education

Competing for a Position in the Veterinary Marketplace 91
more firmly with agriculture and another philosophical trend during the
enlightenment: the pragmatism of the physiocrats.
Enlightenment Pragmatism: The Economic Value of Animals

Physiocrats believed that a strong nation depended primarily on its agricultural
wealth. Physiocracy developed within the setting of the mainly rural societies
of eighteenth-century Europe and was influenced by the world’s largest eco
nomic system, namely, that of China. Most physiocrats believed that govern
ment policy should not interfere with natural economic laws, and that land and
agrarian labor were the sources of all wealth. Similar to Chinese agrarian
politics, the nation’s wealth derived from the land development and (high)
prices for agricultural products. The most important early representative of this
group was Frangois Quesnay (1694-1774). He advocated productive work as
the only true source of value and wealth for the state, in contrast to mercantil
ism in which merchants traded goods produced by others and the value was
determined at the market. In order to achieve national wealth and planning of
long-term economic growth, rulers and their administrators needed statistical
data on trade, population, and agricultural output (especially for livestock and
horses). These quantitative data on a national level facilitated the growing
power of centralized state control from the 1760s onward.
The rise of rational planning principles and the physiocrat economy with its
emphasis on the value of agriculture drew more attention to livestock produc
tion, farmers, and veterinary medicine. Veterinary education should be
oriented toward the needs of the nation’s farmers and livestock raisers, a belief
only underscored by repeated, long-lasting outbreaks of rinderpest in cattle
(Chapter 2), which severely decreased agricultural growth. Next to healthy
livestock, the nation demanded equine medicine as the number of horses - the
motors of society and the army - increased during the eighteenth and nine
teenth centuries. The final reason for veterinary schools to shift toward a more
practical education for their students was the cut-throat competition they faced
upon graduation. What was the status quo of professionals active as animal
healers at the time of the foundation of the first French veterinary school?
Competing for a Position in the Veterinary Marketplace
Every Man His Own Veterinarian

Around the world at this time, animal owners were the foundation of the
veterinary marketplace: they often treated their own animals, and they decided
when to call in a healer. Europe was no exception. Literate animal owners got
significant help from the popular literature published cheaply in the eighteenth

century. Numerous booklets of recipes for ointments, drenches, and other

treatments circulated, particularly in the countryside. Anyone could write (or
reproduce) booklets, such as the long-lived collection of horse remedies
written by the “uneducated” Meister Albrant. The most well-known examples
are booklets called Every Man His Own Farrier, published in French, Italian,
German, English, Dutch, and other languages. On the frontispiece typically, a
drawing of a horse is presented in the center, surrounded by lines, figures, or
letters illustrating and describing the locations of all known diseases, and -
often - with recommended locations to apply bloodletting. Another common
image is a drawing that includes the names of multiple defects and diseases
illustrated on the body of one horse (Defauts du cheval, French; Fehlerpferd,
German; “Defective” horse, English) (Fig. 3.2). Such images were mostly
copied from earlier comprehensive books on hippology (knowledge about
horses). The figures or letters correspond with short descriptions of the disease
in the booklet with recommended remedies and recipes. Similar booklets were
published on diseases in cattle as well.
Travel journals, guild regulations, annals, feudal accounts, almanacs, and
recipe books derived from popular books also provide information on who
practiced animal health care and healing and how. These sources also give an
impression of known infectious diseases such as cattle plague, sheep pox,
Figure 3.2 Image of the “defective” horse.

Source: L.W.F. van Oebschelwitz, De Nederlandsche stalmeester (‘s Gravenhage:
Van Kleef, 1763) 91, plate II.

anthrax, vermin, rabies, and glanders, and mention disorders like laminitis
(inflammation inside the hoof ), numbness, blood clotting, tumors, sprains, and
lameness. Smiths were occupied with horseshoeing, but later broadened their
surgical skills with bloodletting, firing, castrating, and tail docking. Next to
administering purgatives they treated illnesses such as the glanders, the botts (a
parasite), or lameness. Next to bloodletting, standard treatments were attaching
a seton, Seton (French), Haarseil (German), that is, making two incisions in
the skin using a long needle and putting a cord of hair under the skin to
stimulate bad humors to discharge from the body together with pus; root
sticking, that is, sticking a part of hellebores root under the skin of the ear or
tail; scarification or cauterization of the skin around chronically diseased joints
and subsequent anointing with irritating turpentine, mustard, and the like to
provoke healing. Trepanation was a specialized skill consisting of drilling a
hole into the bones of the skull to relieve pressure (Fig. 3.3). A very crude
Figure 3.3 Plate illustrating trepanation of the sinus maxillaris, which became
a regular surgery in the eighteenth century.
Source: L.W.F. van Oebschelwitz, De Nederlandsche stalmeester (‘s Gravenhage:
Van Kleef, 1763) 238, plate VI.

surgery known since antiquity until well into the nineteenth century was the
removal or cauterization of the membrane under the tongue, the lyssa, to
prevent or treat rabies in dogs.
Next to the application of opium, mandrake, and other materia medica, and
the Islamic influence from the thirteenth century, cauterization became
common in surgery. Hot burning irons with their dry and hot fire were used
to burn and dry out cold and wet diseases such as abscesses, ulcers, and spavin
exostoses. To keep horses calm during simple operations, an assistant or
groom used a twister or twitch on the upper lip. The Hippocratic idea that
prevention was better than treatment remained very important in the early
modern period, for humans but also for animals. General advice to maintain
animal health included not overworking them and providing a warm and dry
place to sleep, clean water, and appropriate feed for each season. However,
magic and superstition with centuries-old incantations, prayers, and blessings
survived antiquity and was adjusted after Christianization to remain during the
early modern era.
To us today, these remedies and practices seem barbaric, with emphasis on
bleeding, burning, and purging sick animals. However, these were the treat
ments most familiar to animal owners and to people who earned money for
treating animals. These treatments were similar to the standard of care used in
human medicine. As we saw in earlier chapters, these treatments also corres
ponded to theories of disease causation, such as the humoral theory. Like his
medical counterpart, a professional animal healer was expected to do some
thing - the more active or dramatic, the better, so that the animal’s owner knew
they getting their money’s worth. Veterinarians who had graduated from the
new veterinary schools at the end of the 1700s competed in this marketplace
already crowded with many other manipulators of animals’ bodies. Later
generations of graduate veterinarians condescendingly looked down upon their
unqualified rivals; but until the late 1800s, they still had to compete with those
other healers. Indeed, European veterinarians built their professional roles on
the foundations of several earlier occupations in the animal healing market
place, most notably the marshals and shoeing-smiths.
Shoeing-Smiths and Other Proto-veterinarians

Folk veterinary medicine was performed not only by animal owners, herdsmen
and shepherds but also by an array of people offering their services on the
market for animal healing. Similar to human medicine, a professional hier
archy existed within animal healers. As an animal owner, one could choose
between generalists and craftspeople who specialized in a particular area.
These included shoeing-smiths, castrators, tail-dockers, obstetricians, horse-
and cow-leeches, medicine-mixers, flayers, executioners, and others. Wealthy

owners with valuable animals often employed a full-time caregiver for their
animals (especially horses). In Europe, this caregiver was called a marshal,
marechal/marechaux, or Marschalk (the word originates from the Gallic
marahskalks, meaning horse and servant). The horse marshal was the first-
line healer, although he could call in a specialist if necessary. The status of
marshal had increased during the late Middle Ages: if an animal was ill, the
marshal made the diagnosis, while the practical work was left to the specialist,
groom, or shoeing-smith. Some marshals obtained a military rank; a few even
rose to the select (often royally appointed) post of equerry (equier), at the very
top of the hierarchy. Historians have pointed to the role of horse marshal as a
direct precedent for the role of veterinarian in Europe, along with the farrier or
shoeing-smith, an occupation with a long history (see Chapter 2). Shoeing-
smiths were important members of each local community in many parts of the
world (Fig. 3.4).
After horseshoeing’s introduction to Europe, the two roles of horse marshal
and shoeing-smith slowly merged into one occupation: the farrier (English),
marechaux-ferrant (French), or Hufschmiede (German). Farriers were usually
tradespeople who learned their craft through an apprenticeship and practiced
on a gentleman’s estate, in a village or town, or in the military cavalry (as the
marshal had). Their practical knowledge was supplemented by popular ver
nacular literature such as printed booklets, manuals, and almanacs (also avail
able to animal owners). The term “farrier” originated from the Latin ferrarius,
meaning “of iron,” and farriers were an organized profession. As early as 1356,
the mayor of London requested that farriers within a seven-mile radius of
London should establish a guild to regulate their trade and improve their
practices. Guild control of the animal healing marketplace emerged slowly in
England, however. The most powerful guild, the Worshipful Company of
Farriers, was not granted a charter until 1674. In Germany, the guild system
was common for many occupations, including the Hufschmiede. Guild rules
protected the farriers and their customers from poor workmanship, overchar
ging, and loss of employment.
Another very important precursor to the role of professional veterinarian in
Europe was the albeytare in Spain. As we have seen, this word derives from
Arabic and reflects the key importance of the Islamic tradition of animal
healing in Spain. Indeed, Islamic knowledge’s influence remained consider
able long after 1492, and this knowledge formed the basis for professional
equine medical guilds in Spain. Like physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries,
albeytares had to pass an official state examination. This examination, over
seen by the Tribunal del Protoalbeyterato, was established in 1500 and
remained active well into the nineteenth century. In preparation for this
examination, students used the Libro de Albeyteria from Francisco de la
Reyna (c. 1520-1583) as the textbook. Once a student passed the examination

Figure 3.4 Shoeing-smith, Korea, eighteenth century. Painting by Cho

Yong-Seok (1686-1761).
Courtesy: Prof. Myung-Sun Chun, College of Veterinary Medicine, Seoul National
University, Korea. National Museum of Korea, Seoul, reg. no.: Dogwon-2307.

Justifying Veterinary Education: Military Horses and Warfare 97
(after a period of study and apprenticeship), they had the right to the title of
albeytare or horse-doctor and could practice their profession. The albeytares
were known and admired throughout Europe. For example, in 1563 the
German politician and businessman Markus Fugger traveled to Spain with
his marshal, a man named Seuter, to buy horses for his stud. Fugger was very
impressed by the Spanish horse farms and the fact that in Spain, horse-doctors
(albeytares) were practicing animal healing instead of shoeing-smiths. He
consulted albeytares to conduct examinations of his horses before he pur
chased them, as these horse-doctors were also specialists in buying and selling
horses.
Justifying Veterinary Education: Military Horses and Warfare

The development of surgical knowledge and practices was greatly stimulated
by warfare, with its horrific wounds to the bodies of soldiers and their animals.
In Europe, medieval surgeons occupied their own social niche: the “barber
surgeons,” whose hands-on work was disdained by the higher social orders
occupied by learned physicians. These surgeons did various operations: setting
bones, cauterizing wounds, extracting teeth, removing skin warts and tumors,
applying leeches to remove blood, and amputating limbs. For instance, a
remarkable archeological finding (the Netherlands, thirteenth century) shows
a broken and later-healed sheep bone fixed with a nail. During military actions,
their duties also included euthanizing soldiers and animals wounded too badly
to survive. Both animals and humans endured treatments we consider brutal
today. This included not only cauterization but also setting fractures and
conducting amputations without anesthesia. This led to the need for surgeons
to do their work quickly while their animal patients were restrained with ropes
and hobbles. As with the earlier surgical traditions discussed in Chapter 2,
surgical knowledge about humans influenced veterinary practices.
Aristocratic and Military Use of the Horse

Since domestication, horses have had great socioeconomic, military, cultural,
and recreational meaning for human society. This is reflected by the (esti
mated) tens of thousands of books and treatises that have been published about
horses. Topics include breeding, feed, care, healing, and specialized training
(such as dressage and equitation). A chronological analysis of these writings
clearly mirrors the different phases of professionalization of horse medicine.
Many old books about horses in veterinary library collections deal with
hippology. Within this theme, the art of horse riding represents a separate
subcategory. This is not surprising, given the fact that horse riding belonged to
aristocratic court culture and the appearance of power (hunting, tournaments,

splendor parades, marches, etc.). Until mechanization, horses were indispens

able in agriculture and transport. Of course, horses were essential in warfare as
cavalry mounts, beasts of burden, and sources of traction.
During the Roman and Byzantine eras, horses were increasingly specially
bred and trained to fulfill different tasks. This process continued in the ensuing
centuries, when horses represented an essential part of court culture and
military campaigns. The high social position of knights at estates and courts
required horses to carry them during hunting, hawking, jousts, parades, and
tournaments. On the battlefield, horses proved to be a most effective and
significant weapon of the cavalry. With their speed, swords, and lances,
mounted knights increased the military capabilities of an army significantly.
Knights needed more than one horse and, appropriate to their warrior status,
they rode stallions, not mares or geldings. A specific and expensive type of
horse (not a breed) a knight used in warfare or tournaments was the destrier.
These strong horses supported fully armored knights and were trained to
withstand the noise of combat and the shock of charges by other horses in
frontal collisions. However, for all other types of transportation, knights used
palfreys as ordinary riding horses. Palfreys were lighter than destriers and
trained for smooth gaits and endurance. Finally, knights owned sumpter
horses, mules, or donkeys. These beasts of burden were cheap but essential
for transporting equipment and armor. Obviously, these different types of
warhorses needed veterinary knowledge for successful breeding, feeding,
shoeing, and health care.
Between 1522 and 1648, Europe was the scene of religious wars with
battlefields everywhere as a result of conflicts between Protestants and
Catholics. The need for warhorses increased, as did the demand for profes
sionals to maintain their health, particularly since a well-trained military horse
cannot be quickly replaced. (The production and training of a horse requires at
least five or six years.) During the Middle Ages and early modern times,
European nations did not have standing armies. The commander was the
owner or assembler of the regiment, and the horses were privately owned.
Some regiments employed shoeing-smiths, saddle-makers, marechaux, and
sometimes knackers to care for horses. For soldiers in the mercenary armies,
war was a way to make money, but only if their horses remained healthy.
European armies were a melting pot of nationalities, and this was one way that
veterinary knowledge circulated. Horse owners and animal health practitioners
exchanged knowledge about horse diseases, injuries, and treatments, which is
reflected in the veterinary writings of those days.
Riding Schools
Within the tradition of Xenophon, many books were written on the art of
horsemanship. In his instruction for the horseman, Xenophon described the

Justifying Veterinary Education: Military Horses and Warfare 99
training of riding horses for military use. Translated into various languages,
this treatise was applied as standard for many centuries. In the sixteenth
century the number of books on horse riding increased, because the use of
new weapons (gunpowder, guns) required new riding styles and combat
tactics. Quick and dynamic maneuvers became very important in fights
between riders. Training was thus focused on various intricate turns and
half-turns of horse and rider, which required advanced training. These new
insights were taught to the aristocracy at riding schools that were established
in Europe, especially in Italy. The Naples riding school attained international
fame. The main representative of this school, Federico Grisone, described
the new training methods in his handbook Ordini di cavalcare (Venice,
1550). Via various translations, this new hippological knowledge spread to
other countries where stable masters, marechals, and riding masters gratefully
exploited it.
Foreign pupils who had stayed at the Naples riding school for a longer
period spread their knowledge on horsemanship further into Europe. A well-
known example is Antoine de Pluvinel. After his stay in Italy, he established
an Academie d’Equitation in Paris in 1594. Ingratiating himself with the
French court, Pluvinel won the position of equestrian tutor to the dauphin,
later King Louis XIII. From these lessons, Pluvinel wrote a beautifully illus
trated book: l’Instruction du roy, en I’exercice de monter a cheval (Paris,
1625). As French ambassador to the Netherlands, Pluvinel spread his methods
to the Dutch court and beyond with the military. In his Instruction, he called
for the establishment of royal academies where horsemanship and the art of
war were taught. With their combination of theory and practice, such royal
academies, which were effectively founded in France in the seventeenth
century, became excellent breeding grounds for the further development of
horsemanship (hippology) and equine medicine (hippiatry). They produced
several influential ecuyer (stable masters).
The first books on horsemanship published in England were Thomas
Blundeville’s The fower chiefest offices belonging to horsemanshippe (1565)
and John Astley’s The Art of Riding (1584). Examples of other famous
equerries who directed riding schools are Jacques de Solleysel, William
Cavendish, Frangois de la Gueriniere, and Gaspar de Saunier. De Solleysel
(1617-1680) was director of the Royal Academy in Paris. In 1664 he wrote Le
parfait mareschal (The perfect marshal), which became an international best
seller with 33 editions. Cavendish (1592-1676), duke of Newcastle, was the
husband of the philosopher and poet Margaret Cavendish. This monarchist
couple was exiled from England and lived in Paris and Antwerp (Belgium).
Inspired by de Solleysel, Cavendish began research in horsemanship and
started his own riding school in Antwerp. His book, New method for horse
dressage, was published in 1658. The book is famous because of its wonderful
42 illustrations. These copper engravings in Baroque style were made by

Abraham van Diepenbeke, the horse painter in the atelier of famous artist Peter
Paul Rubens.
De la Gueriniere (1688-1751) was royal stable master in France and is
considered the founder of modern horse riding. His dressage methods, of
which the tradition is continued in the Spanish Riding School for Lipizzaner
horses in Vienna today, were outlined in his Ecole de cavalerie (Paris, 1733).
After a career in France, Gaspar de Saunier (1663-1748) became riding master
at the universities of Utrecht and Leiden (the Netherlands). In Leiden he
worked on his book La parfait connaissance des chevaux, which was pub
lished in The Hague in 1734. The first part covers diseases and therapy, and the
second part deals with horse anatomy. In 1756 he published l’Art de la
cavalerie, in which different chapters were dedicated to warfare training. For
a long time, the riding schools remained centers for the sophisticated equitation
required by the military and prized by the aristocracy. Next to the nobility, the
well-to-do-class started recreational horse riding in the eighteenth century.
Horse riding no longer remained reserved only for gentlemen; ladies riding
sidesaddle became a common phenomenon in riding centers. The same period
witnessed the rise of horse and trotting races, which formed a further stimulus
for the development of equine medicine.
Justifying Veterinary Education: The Great Animal

Plagues, Revisited
Along with the needs of the military for healthy horses, governments’ other
urgent concerns about the health of cattle and other food-producing animals
only increased during the 1700s and early 1800s. This reflected a surge in the
spread of animal diseases, due to accelerating transnational trade of animals
and animal products. The most destructive diseases were rinderpest, foot and
mouth disease, and contagious pleuropneumonia in cattle; vesicular diseases
and sheep pox; and anthrax. Of course, glanders in horse populations (espe
cially in armies) continued to be a major problem; but the economic impact of
food-animal diseases increasingly stimulated regional national governments to
seek solutions. These solutions, however, did not obviously point to the
establishment of formal veterinary training. The most effective means of
disease control were bureaucratic, involving the police powers of the govern
ments. Quarantines, the control of animal movements and trade in animal
products, and slaughter of sick and exposed animals remained the most
important methods of disease prevention and control.
Rinderpest, which spread from its reputed homelands in the Russian empire
to Europe and beyond, is an excellent example. Major outbreaks of rinderpest
hit Europe in the 1710s, 1740s, and 1760s-1780s. City-state and national
government officials had sophisticated knowledge about these waves of the

Justifying Veterinary Education: Great Animal Plagues, Revisited 101
disease, which they accurately traced along the trade routes. Differing from
country to country, the need to control rinderpest in order to secure the supply
of food of animal origin represented potentially important reasons to establish
institutes for formal veterinary education. Although livestock diseases with
their disastrous effects on the animal economy were explicitly mentioned in
the founding charters, this target often faded into the background once the
early schools were established.
There was rhetorical value inherent in mentioning the specter of the great
epizootics, such as rinderpest, as a reason for monarchs and private benefactors
to fund formal veterinary schools. School officials certainly sounded like they
were concerned about this important problem. However, a close look at the
activities of the early European veterinary schools shows that they were focused
on the treatment of valuable horses. Little attention was paid to studying
diseases of food-producing animals (such as rinderpest). Likewise, in the
veterinary historiography, later historians who casually cited the great livestock
epizootics as the only (or major) reason for establishing veterinary educational
institutions often overestimated its actual importance. The promise of trained
veterinarians’ ability to control the eighteenth-century outbreaks of rinderpest
was a hopeful idea at best because they had no tools (vaccines, etc.) besides
quarantines. As a final point, we note that most schools were established after
the third wave of European rinderpest outbreaks (1768-1786) had ended.
As we will see, even the earliest French schools (established during the third
wave of rinderpest) were mainly concerned with injuries and diseases of
horses. This fact disappointed many students, particularly those who had been
sent by other nations to study veterinary medicine in the service of disease
control. As in the French schools, students complained about the lack of
attention to nonequine epizootics at the early German schools. Equine medi
cine for horse breeding for economic and military purposes was the main focus
of curricula for the early schools. This probably reflected the fact that the
schools’ founders themselves were most interested in horses (especially for the
military) and that horses were the most valuable of all the domesticated
animals. For example, in 1821 when the Utrecht veterinary school opened its
doors, compare the average value for a horse (115 guilders) to that of a milk
cow (37 guilders), a pig (25), and a sheep (5). To protect their valuable
investment, horse owners would be more likely to pay for veterinary care.
Cattle, although less valuable individually than horses, were subjects of what
we today would call a type of “herd health” or “veterinary preventive medi
cine.” In large numbers, cattle obviously represented a notable percentage of
the national wealth. But bureaucratic functionaries - not country veterinarians -
usually controlled the few tools available against cattle epizootics. As we will
see, these practical considerations eventually slanted the training available at
formal veterinary schools toward equine medicine, surgery, and farriery.

The high value of horses was only one of the factors that shaped the
development of formal veterinary educational institutions. These schools
developed within particular contexts, especially the learned and philosophical
developments of the “enlightenment” period. The earliest schools reflected
their founders’ interests in, and the patronage of, the military, which was
focused on cavalry horses. The veterinary marketplace, which included a
variety of healers, shoeing-smiths, and horse marshals, also influenced formal
veterinary training. To demonstrate how this system of contemporary veterin
ary education developed, we next make a detailed examination of the founding
of the first two schools, at Lyon and Alfort in France.
Figure 3.5 The competitors: above, Claude Bourgelat (1712-1779); below,

Philippe Etienne Lafosse (1738-1820).
Source: stipple engraving by Frangois Pigeot, Courtesy: Wellcome Library London
Digital Image no. 1298i. Philippe Etienne Lafosse (1738-1820). Source: Line
engraving by Michel after Harguinier, Courtesy: Wellcome Library London Digital
Image no. 5197i.

Establishment and Spread of Veterinary Schools 103
Figure 3.5 (cont.)
Establishment and Spread of Veterinary Schools
1762: Lyon, France

The story begins in the city of Lyon, 470 kilometers south of Paris, which was
a center for economics (banking) and silk production. Lyon was not an
obvious choice for locating a veterinary school, but it was the home of the
Royal Academy of Equitation and its director, Claude Bourgelat (whom we
met earlier in this chapter) (Fig. 3.5). Bourgelat envisioned a new kind of
institution, a college for veterinary education based on the model of the
Academy of Equitation, but he could not make his vision a reality without
Henri-Leonard Bertin. Berlin was King Louis XV’s Controller General of
Finances and Secretary of State for Agriculture - he controlled the money

necessary for the new school. How Bourgelat and Bertin shaped this veterinary
school and defended it against its competitors is an interesting story.
Although trained as a lawyer, Bourgelat was far more interested in equita
tion and the proper care of horses. Besides directing the riding school,
Bourgelat began studying equine anatomy and hippiatry. Between 1750 and
1753, Bourgelat published the three volumes of his Elemens d’hippiatrique,
which he wrote in the form of questions from a young apprentice and answers
given by an experienced master. With this innovative style, Bourgelat tested
some of his own educational ideas and made these books particularly useful as
texts for students. The content was innovative. Bourgelat was an educated
rationalist, and he stressed observation and experiment while expressing doubt
about traditional therapies such as bloodletting (still very popular at the time).
His publications and his social connections helped Bourgelat to become a
corresponding member of the French Academy of Sciences and a contributor
to Diderot and Alembert’s Encyclopedie, which made him a member of the
highest ranks of the French intelligentsia.
Bourgelat used his reputation, broad social network, and communication
skills to sell the idea of an ecole veterinaire in Lyon to Henri-Leonard Bertin.
Along with being head of the French treasury, Bertin oversaw an agricultural
reform program established in 1761 that was primarily aimed at controlling
rinderpest, and he envisioned the new school as a center for education and
research about agricultural diseases. In contrast, Bourgelat’s vision focused
entirely on horses: he planned a school based on horse husbandry and farriery,
with theoretical lectures on medical subjects given by professors from the
medical school. Bertin told Bourgelat that the French government would pay
to establish a school if it included investigations into the diseases of cattle and
other livestock. Seizing his opportunity to gain royal patronage for the school,
Bourgelat agreed (in principle). In this way, the rhetorical reasons for estab
lishing the Lyon school fit within the scope of the physiocratic movement to
improve livestock production, as well as within the enlightenment approach to
solving larger societal problems (protecting the food supply and the animal
economy). Bourgelat’s ecole veterinaire opened its doors on January 1, 1762,
in a former tavern building. (Perhaps this explains veterinary students’ long
standing enthusiasm for social activities.)
The Lyon veterinary educational model had a few similarities and some
important differences with that of contemporary medical education (for phys
icians and surgeons). As with physicians’ formal medical education, the
students were expected to memorize and be able to recite the lectures.
Bourgelat instructed students to write down every word, exactly as he had
dictated. For this purpose, Bourgelat later wrote Elemens de l’art veterinaire,
zootomie ou anatomie comparee, a 1’usage des eleves des ecoles veterinaires,
a textbook that was published in Paris (1766-1769). Like their medical
counterparts, Bourgelat’s veterinary students began with anatomy. Here the

differences become apparent: veterinary students were destined to combine the

traditional roles of physician and surgeon, by both understanding the theory
and carrying out the practices. Like traditional country physicians, veterinar
ians could expect to see a wide variety of medical and surgical problems, but in
multiple species and working with their boots in the mud of the barnyard.
Veterinary students had much more access to bodies for dissection and clinical
material than their medical counterparts. In Bourgelat’s school, veterinary
students received an admirably hands-on education. Following their profes
sors’ theoretical lectures, students moved on to demonstrations and practical
training on dissections, botany, horseshoeing, and preparing medicines. Under
supervision of their teachers, students carried out consultations and cared for
hospitalized animals. They were housed internally in the school, had to wear
uniforms, and had regular clean-up duties - which were part of Bourgelat’s
intent to teach them “proper” professional behavior. In 1777, Bourgelat pub
lished a detailed set of instructions for how to run a veterinary school,
Regiemens pour les Ecoles Royales Veterinaires de France (Rules for the
French Royal Veterinary Schools). The procedures and curriculum of the
Lyon veterinary school became a model for similar schools that were estab
lished around Europe and in other nations during the following decades.
Bourgelat had initially considered a background in human medicine as ideal
for potential veterinary students. However, he soon downgraded this demand,
in large part because it greatly limited the pool of students. In most areas,
physicians earned more money than veterinarians did; why would a physician
or surgeon spend time and money to become a lower-paid veterinarian? Most
young men interested in becoming veterinarians were primarily interested in
animals, and many had grown up in families of farriers, horsemen, or
livestock owners. Bourgelat considered the traditional practices of farriers
and shoeing-smiths that were educated by experience and long family trad
itions to be backward and inefficient. But he quickly realized his school
would fail if he could not attract the children of the common folk, the sons
of honest farmers or farriers of the “better” type (in other words, able to read
and write). Bertin, the French agricultural minister, agreed with Bourgelat on
this point, since his major interests lay with educating veterinarians who
would work with France’s large agricultural populations of livestock (mainly
cattle and sheep). Bourgelat compromised by admitting farriers’ and farmers’
sons, and then educating them as rigorously as possible in theory and
philosophy as well as hands-on practice. In 1765, Bourgelat established a
second veterinary school, based on the Lyon model, just outside Paris: the
ecole veterinaire d’Alfort. Bourgelat then asked for, and obtained, the title
“Inspector-general” of all veterinary education in France. This title
empowered Bourgelat to make his veterinary school model the only one
approved by the French government. However, Bourgelat immediately
encountered opposition to his plans.

There were other successful models of veterinary education in France and

other European countries. Compared to Bourgelat’s school, most of them were
based less on theory and more on practical skills. Bourgelat’s model broke
with traditional farriery and with shoeing-smiths’ guilds to create a new kind of
practitioner of a specialized profession. This resulted in a clash between social
classes and also between the long hippiatric traditions and the newer ways of
developing veterinary knowledge. Bourgelat was confronted with fierce criti
cism, particularly from his most important opponent, farrier Philippe Etienne
Lafosse (1738-1820), heir of an old and well-respected family of Parisian
marechaux (horse marshals) (Fig. 3.5). This meant the onset of a long-lasting
debate about the monopoly of equine medicine between farriers and equerries,
in which Bourgelat represented the small upper-class group of equerries and
Lafosse the much larger (and lower in the class structure) guilds of shoeing-
smiths.
Philippe Etienne Lafosse learned horseshoeing in the blacksmith shop of his
father, Etienne Guillaume, who was also a well-known horse anatomist.
Philipp Etienne was not merely a crude apprenticed horseshoer, however; he
was also a learned man. He studied human and animal anatomy by visiting
slaughterhouses and observing dissections in hospitals. Furthermore, he
followed advanced studies at the Academy of Sciences, investigated anthrax,
and was educated in the art of horse riding. He joined the army as a horse
doctor in 1758. There he wrote a treatise on glanders (1761) and recommended
measures to control this highly contagious scourge of military horses. After the
French defeat in the Seven Years’ War, Philipp Etienne Lafosse joined the
medical faculty of the Paris university. In 1764 the Minister of Foreign Affairs
and War asked his father, Etienne Guillaume Lafosse, to draw up an instruc
tion manual for an “Ecole militaire d’hippiatrie pour les marechaux des
regiments de cavalerie.” This school for shoeing-smiths would support the
military and focus on cavalry horses. One year later, the senior Lafosse died.
Philipp Etienne Lafosse then attempted, but failed, to get an appointment as an
instructor at the Lyon and Alfort veterinary schools. This made him an enemy
of Bourgelat.
Instead, Philipp Etienne Lafosse started his own public courses in hippiatry
for interested individuals in 1767, and this sparked a debate about the social
attributes and purposes of veterinary education. Lafosse believed veterinary
education should grow out of the farrier tradition, focus on horses, and
primarily support the military. Bertin disagreed and opposed Lafosse’s type
of veterinary school. Bourgelat, eager to stifle a rival, protested that Lafosse’s
school was merely a type of lower-class trade school entirely lacking in the
newer philosophical approaches. By taking Bourgelat’s side, Bertin ensured
that the French style of veterinary education did not grow primarily out of
farriers’ guilds, with their lower-class origins and narrow focus on horses.

Under political pressure, Lafosse had to close his public school in 1770. After
that, he was only able to provide private lectures.
Nevertheless, the courses of Lafosse attracted many students, from Alfort as
well as from abroad; and his competition with Bourgelat eventually led to
formal national regulations about who could legally call himself a “veterinar
ian.” Lafosse may have bested his rival Bourgelat in attracting students, but he
was not able to obtain political support for veterinary training aimed at the
horse alone. The competition between Lafosse and Bourgelat was finally
settled by the king, who issued an official veterinary certificate (“Privilegies
du Roy en l’art veterinaire”) in December 1766 that could be attained only by
graduates of Bourgelat’s veterinary schools in Lyon and Alfort. This was the
first modern national regulation about who could be a professional veterinar
ian. This decision was crucial for the initiative to obtain a higher level of
education for professional animal healers beyond that of shoeing-smith or
farrier. It provided advantages for graduates of the approved veterinary
schools, thus encouraging students to attend them. It was an early example
of later regulations, in multiple countries, to elevate the graduates of certain
veterinary schools into a higher position in the veterinary marketplace. By
restricting the title of “graduate veterinarian” to the few graduates of approved
schools, governments essentially endorsed a particular model of veterinary
education and stimulated students to choose it above the older apprenticeship
and guild models.
However, the older models did not immediately decline; and Philippe
Etienne Lafosse’s continuing career is a good example. As a reaction to
Bourgelat’s trilogy Elemens d’Hippiatrique, Lafosse chose to spend his own
private fortune to compete in the same arena: he published Cours d’hippia-
trique, ou traite complet de la medecine des chaveaux in 1772. This unique
edition of 70,000 copies (bound in a very expensive folio) - in which Lafosse
tried to show his superiority over Bourgelat - is generally considered the most
prestigious, accurate, and complete study of equine anatomy; locomotion;
nervous, digestive, and reproductive systems; diseases; and advanced stable
management in the eighteenth century. Lafosse also did not hesitate to openly
criticize Bourgelat’s work in numerous footnotes. Reflecting his own higher
learning, Lafosse chose to structure his folio according to the anatomy and
physiology of organ systems, a format that is still used in veterinary textbooks
today. Bourgelat’s vision for veterinary education won the competition mainly
because Bourgelat was able to get royal patronage in return for a promise to
economize for the French government by saving the lives of its valuable
animals. But Lafosse’s influence, with its focus on practical equine medicine
and surgery, also continued to be important for two centuries or more.
Due to their rivalry, both Bourgelat and Lafosse have influenced and
stimulated the development of veterinary medicine on a national and

international level for the past 250 years. Some historians claim that veterinary
medicine would have developed faster (and could be more socially authorita
tive) if Bourgelat and Lafosse and their followers had cooperated with each
other. However, observed from a model of conflict - not uncommon within
science - one could also argue that the rivalry between these two giants in
veterinary history reflected social/cultural attitudes toward animals and gener
ated a broader scope for veterinary activities. It certainly stimulated several
influential early veterinary publications and trained the profession’s early
leaders to recognize different roles for veterinarians.
Bourgelat died in 1779, having won his battle with Lafosse; but at this time,
the political situation began to deteriorate for the French monarchy. Philibert
Chabert (1737-1814), a skilled farrier who became the horseshoeing instructor
at Alfort in 1766, succeeded Bourgelat as director of the Alfort school in 1779.
Like his predecessor, Chabert was committed to the broader philosophical
educational ideal; but he also recognized the increasing importance of supply
ing graduates who could truly solve practical problems. France sacrificed vast
numbers of horses to the Seven Years’ War; the royal stables alone lost 5,000
animals. Military veterinary medicine, mainly for horses, was an important
concern of the king, who regularly brought visiting heads of state to the Alfort
school, boasting that the school would advance French military power.
Farriers, and the art of horseshoeing, remained crucial to the cavalry, as did
equine health. Therefore, these remained core subjects for the curriculum at the
veterinary schools.
Of course, animal disease outbreaks (especially rinderpest in cattle) pro
vided the other justification for establishing veterinary schools. Bourgelat’s
school at Lyon had only been open for six months when it faced its first major
test: controlling an epizootic among horses and cattle in the Dauphine region in
July 1762. Accompanied by seven of his new students, Bourgelat was sent by
the government to investigate and control this epizootic with orders to save as
many animals as possible. Bourgelat was well aware of the fact that the
government expected the school to deliver practitioners who could control
epizootics, and fortunately, the mission was successful (in large part because
the disease was already declining when Bourgelat arrived). Bourgelat wrote a
positive report, including statistics, which was a useful boost for the young
veterinary school. This helped Bourgelat’s school succeed in gaining a royal
charter in 1764. Ten years later, the third wave of rinderpest hit France and
continued for two years. This time, however, Bourgelat and his successors in
Lyon and Alfort failed to control the disease. The timing was unfortunate for
French agriculture, which suffered during the late 1770s-1780s from heavy
taxation and several years of bad harvests. Food shortages, also due to a very
harsh winter, contributed to political unrest, which culminated in the French
Revolution in 1789. During a decade of violence and chaos, the veterinary

educational model established in the 1760s barely survived. Lafosse,

Bourgelat’s old enemy, took part in the Revolution, and other veterinarians’
fortunes rose or fell depending on their social connections and religious and
political beliefs. (For example, Johann Gottlieb Wollstein, who established the
school at Vienna, was imprisoned for his sympathy to French Protestant
revolutionaries in 1792.) Nonetheless, veterinary education on the model of
the Lyon and Alfort schools survived in France. The Lyon school, under
France’s next major leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, became first an “Imperial
School” and finally a “National School,” and this model of training profes
sional animal healers spread throughout Europe and beyond.
The Veterinary “Meme”: How French-Style Veterinary Education

Propagated around the World
We have detailed the development of the early French veterinary schools
because, as veterinary historian Robert Dunlop has argued, French-style insti
tutions became the dominant model of contemporary veterinary medicine that
spread around the world during the past two centuries. Dunlop proposed the
concept of the veterinary meme to explain the emulation of the Alfort and
Lyon educational model throughout Europe, Asia, the Americas, Australia,
and Africa. (See Appendix A for a list of selected schools.) The “meme”
concept, as described by geneticist Richard Dawkins, was defined and used by
Dunlop as a “cultural element” transmitted from one culture/place to another
by imitation or emulation, as if this cultural element was “infectious.”1 Of
course, this very general concept is not sufficient to explain the complexities of
each school’s foundation. In every region and nation, the types of animals
needing care, the local economy and culture, and the political complexities all
determined the shape of veterinary education. Some regions, especially those
in South and East Asia, already possessed vibrant animal healing professions
and educational traditions, so they did not need the European model. We also
do not believe that this model worked well in every place it was transplanted.
But as we will see, the French schools provided a basic plan for formal, state-
sanctioned veterinary education that spread to many other regions and nations
for over a century.
Our purpose is not to detail the founding and history of every veterinary
school; indeed, that would be impossible in a concise book. Moreover, we do
not have space to mention most of the schools established, after the “first” one
(even identifying the “first” school is difficult, since more than one school may
claim this honor in each nation). We list the first veterinary educational
1 Dunlop, R.H. (2004). ‘Bourgelat’s Vision for Veterinary Education and the Remarkable Spread
of the Veterinary Meme’. Journal of Veterinary Medical Education vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 310-322.

institution established in various selected nations during two centuries,

1762-1962, in Appendix A. Each nation has a proud history of veterinary
education that should be taught to young veterinarians, and this book is only a
general introduction to the linkages between these national, regional, and local
histories. We will use the “veterinary meme” idea here in the broadest sense: to
link the development of veterinary education institutions since the late 1700s
with the broader movements of animals, ideas, and practices around the world.
However, it is important to remember that the world’s veterinary schools were
not merely copies, or replications, of the French Enlightenment model. Each
school was established sui generis, in its own time and place, with its own
interpretation of the model or “meme” that included some aspects and rejected
others. Some common elements that linked these early schools included an
ambitious leader (well connected, energetic, and often with a cult of personal
ity); an emphasis on teaching anatomy, materia medica, and botany, along
with the practical arts of farriery, medicine, and surgery; royal, governmental,
or agricultural association sponsorship; and a mandate to address disease
outbreaks, military needs, and other concerns of the sponsors.
As the French style of veterinary education spread around the world, its
sphere lay in pastures and stalls, not so much in the broader study of the natural
world. Over time, the philosophical tradition of the European enlightenment
largely yielded to the demands of the local marketplace and other more
practical circumstances. The new schools were added to existing cultures of
animal healing. Therefore, veterinary schools and their graduates had to
compete in the existing marketplace for animal healing in their area. Without
regional or national funding, formal veterinary schools could not succeed for
very long. Students paid to attend veterinary school; but this was a problem if
the school could not guarantee that its graduates would get their money back
by earning a better living than their unschooled competitors. To solve this
problem, most European veterinary schools established in the late 1700s and
early 1800s (at least, those that survived more than a few years) relied on a
combination of government (and military) support, wealthy patrons, or busi
nesspeople who kept student fees low. Then they petitioned the government to
award special status to graduates of their schools. The form of the French
school that spread was not primarily the early form embedded in natural
history and the philosophical ideals of the physiocrats; rather, the later, more
practical “veterinary meme” disseminated beyond the borders of France.
French-style veterinary schools began to spread throughout neighboring
countries in Europe almost immediately, at first due to a small number of
individuals and eventually through a combination of power and imperialism,
economics and global trade, and the need to respond to pandemics of animal
diseases. Often, government or military leaders selected an outstanding indi
vidual and sent him to France to study, with the expectation that he would

return home and establish a veterinary school in the French style. An early
example was the Milanese Ludovico Scotti (1728-1806), a disciple of
Bourgelat in Lyon, who moved to Vienna to open a horse hospital named
k. k. Pferde-Curen- und Operationsschule (“Imperial-Royal School for the
Cure and Surgery of Horses,” 1767). In 1769, Turin was the first Italian city to
open a French-style veterinary school. Its first director was surgeon Carlo
Giovanni Brugnoni (1741-1818), who studied in Lyon and Alfort between
1764 and 1768. Peter Hernquist (1726-1808), a student of Carl von Linne
(Linnaeus), professor in medicine and botany in Uppsala (Sweden), studied
both in Lyon (under Bourgelat) and in Paris (under Lafosse). After his return
home, he established a veterinary school in Skara in 1775, basing it on the
French model but also training its students to address the problems of livestock
in rural Sweden.
Danish medical student Peter Christian Abildgaard (1740-1801) was sent to
Lyon by the Danish king with two other students to study veterinary medicine,
particularly to obtain knowledge to control rinderpest. He started there in
September 1763 but was very disappointed with the horse-focused three-year
curriculum. Abildgaard supplemented his Lyon studies with visits to locations
suffering outbreaks of rinderpest to see for himself which measures worked to
control the disease. Abildgaard returned from France and founded a private
veterinary school in Copenhagen (1773) that survived by becoming a state-
funded and royally chartered school in 1776. A final example is Johann
Gottlieb Wolstein (1738-1820), a German military surgeon selected by offi
cials of the Austro-Hungarian empire, who attended both Bourgelat’s and
Lafosse’s competing veterinary schools and then traveled around Europe to
learn breeding techniques and medical treatments, and to observe how other
nations responded to epizootics - all at the government’s expense. Wolstein
returned to Vienna to establish a new veterinary school, k. k. Thierspital
(“Imperial-Royal Animal Hospital,” 1777) and also assisted in planning the
Hungarian school established at Budapest in 1787.
As historian Martin Brumme has shown, the main motives for founding the
early veterinary schools in the Germanic nation-states resulted from the con
cerns of the schools’ regional sponsors: the prestige, ambition, and social
status linked to maintaining a stylish court or a powerful standing army.
Landgraves and princes competed on a local or regional level. The first
German node of veterinary education, however, arose in a university. The
curator of Gottingen university sent one of his ambitious young lecturers,
Johann Christian Polycarp Erxleben (1744-1777), to study at the Lyon school
and travel in search of veterinary knowledge. Erxleben had medical training,
and he had also already authored a treatise on veterinary medicine and educa
tion (Betrachtung uber das Studium der Vieharzneykunde veterinary,
Gottingen, 1769). Besides his French studies, Erxleben traveled to the

Netherlands to observe a rinderpest outbreak. He returned to Gottingen, where

he was successful in obtaining a professorship in veterinary medicine in
1771 with ambitious plans to create a veterinary school. Unfortunately, he
died young in 1776, and his Tierarzt institute was closed. In 1778 his school
moved to Hannover. Erxleben is considered the founder of the scientific
education of veterinarians in Germany. Other German towns where veterinary
education was established included: Dresden (1774), Giessen (1777),
Hannover (1778), Freiburg (1783), Karlsruhe (1784), Marburg (1789), Berlin
(1790), Munich (1790), Wurzburg (1791), Schwerin (1812), Jena (1816), and
Stuttgart (1821). However, only five of these schools survived, reflecting the
difficult start of many veterinary schools during these initial decades. Several
authors published literature about the goals, contents, and types of veterinary
education. Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), brother of the explorer and
natural philosopher Alexander von Humboldt, was perhaps the most well
known. This German language scholar, philosopher, diplomat, and educational
reformer strongly advocated veterinary education and the incorporation of
veterinary schools within university faculties. However, other writers found
this too ambitious for such a modest field, instead recommending smaller
private schools.
Other European nations, such as Spain, Portugal, Finland, and England, sent
young men to France to study at the French schools, return home, and establish
new institutions. Examples are Bernardo Rodriguez (1749-1819), who studied
in Alfort and founded the veterinary school (under military control) in Madrid
in 1793. Carvalho Villa and Antonio Filipe Soares studied in Alfort in the
1820s at the expense of the Portuguese government. They became professors
of the Escola Militar Veterinaria established in Lisbon in 1830. Gabriel
Bonsdorff (1762-1831), a Finnish physician and biologist, was sent to
Hernquist and Abildgaard, both graduates from the French schools, to learn
veterinary medicine. Upon his return in 1786 he was appointed professor in
this field at the University of Turku. In these direct and indirect ways, the
schools in Lyon and Alfort became a model for about 30 veterinary schools
founded in Europe during the period from 1765 to the 1820s.
Imagine that you were one of these students, selected to travel, learn, and
establish this new “veterinary meme” in your own country. You perhaps
already had some medical education, which usually meant a few months (up
to two years) of formal schooling. You probably were already interested in
natural history and animals and had experience with livestock or military
cavalry training. Perhaps you had even published a treatise or book on animal
care and healing or horsemanship. You needed a keen intellect, good connec
tions at home, and sponsorship to pay for your travels. In addition, you needed
to be young, healthy, and willing to live in foreign countries and bear the
stresses of traveling. No matter your native language, you needed to be fluent

in French, and - most important of all - energetic and full of ambition.

Knowing that you were expected to return home and start your own veterinary
school, not only did you work hard to learn the basic scientific information, but
you also paid attention to how the school was organized, its buildings, its
faculty, and its financing. All this knowledge was essential to success in
establishing a new school. Consider the example of the Danish student, Peter
Christian Abildgaard: he read 7 languages, owned more than 2,000 books,
revolutionized the art of horseshoeing in Denmark, and successfully controlled
rinderpest outbreaks. After hearing about Edward Jenner’s discovery that
inoculation with cowpox protected people against smallpox, Abildgaard
ordered the vaccine from England and conducted the first human vaccination
trials in Denmark. Abildgaard was truly extraordinary, and not all students
could boast of so many accomplishments. But each student went to France
with a mission to absorb as much knowledge from the French style of
veterinary education as possible, and to fulfill the confidence placed in him
by his sponsors at home.
Governments were not the only sponsors for veterinary students; in many
countries, local or regional agricultural societies were established between
1750 and 1800. These societies’ membership consisted of wealthy gentlemen
and farmers who were very interested in veterinary medicine and scientific
agriculture. Some of these societies sponsored promising students who were
sent to veterinary schools abroad, then expected to return home and teach or
practice for some years in a certain district. Some recruited veterinarians from
France. In Britain, for instance, the Odiham Agricultural Society held a
meeting in 1785 at which it resolved to help elevate the education of farriers
according to “rational” scientific ideas. Six years later this appeal, which was
supported by the aristocratic horse racing fraternity and the leading physician
John Hunter (1728-1793), resulted in the founding of the Veterinary College
in London. Hunter favored comparative human and animal medicine, believ
ing that veterinary and medical students should learn from both disciplines.
(A few years earlier, Hunter had sent the young field surgeon William
Moorcroft [1767-1825] to Lyon to study veterinary medicine. Moorcroft
arrived in France in the revolutionary year of 1789 and became the first
Englishman to qualify as a veterinary surgeon; we will discuss his subsequent
career in British India later in this chapter.)
The history of the London Veterinary College illustrates some of the
obstacles faced by early proponents of veterinary education, as well as the
ongoing tension between the goals of controlling livestock epizootics and
maintaining healthy military horses. This Veterinary College’s first director
was Frenchman Charles Benoit Vial de St. Bel (1753-1793), who had gradu
ated from the Lyon veterinary school. After his graduation, he became associ
ate professor at Alfort. However, soon he got into an argument with Bourgelat

(who considered him incompetent and arrogant, although the feeling was
probably mutual). St. Bel then worked as a professor at the university of
Montpellier. After the French revolution began, he fled into exile in London.
There he helped to plan and establish what became the Royal Veterinary
College, which opened its doors in February 1791. As director, St. Bel
instituted the French model: a three-year curriculum, beginning with anatomy
and general sciences, and continuing with lectures, demonstrations, and prac
tical courses for students in medicine, surgery, and farriery. St. Bel, a keen
anatomist, dissected hundreds of animals. Unfortunately, from one of these
dissections he caught glanders, suffered terribly, and died in August 1793 at a
young age. The death-mask of his face showed the horrible disfigurement from
this feared zoonotic disease.
St. Bel’s tragic death was only the first in a succession of misfortunes for the
young veterinary profession in England. St. Bel’s school had been supported
by the eminent physician and surgeon John Hunter (1728-1793), and after St.
Bel’s death Hunter made sure that the veterinary students could attend lectures
at nearby medical schools free of charge. Unfortunately, Hunter died just two
months after St. Bel. St. Bel was succeeded in 1794 by Edward Coleman
(1766-1839), a physician without veterinary training who had little interest in
the profession’s progress in England. Coleman discarded St. Bel’s rigorous
curriculum in favor of a short course of three months’ duration. Coleman
dropped the admissions requirements, which meant some students could not
read or write well. The level of students’ social class dropped, aligning
veterinary medicine less with medicine and more with the trades. In highly
class-conscious Britain, this effectively demoted veterinary medicine socially
as well as intellectually. Coleman believed that the ambitions of the London
Veterinary College should be limited to training military farriers, focusing on
the massive loss of horses in warfare. He was rewarded with the appointment
as Principal Veterinary Surgeon of the British Cavalry in 1796.
Until his death in 1839, Coleman’s school provided the bare minimum of
training for military farriers; and historians have argued that Coleman seriously
hindered the development of British veterinary medicine by abandoning the
French veterinary model. They have plenty of evidence from contemporary
observers. For example, Carl Heinrich Hertwig (1798-1881), professor at the
Veterinary School in Berlin, visited the London veterinary school in 1828.
Shocked by the lack of lecturers and discipline, Hertwig declared the educa
tional level to be deplorable. Coleman was apparently not concerned by
criticism; he viewed the school as a moneymaking proposition for himself
(each student paid tuition of 20 guineas per term). Coleman believed that
veterinarians needed little education and were best suited to be farriers. In
fact, this history of the London Veterinary College could be seen as a return to
the earlier battle between Claude Bourgelat and the Lafosse family in the

1760s. It reminds us that Bourgelat’s model, although we see it today as the

more progressive one, was not the inevitable winner of debates about
veterinary education.
One interesting parallel between veterinary education and the history of
(human) medicine is the importance of Scotland (the nation to the north of
England). In the late 1700s, the cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow were home to
important medical schools, such as the University of Edinburgh Medical
School (established 1726). Established during the Scottish Enlightenment, this
school was considered the best medical school in the English-speaking world.
Edinburgh attracted top students from many nations, creating a rich cosmopol
itan culture that would also benefit the development of veterinary medicine
there. William Dick (1793-1866), ambitious son of an Edinburgh farrier,
studied at Coleman’s London Veterinary College and also with the anatomist
John Barclay at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. Dick, aided by
the administrative talents of his sister, Mary Dick, won a grant from the
Highland Society and founded a veterinary school with high standards in
1823. Dick’s veterinary school collaborated closely with Edinburgh’s medical
establishment: students also attended lectures at the University of Edinburgh
medical school and the Royal College of Surgeons; and graduates were
examined by the city’s strict medical examiners. In this way, the Edinburgh
model remained independent from (and superior to) that of Coleman’s school
in London. Another veterinary school was founded in Glasgow in 1863 by
James McCall (1834-1915), a graduate of Dick’s college. These two schools
trained many of the founders of veterinary education in other Anglophone
countries, such as Australia, Canada, and the United States.
Veterinary Education Moving beyond Western Europe, 1800-1850

By the late 1700s, the French schools had provided a basic plan for formal,
state-sanctioned veterinary education, which their graduates transmitted to
other countries. As mentioned above, by the 1820s almost 30 new centers of
veterinary education had developed in Western Europe, of which 20 proved to
be sustainable. Another 20 schools were established in the first half of the
nineteenth century, spreading farther across Europe. Veterinary education
diversified as it spread, and each of these schools modified the original plan
to suit its local social, political, military, and agricultural context.
Consequently, in the absence of local qualified veterinarians, medical doctors
trained in veterinary medicine also played crucial roles in establishing veterin
ary instruction, for instance, in Krakow (1804), Bern (1805), Vilnius (1806),
Utrecht (1821), and Bucharest (1861). In Switzerland, it was the German
physician Carl Friedrich Emmert (1780-1834) who extended the medical
faculty of Bern Academia with a veterinary school. In the Netherlands,

physician Alexander Numan (1780-1852) became the founder of veterinary

medicine, as did Frenchman Carol Davila (1828-1884) in Romania in 1861.
Just as Lyon and Alfort had served as training places for founders of veterinary
education abroad, so did Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, Lisbon, London, Utrecht,
and Edinburgh decades later. The first example is the Germanic veterinary
school’s transmission of veterinary education within the Habsburg empire and
to the Russian empire.
Hungarian Paul Adami (1739-1814) studied medicine in Vienna and was
appointed full professor in medicine and epizootiology in Vienna in 1775.
Between 1804 and 1809, he occupied the newly established chair in veterinary
medicine in Krakow. Veterinary instruction in Budapest started in 1787 with
the appointment of Sandor Tolnay (1748-1818), a former medical student and
graduate of the Vienna veterinary school. He taught lectures in Latin, German,
and Hungarian. Instruction in veterinary medicine at Lviv University (then
belonging to the Habsburg empire, now Ukraine) was established in 1784 by
three graduates from the k. k. Tierspital in Vienna (A. Krupinski, G. Chmel,
and the Frenchman Balthazar Hacquet). From these histories, we can see how
graduate veterinarians created transnational networks of veterinary education
that expanded rapidly.
In Russia, a sophisticated folk-healing tradition based on careful empirical
observations guided local healers who provided most veterinary care. Books
and pamphlets on animal anatomy and physiology, the preparation and use of
materia medica, and the prevention and treatment of diseases were widely
available. Many were translations of texts from other European languages.
Russians’ early familiarity with texts in French and German probably helped
the spread of the Western European veterinary educational model into Russia.
In 1803, rinderpest (enzootic in parts of Russia) returned and began decimating
cattle herds. In response, the minister of the interior sent six Russian veterinary
specialists and students to the veterinary schools in Berlin and Vienna to study.
After returning, some of them (including I.D. Knigin and A.I. Yanovsky)
helped to establish the Veterinary Division of the Medico-Chirurgical
Academy (MCA, which became the Military Medical Academy in 1881) in
St. Petersburg in 1808. The Veterinary Division included departments of
anatomy, surgery, and therapeutics, all headed by professors trained in the
Germanic tradition. Under the orders of the imperial government, veterinary
professors focused on the diseases of cattle, sheep, and other livestock, as well
as horses. This is a good example of how different places adapted the original
French plan for veterinary education, transferred through the Germanic
schools, into a new national and imperial context.
It is also interesting to note that, in tsarist Russia, studying livestock
knowledge within universities was well supported (different from the
Western European tradition, which was often based on private schools). The

first official veterinary educational program (including professors of livestock

husbandry and medical treatment) in the empire, established at Kharkov
University (Ukraine) in 1805, was set up by the German veterinarian Martin
Pilger. In 1806, German physician and naturalist Ludwig Heinrich Bojanus
(1776-1827) began lecturing at Vilnius University (Lithuania) after being
appointed professor in veterinary medicine. Before beginning his professor
ship, he had followed courses in veterinary medicine at Alfort, London, Berlin,
Hannover, and Vienna. In central Russia, the Moscow State University had a
“Department of Cattle Treatment” in 1807, led by a physician. Therefore, in
Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic region, the foundation for specialized veterin
ary institutions lay within higher education and emphasized animals beyond
only the horse, unlike the first French model based on equine medicine and
farriery. By 1850, the St. Petersburg school taught anatomy, physiology,
pathology, surgery, epizootology, hygiene, pharmacology, and therapeutics.
The veterinary department at Vilnius moved to the University at Dorpat (now
Tartu, Estonia) in 1843. This department was based on the Germanic schools,
employed some German professors, and even taught in German as well
as Russian.
The establishment of veterinary education in Turkey, at the center of the
Ottoman empire, is an example of exporting knowledge from Berlin, London,
and Alfort and adapting it to local needs. In 1841, the German veterinarian
Godlewsky went to Turkey to introduce veterinary instruction at the Military
School in Constantinople (now Istanbul). This mission was part of a request
from Sultan Mahmud II to Prussia, with the goal of building up a new army.
Godlewsky obtained the diploma “Veterinarian 1st class” in 1837 in Berlin
and had been a brigade horse-doctor in the Prussian army. Next to education,
his task was also to set up and lead a veterinary institute at the barracks in
Constantinople. The first three-year course started in 1842 with 12 students.
Next to language problems, a drawback was that the religious beliefs of the
Islamic students opposed postmortems of animals, which made teaching
anatomy and pathology difficult. From 1845 onward, Godlewsky taught his
lectures in Turkish.
In 1847, the Military School moved to another location, and there it was also
influenced by British and French graduates. Turkish student Ahmet Pasha was
sent to London and graduated there as a veterinarian. Upon his return, he was
involved in the extension of the curriculum to four years in 1849. In the same
year, French military veterinarian Daniel Dubroca (c. 1810-1853), a graduate
of Alfort, went to Constantinople to work on the reorganization of veterinary
education at the military school, of which he became head. The French influ
ence became stronger than the Prussian because France acted as an ally of the
Ottoman empire during the Crimean War (1853-1856). Later, veterinary
academic staff from France and Belgium were imported to establish a civilian

veterinary school in Turkey in 1889. The French model of scientific veterinary

education was strengthened when Turkish students returned from their training
in Alfort in 1895. Military and civilian veterinary education merged in 1921, at
the end of the Ottoman empire. Overall, this history demonstrates how Turkish
officials created a new and unique structure for veterinary education during the
mid-1800s by selecting and combining the most useful aspects of German,
French and English veterinary knowledge.
The Imperial Veterinary Education Model in Northern Africa

and the New World
Formal veterinary education also traveled with European colonialism, but
usually very slowly. The veterinary schools still supplied very few of the
actual practitioners available to heal animals in the late 1700s. This was true
in many places around the world (including much of Europe). Graduate vets
were rare even in the military stationed in the French colonies, despite the fact
that a military commission was one of the best positions available to the
growing number of veterinary school graduates. (This would be true, later,
in the British colonies as well.) For example, most animal healing in St.
Domingue (today’s Haiti) was conducted by enslaved healers, the gardiens
de betes. These veterinary specialists used traditional African knowledge,
including herbs and other materials along with spiritual rituals, to heal injuries
and treat diseases. The colonial government used quarantines and slaughter of
infected horses, cattle, and dogs to control epizootics of glanders, anthrax, and
rabies. The first graduate veterinarians arrived in St. Domingue in the 1780s,
but they concentrated on military animals and enforcing colonial epizootic
control. The enslaved gardiens de betes did most of the healing for individual
animals during the colonial period and afterward.
In northern Africa, animal healers were joined by a few graduate veterinar
ians after the first European-model veterinary school was founded in Egypt in
1827 under the government of Mehmet ‘Ali. Although an epizootic in bullocks
was the urgent reason for its founding, this school was also directly connected
to the French model after the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt (1798-1801) and
the subsequent departure of Egyptians to study and observe French methods.
Mehmet ‘Ali also sent for two French veterinarians: Pierre Nicolas Hamont
(1805-1848), who studied at Alfort and became an army veterinarian, and
Auguste Pretot, also an Alfort graduate, who died within a few years of his
arrival. Hamont began training students from the military academy, then
successfully campaigned for a new veterinary school to be built near Cairo
in 1831. Incorporating military veterinary medicine for cavalry horses
increased the school’s enrollment despite its rigorous curriculum: four years
that included anatomy, surgery, pathology, physiology, internal medicine,

diseases, and the French language. Following graduation, Mehmet ‘Ali’s

officials sent veterinarians around the country to agricultural regions.
Veterinarians were also needed by the military, which was expanded during
the 1830s when Mehmet ‘Ali invaded Syria and parts of Anatolia.
As historian Alan Mikhail has shown, Egyptian veterinarians worked within
a remarkably centralized and active bureaucratic structure during the 1830s
(much earlier than many other areas). Government officials deployed veterin
arians to certain places; sent equipment, supplies, and reports from Cairo out to
them; and expected them to report animal health problems arising in the
provinces. This veterinary bureaucracy changed methods of animal breeding,
how animals were fed and housed, and their work conditions. It also changed
the relationships between individuals and their animals by instructing them
how to care for animals as components of the national wealth. Although this
first Egyptian veterinary school was closed in the 1840s by Mehmet ‘Ali’s
grandson, Egyptians were still sent to France to absorb European knowledge
about how to prevent epizootics and maintain cavalry horses. In turn, the
Egyptian veterinarians took their knowledge and practices with them to remote
provinces and other parts of the empire.
Across the Atlantic Ocean in the Americas, official and missionary reports
of early Spanish and Portuguese settlements described diseases of humans and
animals and their treatment. Spanish conquerors mention pre-Colombian profes
sional healers taking care of wild mammals and birds in Moctezuma’s menagerie
at Tenochtitlan (Mexico). They were also impressed by the wide variety of
medicinal plants the indigenous populations used to treat human and animal
diseases. In the early colonial period, veterinary activities included shoeing, meat
inspection, and the breeding of newly introduced species. On Columbus’ second
voyage and on all later expeditions, Spanish livestock (horses, donkeys, pigs,
sheep, goats, rabbits, hens, etc.) were taken along to feed the colonists, but three-
fourths of these animals died before arrival. Only a few Iberian albeitares and
blacksmiths went to the Americas, mainly focusing on equine medicine, since
horses were crucial instruments of war. The first albeitar who worked in the New
World between 1495-1498 was Cristobal Caro. Another, Fernan Gutierrez,
introduced cattle into Peru in 1537. The Spanish and Portuguese method of cattle
ranching was exported to New Spain (the Americas). From there sprang the
greatest cattle empire in world history, from the vast Argentine pampa north to
the plains of Wyoming (United States). Horses had been long extinct in the
Americas; the arrival of European invaders brought these entirely new species
of equids. The descendants of those first European horses multiplied abundantly
in the open grasslands, where Indigenous peoples such as the Comanche began
using horses successfully for hunting and warfare.
One problem for the early conquistadores was the lack of horseshoes,
causing many hoof injuries and lesions. Supposedly, due to the lack of iron,

silver and even gold horseshoes were used during the conquest of Peru. Juan
Suarez de Peralta (1541-1613) was the first albeitar born in the Americas
(Mexico); he probably learned by apprenticeship. Another interesting figure is
Felix de Azara (1746-1821), a Spanish soldier and probably also veterinarian,
who studied natural history and animal husbandry in Paraguay. The Spanish
veterinary schools at Madrid (1793), Cordoba and Saragossa (1847), Leon
(1852), and Santiago de Compostela (1882) took the school at Alfort as their
model (and in turn provided founders for new schools in the colonies). In
1821 the Spanish government made plans to erect schools overseas in Mexico,
Lima, Santa Fe de Bogota, Caracas, Buenos Aires, and Manila (although some
of these schools were never established or were short lived).
The first veterinary school in North America was established in Mexico City
in 1853. Frenchman Eugene Bergeyre (1829-1880), a graduate of the
Veterinary School in Toulouse in 1850, emigrated to Mexico in 1853 and
became head of the stables of President Santa Ana. Bergeyre also became the
first professor of veterinary medicine (including meat inspection) at that school
in 1856. Other European emigrants included farriers William Blake (since
1810) and Edinwaldo Adges, who were employed in the army of Simon
Bolrvar (Venezuela). A famous veterinarian in Bolrvar’s army was German
Otto Philipp von Braun (1798-1869). Braun qualified in Hanover, emigrated,
and was made commander of the Hussar Battalion of Bolrvar’s army in 1823.
From 1830 until 1839 he also became one of the most successful generals in
Bolivian history, repelling an Argentinean invasion in June 1838. After 1850,
more veterinary schools were established in the Americas, and we return to
them in Chapter 4. Not until the end of the 1800s did a substantial number of
graduate veterinarians from Spain, Italy, France, Britain, and the young
American schools accumulate in North, Central, and South America.
Professionalization of Veterinary Medicine in the Industrial Era

Although the establishment of formal veterinary training was important, it was
only one of the necessary steps in the slow and gradual professionalization
process, which characterized the rise of modern veterinary medicine.
Education, training, and professionalizing are dynamic processes. The position
of even established professions is not unassailable. Institutionalization and
legitimation of a profession are continuing processes, while the domain of
professional activities is continuously evolving. Consensus and cooperation
play a role in these processes, as do discord, competition, and conflict. The
successful continuance of a profession thus depends on different factors.
Therefore, it is worthwhile to evaluate the different processes and factors
involved in the genesis of a profession. Professionalization can be defined as
the process by which members of a profession use their special knowledge and

Professionalization of Veterinary Medicine in the Industrial Era 121
the value of their skills to attain a powerful social position. When the duties of
a particular profession are largely described by the law, the position of that
profession is mainly determined by negotiation with the government. Internal
and mutual competition between the members of the group as well as external
competition (mainly by empiricists) are unfavorable for the negotiation value
of the group. Veterinarians’ social power and ability to negotiate remained low
until the era of microbiology, due to a lack of effective therapies. A successful
professionalization process also depended on collective power: the solidarity
and the influence of a group. A high degree of organization in associations,
coalition with other groups, and public relations are effective ways of increas
ing this power as well as improving political influence. From the eighteenth
century onward, members of the professional group also took external factors
into account when using a particular strategy. Factors such as legal, socio
economic, and technological developments, as well as - in the case of veterin
ary medicine - epizootics and zoonoses all contributed to their choice
of strategies.
Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, Western European
society rapidly modernized. The need for people with specific professional
expertise increased as a result of industrialization, division of labor, and
democratization of society. The process of advancing differentiation in society
was associated with a change in university education. New disciplines like
economy, agriculture, technical sciences, and veterinary medicine were intro
duced. Education focused more on practical applications and the societal
benefits derived from scientific knowledge. Clinics and laboratories become
important in human and veterinary medicine as well as in the application of the
natural sciences. The newly upwardly mobile occupations imitated the model
of the older professions. Medicine was the first discipline in the nineteenth
century to move toward academic professionalization and diversification.
Urbanization, concern for the poor hygienic standards in the rapidly growing
cities, and a rise in per capita income favored the growth of the medical
profession. Influenced by the thinking of the Enlightenment, the physiocrats,
and the French Revolution of 1789, profession building of both physicians and
veterinarians had begun in Western Europe in the eighteenth century.
The crucial role of higher learning in the emergence of professional culture,
as well as in the process of professionalization, is obvious. Within this process,
three factors play an interactive role: the profession with its practitioners and
organizations, the state as regulator and certifier, and institutionalized higher
education as a training ground. Higher education affects professionalization
primarily in terms of admission (selection), curriculum (knowledge), and
examination (credentialing). The interaction between higher learning and
professionalization also varied with political and social traditions. In Great
Britain and the United States, the professionalization model was liberal and

characterized by a strong professional organization and autonomy, even in

professional training. The same goes for a country like the Netherlands, which
lacked a powerful centralized bureaucracy and followed a liberal doctrine of
free trade and restriction of state interference. The state established a formal
educational system in 1821, but the State (sic) Veterinary School was financed
by a cattle fund for almost 30 years. Furthermore, until 1874, veterinary
healers without formal training were allowed to practice veterinary medicine.
In Germany and Russia, the model followed the bureaucratic tradition,
depending heavily on state regulation and licensing because professionals,
officials, as well as professors revolved around government.
When we take a closer look at the emergence and the sociology of profes
sions, different factors and processes can be distinguished. According to
sociological theories, three processes - differentiation, legitimation, and insti
tutionalization - have to be completed to validate the definition of a profession.
Differentiation is completed when certain activities are concentrated and
routinely conducted by skillful persons. Legitimation and institutionalization
occur when these persons are faced with problems resulting from these
activities and jointly try to find solutions. The process of legitimation is
completed when other groups - the authorities, principals, and customers -
accept and approve the specific professional activities. Institutionalization is
divided into social institutionalization and institutionalization of the domain.
The latter occurs when the field of activities claimed and defined by the
practitioners themselves is recognized by the legal system. Social institutional
ization represents the degree of acceptance of the professional group by the
society. One big problem for the acceptance of the emerging veterinary
profession was the significant competition by uneducated veterinary healers.
One of the main objectives of the early veterinary associations founded in
Denmark (1807), Switzerland (1813), the Netherlands (1862), the United
States (1863), Spain (1865), Romania (1875), and Britain (1882) was to
remove this competition. In addition, these associations for veterinary advo
cacy pursued legislation and published a professional journal. Conflicts arising
between the different empiric craftsmen and the new professions that pursued
academic acceptance were common in the medical professions. During the
long professionalization process, such conflicts between barber-surgeons and
medical doctors, apothecaries and pharmacists, tooth-pullers and dentists, and
farriers and educated veterinarians were typical.
Regarding the professionalization process of educated veterinarians, import
ant phases can be distinguished (Table 3.1). Such a scheme could also be
drawn up for other medical and paramedical professions, thereby enabling a
comparison between different phases in the origin and development of these
professions in various countries to discover whether similar patterns
occurred globally.

Professionalization of Veterinary Medicine in the Industrial Era 123
Table 3.1. Phases of the professionalization process of educated veterinarians
1 Formal education and (state) legislation regulating the veterinary curriculum

2 Professional journals established
3 Professional activities become full-time jobs
4 Professional associations established
5 Veterinary state supervision of livestock diseases (such as Cattle Acts) with veterinary civil
servants responsible for design and implementation
6 Legal protection of the title “Veterinarian” (veterinary surgeons acts) only for graduates of
accepted schools; this minimized competition from competing animal healers
7 Provision of effective therapies such as vaccines against epizootics, based on (laboratory)
scientific research
8 Elevation of veterinary colleges to institutions of higher education, to the level of a
department or faculty in a university
9 The right to write and defend academic veterinary dissertations (doctoral status)
10 National laws for quality control of food of animal origin under veterinary supervision
11 Professional code with its own disciplinary law, as well as professional conduct toward the
outside world
Using this general scheme, we can compare the professional development of

veterinary medicine in various countries. We can also understand the criticism
toward the early schools and their graduates. One problem was the develop
ment of scientific veterinary medicine, which lagged behind the development
of formal education, journals, associations, and state supervision. Often, gov
ernments instituted formal education, thereby legitimizing the status of “scien
tifically” trained veterinarians, long before these graduates and the schools
could meet the desired expectations by clients. This also explains why unedu
cated healers continued to dominate veterinary practice for decades. In many
countries, empiricism continued to flourish throughout the nineteenth century
and into the twentieth. Animal owners preferred to have their animals treated by
skillful and often cheaper animal healers rather than by qualified veterinarians
who might be well educated, but therapeutically less experienced. After all, even
graduate veterinarians felt powerless against the most dreaded diseases: rinder
pest during the 1700s and 1800s and contagious bovine pleuropneumonia from
the 1830s onward. For individual animals, economics were usually the only
criteria used to determine who was called in to treat a sick animal.
This status quo is confirmed by a nationwide government survey on veter
inary services in the Netherlands in 1846 (25 years after the establishment of
the first veterinary school). By that time, there were about 121 educated
veterinarians and 771 other animal healers active within the country. Almost
all municipalities saw no added value in qualified state veterinarians, and they

did not want to support them. They preferred to maintain the services of the
majority of available healers - the private empiricists. This outcome led to a
radical reorganization of the veterinary school at Utrecht in 1850.
The further development of veterinary sciences and the veterinary profes
sion in the period 1850-1900 will be analyzed in Chapter 4. But another
important theme, and one of the reasons to establish veterinary schools, was
the need for horse veterinarians for the army. This justification continued to be
an important one for formal veterinary education because the decades around
1800 witnessed many battles, conflicts, and wars in which horses were crucial.
The armies needed shoeing-smiths, army farriers, and army veterinarians to
keep their numerous horses healthy.
Animals in Warfare, Late 1700s-1850
Napoleonic Wars and Veterinary Education

The veterinary schools in France were reorganized during the French
Revolution of 1789. Due to political reform, the organization of veterinary
education became a matter of national concern and attempts were made to
unite veterinary and human medicine. The French veterinary schools had a
difficult time, but they survived independent of medical schools. The need for
healthy horses in the expanding French army, particularly when Napoleon
came into power, played a role in this respect. Napoleon Bonaparte
(1769-1821) was a general and dictator during the last governments of the
French Revolution. In 1799, following a coup, he ruled as First Consul until
1804 when he crowned himself as Napoleon I, emperor of France. He kept that
position until 1814 and again briefly in 1815 until his final defeat at the battle
of Waterloo (Belgium). Napoleon built a large empire dominating continental
Europe for more than a decade. As one of the greatest commanders in history,
with a brilliant strategic understanding, he won most of his battles and the so-
called Napoleonic Wars in which he led France against a series of coalitions.
Napoleon, like so many military rulers before and after him, was highly
dependent on a huge army of healthy horses, mules, and donkeys. In the
second half of the eighteenth century, significant changes occurred in the roles
of horses within the cavalry, mounted infantry, and the new horse artillery
units in European armies. In addition, Napoleon introduced the concept of a
supply train, a horse-drawn logistical transport of artillery, engineer forces, and
forage. Adequate provision of these materials was crucial for combat forces in
the field, but bringing all these supplies to the armies required vast numbers
of horses.
Under these political and military conditions, the emerging veterinary
schools could profit from the increasing demand for shoeing-smiths, army

Animals in Warfare, Late 1700s-1850 125
farriers, and army veterinarians to keep army horses healthy. Previously,

governments had contracted private shoeing-smiths and farriers who were
responsible for shoeing army horses and providing general care. At the end
of the eighteenth century, governments established military veterinary services
to counter the continual heavy losses of horses during the military campaigns.
These military veterinarians were recruited from the newly formed veterinary
schools. Shoeing-smiths and farriers who were employed by the armies were
sent to veterinary schools around Europe, thereby representing a significant
influx of students and a steady source of revenue for the schools. Between
1804 and 1812, the number of veterinarians in the French army increased from
about 100 to 250, for example.
Living in the twenty-first century, it is hard to imagine what life must have
been like for army smiths and veterinarians, as well as for the animals they
tried to keep healthy. Imagine the challenges and logistical problems of
mobilizing, feeding, and watering more than 100,000 horses without modern
technology. In peacetime, the European armies planned to have one horse per
seven soldiers; but in wartime, the ratio increased to one horse per four
soldiers. Veterinary physiologist Peter Bols has calculated that 5,000 horses
at rest (during peacetime) consumed 175,000 liters of drinking water; 15,000
kilograms of hay; 15,000 kilograms of straw, and 15,000 kilograms of concen
trated feed every day. (During battle and at higher temperatures, these figures
would be much higher.) Five thousand horses would also leave 35,000 liters of
urine and 200,000 kilograms of manure in the encampment. Planning for the
needs of these animals while on military campaign must have been a huge
challenge. History shows what happened when military leaders failed.
In the summer of 1812, Napoleon took about 175,000 horses with him on
his campaign to Russia, while the French army counted 450,000 troops overall
and the Russians 400,000. Napoleon’s Russian campaign was disastrous for
the French. They spent time and energy traveling to Russia and attacked during
the harsh Russian winter, for which they were not prepared. Cunning Russian
commanders took full advantage of the French army’s logistical problems. The
French army was poorly equipped and lacked adequate forage for the horses
(insufficient and bad quality), leading to immense suffering for the animals.
Huge numbers of horses died due to hardship (dust, heat, thirst, hunger, cold,
deadly wounds) and diseases (colic, diarrhea, and contagious diseases). The
scourge of horses, glanders, raced through the army’s animals (and probably
sickened soldiers, also, since it is a zoonotic disease). Unfortunately for the
French, Philibert Chabert, director of the veterinary school at Alfort, taught his
students that glanders was not contagious between horses (or between horses
and men). This mistaken doctrine cost the French armies dearly during the
Napoleonic Wars. Descriptions of the withdrawal of the French army from
Moscow during the harsh winter are horrific. About 140,000 horses were lost.

The cold and hunger drove soldiers insane. They cut pieces of muscles from
their dead but even still living horses, put it on their bayonets, roasted it above
fires and spiced it with gunpowder. They even ate cats and dogs to survive.
A soup of horse blood, melted snow, flour, and a little gunpowder for the taste
was considered a feast.
After the failure of the Russian campaign, Napoleon blamed the marechaux-
ferrants (shoeing-smiths) and artistes veterinaires (veterinarians) as one of the
scapegoats for his defeat. He considered their shortcomings to keep the army
horses healthy a proof of lacking education and, therefore, decided to reform
veterinary education in the so-called decree of Moscow of January 15, 1813.
In this imperial decree (Decret imperial sur l’enseignement et l’exercice de
l’art veterinaire) he determined that henceforward there would be five veter
inary schools in his empire: one of the first category in Alfort and four of the
second category in Lyon, Turin (occupied Italy), Aachen (occupied part of
Germany), and Zutphen (occupied Netherlands) [the latter two were never
established]. All schools would provide a three-year course leading to the
diploma of marechaux veterinaires (veterinary marshals). Only at Alfort would
a supplementary two-year, more in-depth course be given to deliver fully qualified
medecines veterinaires. The Alfort school should also account for the training of
professors who would teach at the second-category schools. Veterinary inspectors
were appointed who were responsible for veterinary care of large cavalry groups.
In this way, Napoleon broadened the job opportunities for veterinarians.
However, in practice it was only gradually that specially trained military veterin
arians took over the veterinary tasks of the traditional army shoeing-smiths.
Moreover, this reform could not prevent the final defeat of the Napoleonic regime
at the battle of Waterloo in 1815 (again, thousands of horses died).
These military details may seem insignificant to us today; but this was not
the case in the long nineteenth century because horses were essential to all
military activities. This included the role of military forces in invading,
conquering, and settling new territories. “Imperialism” is defined as a country
exerting power and influence over other countries or regions through diplo
matic and military activities. Within the time period covered by this book,
European imperialism through military activities was a major force in world
history. Often-violent takeovers of lands, peoples, and resources spread
Europeans to Asia, Africa, the Americas, and islands throughout the world.
Veterinarians and models of veterinary education and regulation spread with
the armies and settler colonialist regimes of the late 1700s and 1800s.
Veterinary Medicine and Imperialism

Imperialism during the 1700s dramatically increased contacts between Asia
and Europe, expanding on a centuries-long interchange of goods, people, and

Veterinary Medicine and Imperialism 127
ideas. Global trading, diplomacy, religious pilgrimages and missions, and

military incursions had all brought medical knowledge from one part of the
world to another, especially from Asia to Europe, for centuries. How did these
circulations of knowledge about animal healing affect local practices?
Adoption of novel healing practices depended on social context, not only on
how well the therapy worked. Animal owners in a society subjected to
imperialism, for example, often viewed “foreign” healing practices with suspi
cion and hostility. However, historians have also uncovered examples of
people mixing the “new” therapies and techniques with traditional ones.
Similar to the marketplace for veterinary practitioners, the globalized thera
peutic marketplace offered a broad menu of choices that were widely reported
and often available even in remote areas.
Ancient centers of Ayurvedic and Tibetan medicine extended from southern
India to what is now Mongolia, and these were also centers of production for
high-quality sheep and horses during the eighteenth century. Many trading
routes crossed this vast area, as did religious pilgrimage routes, and knowledge
traveled with the caravans. Knowledge about animal husbandry and healing
for elephants, camels, and cattle was the most important in places that used or
venerated those animals. The special place of cattle as sacred animals in some
parts of South Asia meant that sanctuaries for healing sick and injured animals
were widespread by the eighteenth century. Elephants had their own traditional
healers (kaviraj), especially in the more rural areas. The kaviraj, which are still
an active group of healers today, practiced traditional medicine using medi
cinal plants, and they were kept busy treating elephants in remote villages and
the countryside. Cattle and elephants were also treated with a type of homeo
pathic medicine. The treatments were small doses of medication that, at normal
doses, would cause the same symptoms from which the animal suffered. For
example, if an animal had diarrhea, small doses of a laxative or purgative
would be given to prompt the animal’s system to react against the diarrhea.
These are only a few examples of the complex traditional healing practices,
which not only dealt with more minor complaints but also addressed complex
conditions such as pneumonia, diabetes, and tumors.
The rich medical ideas and practices of South Asia continued to circulate to
Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially with the
activities of the imperialist British East India Company (EIC). EIC goals
focused on the extraction of wealth from South Asia. In parts of what is now
the nation of India, a ruthless British colonial military regime, which depended on
controlling large numbers of animals, was an active occupying power by 1800.
British veterinarians began to arrive in India in 1799. Paramount to the EIC’s
success was the acquisition of horses, which were used for military purposes.
Efforts to send horses from the West to EIC outposts in India were extremely
expensive and often unsuccessful (the horses died on the long journey). Moreover,

what some viewed as the greatest horse pasture in the world lay to the north: the
steppe lands of Central Asia, the western part home to the famed Akhal-Teke
“golden horses,” reputed to be fast as the wind and able to run without food or
water for days. By 1800, over 100,000 horses (most of them considerably lower
quality than Akhal-Tekes) were being brought to markets of the Hindu Kush,
stimulating the EIC to consider breeding their own horses locally.
From their base in Bengal, EIC officers founded a stud farm for horse
breeding at Pusa and brought the British veterinarian William Moorcroft
(1767-1825) to run it in 1807. After his graduation in Lyon, Moorcroft had
worked briefly as professor at the London veterinary college, but soon returned
to his lucrative equine practice. He constructed a colossal apparatus to make
horseshoes, but this enterprise failed; so Moorcroft decided to follow his
passion for adventure travel and go work for the EIC in India. He brought
the French veterinary educational model to Bengal, and although no school
was founded, there is evidence that local people employed at the stud farm
learned a great deal from Moorcroft. In turn, Moorcroft immersed himself in
Bengali culture, learning languages and marrying a local woman; but he
disappointed the EIC because on two major expeditions he failed to find
reliable sources of the best Central Asian horses for the British stud farm.
Most important for veterinary medicine, he sent copious notes about medicinal
plants and local knowledge (and even a flock of Tibetan sheep) back to
England during these travels. Moorcroft was an important conduit for animals,
plants, and ideas from South-Central Asia that traveled to Britain, and he
probably brought European veterinary ideas to northern India as well. While
there is little evidence that Moorcroft’s findings greatly influenced early British
veterinary medicine, he is a good example of the ways in which veterinary
knowledge circulated around the world with individuals as well as institutions.
Of course, this knowledge exchange was not new, particularly in China,
which harbored Jesuit missionaries, diplomats, and other conduits of European
ideas since at least the Mongol khanates of the thirteenth century. In the mid-
1800s, European visitors to Chinese territory found local animal healers who
combined traditional botanical remedies with practices the Europeans knew
well: firing (cautery of external lesions), drenching with purgatives, and
bleeding. For example, Scottish veterinary surgeon George Fleming
(1833-1901) published his notes from a trip on horseback beyond the Great
Wall in 1863, after he participated in the British invasions of China.
Remembering that Fleming’s point of view was very imperialist, we nonethe
less learn quite a bit about local veterinary chang-ta (farriers), who used stocks
and the nose-twitch to restrain animals, just as in Britain. Fleming compared
the Chinese hoof-knife to that used by French marechaux-ferrants.
Fleming then described the Yi-ma or horse-doctor, who traveled between the
larger rural towns (see Chapter 2, Fig. 2.4). The Yi-ma informed the British

visitor about the principles of yin and yang and referred him to a text on
“Chinese Veterinary Medicine.” The Yi-ma was a well-respected professional
whose work included the use of medicinal herbs and drenches and other
practices (bleeding, cautery) familiar to Europeans. Fleming recounted the
Yi-ma’s instructions about feeling the pulses, and how he had understood the
animal’s body in terms of qi and its movements, especially in the internal
organs. The Yi-ma applied plasters to the affected areas and manipulated body
parts in accordance with his understanding of these bodily flows of energy. By
explaining this system of understanding the body in some detail, Fleming
transferred this knowledge to his readers in Britain. Perhaps just as important,
Fleming’s writing showed his surprise at finding a system of veterinary healing
that made a certain sense to a European and aspects of which were very similar
to European practice. Regarding horseshoeing, for example, Fleming noted
that the Chinese practices of affixing a light metal plate to the horse’s hoof
more closely resembled the practices of Europe than of neighboring Japan,
where horses’ feet were protected by woven-straw sandals. Clearly, horse
shoeing and healing knowledge from around the world had been circulating for
years, including in the isolated rural regions of northern China.
Veterinary knowledge exchange, therefore, was not new during the late
1700s and early 1800s. As in previous historical eras, trade and war spread
veterinary knowledge. Nor was the use of animal healing as a tool of imperi
alism and colonialism new, but the 1800s saw the rapid expansion of European
colonial regimes (and the French veterinary meme) onto other continents,
notably Africa. For example, the colonial French veterinary presence in north
ern Africa began in the summer of 1830 with the invasion of Algeria.
According to veterinary historian Diana K. Davis, the veterinary regime
developed there (later expanded to include Tunisia and Morocco) was crucial
to successful French settler colonialism. In contrast to the situation in British in
India, veterinarians in northern Africa were expected to manage livestock
production and pastures (not just horse diseases). French ideas and practices
clashed with well-established local regimes of animal husbandry and the
marketplace for animal healing, especially in the steppe areas populated by
nomadic pastoralists. To maintain control, French colonizers utilized strict
regulations that applied to animals as well as local people. The aims of
controlling animal disease, supplying military animals, regulating pasture
use, and regulating the food supply fit closely with (and greatly assisted) the
goals of controlling rebellious local populations - and the French veterinary
meme provided the expertise.
Another conduit of veterinary knowledge exchange took place in a part of
the vast Ottoman empire, in Egypt. In 1798, the French dictator Napoleon led
an expedition to, and military occupation of, Egypt. Although short lived, this
incursion included French military veterinarians whose ideas and practices

came from their training back in France. In Cairo and into the countryside,
exchanges of animals and knowledge began to spread along with the army.
Scientists, including the eminent zoologist Etienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire,
also took knowledge of Egyptian animals back to Europe. In terms of the
domesticated animal economy, the French ideal was based on bureaucratic
control that extended into remote areas in occupied Egypt. This pattern seems
to have survived after the French left in 1801. The eventual new Egyptian
leader, the government of Mehmet ‘Ali, ushered in dramatic changes in
human-animal relationships during the late 1700s-early 1800s based on the
French veterinary regime and animal management model. As Alan Mikhail has
shown, the institutions of the new Egyptian State increasingly took charge of
regulating and providing care for animals. Mehmet ‘Ali actively cultivated the
French “veterinary meme” by employing two French veterinarians from the
Alfort school in 1827 to investigate an outbreak of disease in rice-field draft
animals. One of these, Pierre Nicolas Hamont, began training Egyptian stu
dents; this was the beginning of the first French-style veterinary school in the
Ottoman empire. Financed by Mehmet ‘Ali’s treasury, the growing school
began in Rosetta, moved to Abu Za’abel, near Cairo, in 1831, and, finally, to
Shubra in 1837.
This Egyptian School of Veterinary Medicine exemplified the goals of early
French-style institutions (controlling disease in economically valuable live
stock and keeping animals healthy for the military), but it also illustrates the
important point that the French “veterinary meme” was deliberately used by
government officials in other nations and not merely imposed upon them.
European colonialism often used French-style veterinary medicine as one of
the key tools for controlling subjugated regions. Competing powers, including
nations allied with the mighty Ottoman empire, cleverly adapted European ideas
and techniques to suit their own economic and military purposes. The Islamic
medical and veterinary traditions of the madrassas were still very important,
and, just as in Western Europe, a vibrant veterinary marketplace included large
numbers of folk healers (sacred and empirical) as well as the educated elites. The
French-style schools added another, government-sanctioned, group of practition
ers to the Egyptian veterinary marketplace: during the 1830s, between 50 and
100 students were enrolled in the School of Veterinary Medicine. As we will
see, even more military personnel were trained in the French veterinary meme to
maintain the health of cavalry horses. These formal, bureaucratic efforts to
manage Egypt’s animals reflected the government’s concentration on safeguard
ing the economic and military wealth of its animals. A wealthy nation depended
on healthy animals, and alert government officials tested many different ideas
and practices, including foreign ones.
Imagine that you are an Egyptian veterinary student in 1840. What would
you study, and where would you work after graduation? Until 1846, veterinary

and medical students studied together during the first year. They focused on
learning comparative anatomy, especially the skeleton and muscles, and also
the basic sciences such as botany, chemistry, and physics. After that, veterin
ary and medical students separated and began more species-specific studies of
anatomy, physiology, pathology, and simple surgeries. The third and fourth
years of veterinary school included more clinical experience and courses in
medicine, disease pathology, and surgery. This curriculum probably looks
familiar to veterinary students today. The Egyptian School took full advantage
of the French “veterinary meme” and the fact that French was the common
language of European veterinary medicine in those days: the veterinary stu
dents were required to take courses in the French language during all
four years.
Upon graduation, veterinary students were assigned professional positions
throughout Egypt. Most were sent to agricultural areas, where they functioned
as veterinary public health officials as well as treating individual animals.
Veterinarians were empowered to enforce government regulations about clean
water, proper feeding, and not working animals during the hottest weather. The
veterinarian also treated horses, camels, or buffalo that were sick, injured, or
suffering from parasites. If he suspected a contagious disease, the veterinarian
could force the slaughter and burning of sick animals’ bodies and prevent
livestock owners from moving animals from one place to another. Certain
diseases were reportable to the agriculture ministry in Cairo, and veterinarians
could declare and enforce quarantines. Although the Egyptian School of
Veterinary Medicine was closed by Mehemet ‘Ali’s successor, ‘Abbas, in
1849, this regulatory structure remained to control one of Egypt’s most
economically and militarily valuable resources: its domesticated animals.
Notably, this Egyptian veterinary regime included a focus on comparative
medicine and an assumption that animal diseases could also afflict humans.
Because they studied anatomy alongside medical students, Egyptian veterinar
ians understood the similarities between human and animal bodies right away
during the first year of veterinary education. These scientific studies reinforced
generally held beliefs that some diseases were contagious and could infect
humans as well as animals; and that the pollution generated from a sick
animal’s body could make an exposed person sick. This was a kind of
miasmatic theory that assumed that sick or dead animal bodies (and blood)
produced poisonous vapors, especially in the case of febrile or purulent
illnesses. If such an animal was dying, the practice of wa’da dictated that it
be buried alive to avoid exposing the person slaughtering it to the tainted
blood, vapors, and bodily excretions. After sick animals’ bodies were buried
(dead or alive), workers poured ammonia or shoveled lime over the slaughter
or burial sites, according to State regulations, to prevent healthy animals or
people from exposure. All of these measures reflected the assumption that the

organic boundary between human bodies and animal bodies was porous to the
malevolent influences of disease, and that preventive measures worked for
both livestock and people.
Conclusions
From this very brief survey of two centuries, we can conclude that:
1. In Europe, the enlightenment (1700s) stimulated the development of formal
veterinary education, especially in France. Concern about epizootics and
the existence of the military riding school as a model also contributed to the
establishment of the first French schools. A vibrant print culture, the growth
of medical knowledge, and royal (later republican) governmental sponsor
ship enabled formal veterinary education to grow quickly in France. The
rationale for these French-style veterinary schools began with the growth of
natural history, science, and medicine; but the schools’ purpose slowly
became more practical, driven by economics and the needs of the nation
state.
2. The French veterinary meme quickly spread abroad, due to other European
nations’ interest in developing their own schools; French imperialism; and
the concerns of national leaders in other parts of the world about epizootics.
3. During the 1700s, animal diseases such as cattle plague/peste bovine/
rinderpest threatened agricultural production. Some government officials
(in France and other locations) believed that veterinary schools should
focus on understanding and responding to these livestock diseases. This
goal contrasted with the next point:
4. Horses, donkeys, and mules were crucial to military units and in warfare.
Keeping horses healthy required professional healers, including horse
doctors, farriers, and shoeing-smiths. This was another argument in favor
of establishing veterinary schools. Balancing the curriculum between these
two goals - the needs of agriculture and the needs of them military - was a
source of tension for almost all veterinary schools.
5. Veterinary school graduates had to compete in the veterinary marketplace,
against unschooled horse-doctors, farriers, cow-leeches and other folk
practitioners, and many other types of professional healers. Animal owners
had many choices. The establishment of formal veterinary schools did not
end the activities of other healers or the availability of “do-it-yourself”
veterinary care booklets used by farmers and animal owners.
6. Military veterinary medicine, often combined with imperialism, became
even more important during the 1800s. For example, the states of the
Ottoman empire established a corps of army veterinarians, as did the
Napoleonic army.

Conclusions 133
7. The establishment of veterinary education was just one step in the different
phases of the long professionalization process of veterinary medicine.
Question/Activity: Find examples of how veterinarians and other animal

healers were trained in your home country, 1700-1850. What was the veterinary
marketplace? When were formal veterinary schools established in your country?
Finally, we have seen the importance of horsepower in armies around the world
during the 1700s-1800s. How did the use of horses in warfare change over time?

4 Veterinary Institutions and Animal Plagues,
1800-1900
Introduction
In the early 1800s, students of veterinary medicine in the recently established
European-style schools varied quite a bit. Many had some basic education; but
their major qualification was hands-on experience with animals, particularly
horses. These were working-class or middle-class people - the sons of farmers,
shoeing-smiths, or village farriers. They were already familiar with what we
call the “veterinary marketplace” (the array of mostly unlicensed veterinary
practitioners from which animal owners could choose, from botanical healers
to castrators and dentists). A much smaller group of veterinary students had
had the benefit of more formal education and better social connections. These
students, along with the most talented and ambitious of the farmers’ and
farriers’ sons, became the leaders in the effort to professionalize veterinary
medicine and veterinary research during the nineteenth century.
The mid-1800s was an exciting time to be a veterinary student because
scientific knowledge was being created rapidly. In Europe, the fields of
zoology and natural history had been revolutionized by such thinkers as the
Frenchmen Buffon and Lamarck; the British Owen, Chambers, and Darwin;
the Germans Haeckel and Weisman; and the Swiss Rutimeyer. Embryology
and cell theory (Schleiden, Schwann, and Virchow) laid the foundations for
understanding comparative anatomy and development. Together, these
developing fields of thought and experiment supported the notion that natural
laws underlay the study of animals in health and disease, just like the laws of
physics or chemistry. This fast-developing corpus of knowledge was the basis
for “scientific” studies of healthy and diseased animals, in the European
tradition that eventually spread around much of the world. This new veterinary
regime was shaped by the problems of rapidly growing, industrializing, and
colonizing nation-states.
Between 1800 and 1900, the circulations of systems, goods, ideas, people,
animals, and diseases transformed much of the world. The ability to move live
animals on an international scale was made possible by the development of
railroads and steamships from the 1850s onward. Railroads and steamships
134

Introduction 135
moved quickly; therefore, even sick animals could reach new regions before
dying and transmit diseases to indigenous animals. Observations and ideas
about these animal diseases moved in multiple directions. As we will see,
animal experts in regions of Africa and Asia influenced European knowledge
about animals and healing, just as European veterinary knowledge and insti
tutions were brought to India, Java, and South Africa. But this knowledge
exchange took place against a background of violence due to wars and colonial
imperialism, destruction of natural resources, and the destruction caused by
animal diseases (such as rinderpest) brought by Europeans to Africa, East Asia,
and India. Rinderpest, which killed about 90 percent of the cattle it infected,
devastated entire societies and cultures. This particular legacy of imperialism
persisted for a long time: for example, rinderpest was largely eradicated in
Europe in the nineteenth century, but it remained endemic in Africa until 2011.
In Africa, rinderpest was devastating not only to livestock and the environment,
but also to peoples such as the Maasai, vaShona, Bahima, and Zulu, whose
societies and cultures were based on owning livestock. These world-changing
events, as well as the need to increase and secure the food supply of the growing
world population, shaped the development of the veterinary sciences, veterin
ary medicine, and government regulation of animal health and disease.
Understanding and Controlling Animal Plagues and Zoonoses

in the Nineteenth Century
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the need to understand and
control continuing outbreaks of epizootic and zoonotic diseases stimulated
innovations in organized veterinary medicine that continue in some form
today. An important step was the establishment of veterinary institutions:
schools, (state) veterinary services, serum production and research institutes,
meat and milk inspection services, and field stations. The nineteenth century
also witnessed the formation of national veterinary professional associations
and international veterinary congresses. Both were aimed not only at better
controlling animal plagues and zoonoses, but also at obtaining veterinary
legislation including state-sponsored animal disease control (the Cattle Acts
on notification and stamping-out, for example); meat inspection acts; and
legitimizing veterinary medicine as a state-sanctioned profession. It was in
the late nineteenth century that the veterinary school graduate began to have an
advantage in the veterinary marketplace, as other animal healers and practi
tioners were gradually outlawed (a process that took decades). In many parts of
the world (but not all), the state licensing of animal healers contributed to the
normalization of a particular model of animal healer: educated by an approved
veterinary school, licensed by the state, and charged with enforcing the state’s
dictates and laws.

136 Veterinary Institutions and Animal Plagues, 1800-1900
In this chapter we examine major outbreaks of epizootic and zoonotic

diseases in the nineteenth century, how these diseases spread around the world
(especially by European imperialism and colonialism), and the societal and
veterinary response to them. Growing industrial cities consumed ever-larger
amounts of meat, milk and other animal products. Food hygiene developed
along with sanitation and public health in the cities, but its authority extended
into the countryside where animals were born and raised. These regulations
depended on scientists’ ability to judge food as “healthy” or “safe,” both in the
abattoir and in the laboratory. Laboratories that were attached to the newly
established veterinary institutes played a major role in understanding and
controlling animal and zoonotic diseases. There, methods from the natural
sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, statistics) were applied alongside
laboratory animal science (animal models) to develop new tools such as
preventive vaccines and therapeutic serums. These tools promised to ensure
a supply of safe foods of animal origin and healthy horses for services in
agriculture, transport, and the armies. The new institutes and laboratories, in
turn, depended on the impression that veterinary medicine was becoming
“scientific” and that some of its leaders were allies with (human) public health
officials in the framework of the so-called sanitary movement. Veterinary
research work also connected veterinary medicine with human medicine
through the study of “comparative” pathology, physiology, and medicine.
These comparative studies were based on shared ideas about disease etiology
(causation), transmission, and pathophysiology between physicians, veterinar
ians, and natural historians (early biologists).
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the scientists who worked within
veterinary and medical institutions developed the basis of disease causation
theories (germ theories) still used today. Especially in the Global South,
veterinary investigators moved beyond the germ theories to elucidate the
ecology of vector-borne diseases such as Texas cattle fever, East Coast fever,
and equine encephalitis. Veterinary parasitologists studied macroparasites
(such as Ascaris) and microparasites (such as Trichinae), linking parasitology
and disease ecology with germ theories. Some young veterinarians learned
these methods at veterinary schools, which were increasingly becoming asso
ciated with universities and national professional associations. The knowledge,
vaccines, and other “products” of microbiology began to convince farmers of
the added value of trained veterinarians over other healers - but only very
slowly. By 1900, trained veterinarians were also better equipped with diag
nostic tools such as auscultation, thermometry, microscopy, and culturing
microbial organisms by letting them reproduce in predetermined culture
medium under controlled laboratory conditions. While theories, knowledge,
and new tools were available, they were also expensive - and their widespread
use depended on the economic value of veterinarians’ animal patients.

Veterinarians and Food Production 137
Veterinarians and Food Production

Most people think that veterinarians are only active as “animal doctors.”
However, the scope of professional activities is much broader, including, for
example, veterinary food hygiene. Today in some countries about 10 percent
of the profession finds employment in the public health sector with the main
task of controlling zoonotic diseases and guaranteeing a safe food supply.
When and how did veterinarians get involved with public health and food
hygiene? We will show that the formation of laboratories, where research was
conducted to support food inspection with scientific knowledge, played a
crucial role in why veterinarians obtained (legal) responsibilities in the food
supply chain and could include public health in their professional domain.
From the early nineteenth century onward, a gradual transition from a
traditional rural society to a modern bureaucratic state occurred in many parts
of the world. This process of modernization was accompanied by characteristic
changes including rapid human population growth, urbanization, industrializa
tion, economic growth, and a gradual rise in the standard of living.
Colonialism continued to extract natural resources and bring wealth to
Europeans, while spreading European livestock production methods around
the world. Due to a higher disposable income of the working class in industri
alized countries like Great Britain, Belgium, France, and Germany, a shift in
food consumption patterns took place: Europeans expanded their consumption
of foods such as milk, meat, and other products from animals. At the same
time, the developing laboratory sciences supported an increase of meat and
dairy consumption.
Many physiologists, chemists, and physicians stressed the importance of a
high intake of animal protein; additionally, meat and dairy consumption were
traditionally important to many cultures. Especially between the 1850s and
early 1900s, knowledge about the chemical composition of foods and nutrient
requirements (of humans and non-human animals) increased. Laboratory
research based on the unit of energy, the calorie, and emphasis on proteins
meant that many scientists considered foods of animal origin to be more
nutritious than vegetable foods. Most European authorities, especially, claimed
that a population deprived of animal protein would become weak and produce
only moderately strong and productive laborers and soldiers. Reflecting imper
ial biases, British economists attributed the seemingly effortless manner in
which Britain controlled its Indian empire to the high meat consumption of the
“British Beefeaters” (in the nineteenth century Britain had the highest per
capita meat consumption in Europe) as compared with the vegetarian diet of
the Indians. In addition, technologists argued that European nations with a
high meat consumption generated the most successful colonists and that the
future belonged to the “flesh-eating nations.” Such notions help explain why

scientists, politicians, economists, and military authorities attached such great

importance to a high meat consumption.
As a result, dairy and meat production increased worldwide overall due to
expanded animal feed production, innovations in cattle breeding, and organ
ized campaigns against livestock diseases. In addition, the nineteenth century
witnessed a rapid expansion of the domestic and international meat trade. Of
course, some regions still suffered from famines and meat shortages. Egypt, for
example, experienced widespread weather events, crop failures, and animal
losses between the 1780s and 1820s. Government officials and the army seized
livestock and the scanty meat supplies, leaving the populace without sufficient
food. But in other parts of the world, both crop and livestock farming dramat
ically increased, especially in sparsely populated colonial territories and coun
tries such as Argentina, Uruguay, the United States, New Zealand, and
Australia. Although the new regimes based on cattle and sheep production in
these areas often had negative effects on the local land and peoples, farmers
could increase profits. Newly developed transportation possibilities (steam
ships and cooling technology) meant that animals and meat could be exported
to help meet the demand in the fast-growing cities.
The increase in meat and dairy consumption and concerns about the quality
of these commodities facilitated the entry of the veterinary profession into food
hygiene during the 1800s. Veterinary leaders in several nations saw the
opportunity to bring aspects of public health under the purview of organized
veterinary medicine. This did not happen quickly; it took time and effort for
veterinarians to assume control over food inspection and regulation, and this
process played out differently in different nations. The development of scien
tific veterinary medicine in the second half of the nineteenth century was
supported by the growing need for veterinary expertise in safeguarding the
food production chain, from the growth of livestock farming and meat and
milk production to the expanding demand from consumers. Veterinarians
argued that they were uniquely qualified to carry out the two essential factors
for effective meat inspection: mandatory inspection of meat for sale and
centralized slaughtering in municipal or public abattoirs on the outskirts of
towns. Likewise, milk production could be regulated by linking veterinary
inspection of cow byres, the fresh milk produced by them, and the urban
regulations necessary to ensure that milk was not adulterated and did not carry
diseases. These would be developments of late nineteenth-century municipal,
state, and national governments.
From the consumer’s point of view, the quantity and quality of meat and
dairy destined for the working class in the second half of the nineteenth
century left much to be desired. Historians have shown that, in the cities,
dairies and slaughterhouses were often “filthy” and their products adulterated
with false ingredients. Home slaughtering was common in the countryside, and

Veterinarians and Food Production 139
barter in food between villagers relied on trusting the farmer who produced the
food. But the chain between producer and consumer became much longer and
convoluted for citizens during the development of a large-scale domestic and
international meat trade. Urban consumers had few guarantees that they were
purchasing healthy or pure milk and meat. One rare example of a regulatory
institution was the pre-revolutionary French guild system, in which retired
butchers were sworn in as municipal meat inspectors. But state regulatory
power and interference were limited due to the prevailing liberal economies
prevalent in most industrializing nations.
In most cities, butchers slaughtered animals in small, privately owned
butcheries. Population growth and urbanization went hand in hand with an
extended network of such butcheries where slaughtering often took place
under unhygienic conditions. In London in the 1870s, it was estimated there
were 1,100 operational slaughterhouses scattered around the metropolis.
Cheap meat and sausages were sold in these butcheries, shops, and markets.
Meat from knacker’s yards was marketed or processed into pies and sausages
and sold to the poor. Old, worn-out, and even dead horses were collected and
processed by knackers, after which the meat was sold as “smoked beef.” Cats
were sold as rabbits and dogs as mutton. Milk cows were fed the rancid waste
products from distilleries and breweries, sickening them and tainting the milk.
Bovine tuberculosis affected as many as 80 percent of animals in major cities
in the United States, Latin America, India, Russia, and Europe.
Almost inevitably, calamities followed. Numerous outbreaks of “summer
diarrhea,” scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhoid fever, and undulant fever (brucel
losis) in children and adults were traced to tainted milk. Infected and spoiled
meat caused trichinosis (a microscopic parasite) and meat poisonings in
hundreds of people, killing dozens of them every year. Consequently, local
and national authorities were confronted with complaints about the filth and
nuisance of dairies and butcheries as well as the poor quality of the food
offered. The regular outbreaks of meat-borne diseases alarmed the authorities
and demonstrated the need for meat hygiene control. Improvement of the
urban environment, the meat trade, and meat and milk inspection regulations
became regular issues in local and national politics in the mid- to late nine
teenth century. Apparently radical measures were needed.
These concerns were not altogether new. Inspired by the intellectual devel
opments of the Enlightenment, the Paris Council for Public Hygiene had
created a set of municipal regulations for meat inspection at the end of the
eighteenth century. However, active interference by a state bureaucracy was
needed to achieve real progress. Following the French example, health boards
were established in most larger towns in Western Europe around 1850. Within
these boards the so-called hygienists, a group of progressive physicians,
engineers, physicists, chemists, lawyers, civil servants, and veterinarians

played a predominant role. Due to the veterinarian’s knowledge of food

hygiene, they participated in these health boards from the beginning. The great
accomplishment of the members was to turn public health into a social and
political issue. In the United States similar groups, known as the “sanitarians,”
also tried to improve sanitary provisions, such as garbage disposal, sewage
system, drinking water, hospitals, food inspection, abattoirs, and animal
rendering. By means of professionalization and a scientific approach to public
health care, including research in laboratories, such sanitary measures were
gradually realized in the course of the nineteenth century. Federal regulations
about the domestic meat supply, however, were not enacted until public
scandals erupted in the first decade of the 1900s.
As for public abattoirs (slaughterhouses), Napoleonic France was the
European leader. Until well into the nineteenth century the Parisian abattoirs
(built 1810-1814) were regarded as exemplary. There and elsewhere in
Europe, butchers were forced to slaughter their livestock centralized in munici
pal slaughterhouses or public abattoirs under mandatory veterinary inspection.
However, this was only accomplished after long debates in local politics
between a faction of hygienists with demands for adequate meat inspection,
allied with animal protectionists and citizens with nuisance complaints on the
one hand, and a coalition of butchers and meat traders whose independence was
threatened on the other hand. Due to the prevailing liberal doctrine of free trade
and restriction of state interference, at first economic interests and the objections
of the butchers outweighed the public health arguments. Authorities believed
that meat inspection was best left to the private sector, and that consumers were
their own best food inspectors. By the turn of the century, however, socialist
ideas and interference by local and national authorities in commercial life tipped
the balance in favor of public slaughterhouses. The establishments of slaughter
houses were further promoted by the enactment of meat inspection acts in
various countries that obliged local authorities to establish a meat inspection
service and to impose hygienic requirements concerning private slaughter
places and butcher’s shops. Many private butcheries could not meet the new
hygiene standards, leading many cities to build abattoirs in order to institute an
adequate meat inspection service. Most of these acts stated that inspection
should be carried out by veterinarians. This also applied to slaughterhouse
directors, thus creating many job opportunities for the profession.
In meat-exporting countries the situation was different. A large-scale meat
industry with centralized slaughtering in huge commercial slaughterhouses
developed from the 1850s onward, first in the United States and later in
South America, Australia, and New Zealand. These large private slaughter
houses proved more cost-efficient than public abattoirs and were quicker to
incorporate new technology. Cincinnati (“Porkopolis”) became the early center
for meat packaging. Chicago took the lead in 1865. Stimulated by the Civil

The Homelands of Rinderpest in Europe 141
War, the large-scale “corn-hog cycle” for fattening pigs, and an expansive
network of railways, Chicago became the city having the world’s largest meat
packing industry, including meat canning. There the meat industry started a
vertical integration by taking over farming and transports and succeeding in
expanding consumer tastes to include by-products such as bacon and lard on a
large scale. One commercial meat packer boasted that his company had found
markets for almost all parts of a slaughtered pig: “we sell everything but the
squeal.” Also, large technological innovations that revolutionized mass pro
duction in the meat industry, namely, division of labor and the disassembly
line (conveyor belt), were developed in Chicago. In 1883 not less than
5 million pigs, 2 million bovines, 750,000 sheep, and 30,000 calves were
slaughtered there. However, the working conditions of labor were very poor,
which, together with published meat scandals and fraud, eventually led to the
federal Meat Inspection Act in the United States in 1907.
These developments took place amidst growing industrialization and
inequality between the world’s richer and poorer peoples. During this period,
increasing global imports and exports of live animals and products of animal
origin led to increasing political and economic conflicts in some places. In East
Asia, China battled European aggression aimed at forcing open borders and
open markets (for European benefit). At the end of the 1800s, empires
weakened as colonies rebelled; and battles over international trade and power
in the early 1900s led up to World War I. In addition to food destined for the
fast-growing civilian populations, the need for feeding armies increased due to
growing international tensions in colonial territories, declining empires, and
among European nations. Veterinary care was also required for the horsepower
wars directly preceding World War I, such as the Franco-Prussian War
(1870-1871), Spanish-American War (1898), Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902),
the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), and the Balkan Wars (1912-1913).
Modern veterinary medicine formed during the late 1800s: its system of
formal education; alliance with the bureaucratic state; and major scientific
breakthroughs. These developments did not happen quickly or easily, how
ever, and they were shaped by the growing animal industries, trade, and
military conflicts. Devastating animal disease crises, including the return of
the dreaded rinderpest, also influenced veterinary medicine’s development.
Hitching a ride with European armies and colonizers, rinderpest quickly
became a historical force that changed not only veterinary medicine but also
societies and cultures around the world.
The Homelands of Rinderpest in Europe

As we know today, rinderpest is caused by a virus, and it can be transmitted by
live animals or infected animal products. Rinderpest is extremely contagious to

cloven-hoofed animals (cattle, sheep, goats, and wildlife), and it has a long
incubation period of up to 21 days. Rinderpest had been the scourge of
European cattle since at least the early 1500s (see Chapter 2). Circulations of
animals around the Continent and high livestock densities in some places
(especially near cities and other large human populations) enabled the disease
to flare up repeatedly over the next 400 years. For example, a “plague of
horned cattle” hit what is now northern Germany in the 1740s-1750s, and
again in the 1770s, killing 70 to 90 percent of the cattle across a wide area.
(Due to this high mortality, this plague is likely to have been rinderpest by
modern definitions.) In the period 1744-1749, England lost half a million, and
the Netherlands 1 million cattle. During the third wave of 1768-1786, again
millions of cattle succumbed in Europe, in spite of the fact that Austria, France,
and Switzerland followed a cull-and-slaughter policy while compensating
victimized farmers. The nineteenth-century global spread of rinderpest
(“steppe murrain”) probably originated in cattle imported to Europe from areas
around the Caspian Sea. These steppe oxen were very resistant to the disease,
and they could appear healthy while shedding the virus. Sporadic outbreaks of
rinderpest occurred in Europe regularly throughout the early 1800s, as well;
but the most devastating epizootic was the “cattle plague” of the 1860s in
Europe and the United Kingdom. Between 1865 and 1867, the height of the
epizootic, 75 to 90 percent of cattle in some affected areas died despite the
efforts of local officials to contain the disease. This was a disaster that
demanded the full attention of national governments and gave the young
veterinary profession a chance to demonstrate its value - but the correct course
of action was often highly contested.
How governments and veterinarians responded to epizootics depended on
the larger social and cultural context, as we have seen; and in 1865 several
broader changes in European science, print culture, and governance led to
greater governmental intervention to prevent rinderpest’s spread. In the case of
Britain, historian John Fisher has asserted that the “cattle plague” (rinderpest)
outbreak in 1865 was the most widely discussed problem of its time. This was
probably one reason why veterinary legislation to control cattle movement and
rinderpest followed rapidly: The Contagious Diseases (Animals) Acts were
expanded in 1869, for example. The British government supported patholo
gists’ investigations into rinderpest and, later, experiments with potential
vaccines, in the hope of finding alternatives to shutting down the cattle trade.
Unfortunately, in the 1860s-1870s laboratory experiments did not offer any
effective solutions to the problem of rinderpest. Veterinary leaders pointed out
that the only effective short-term measure was to stop moving cattle domestic
ally and internationally; isolate and slaughter infected animals; and cull
animals that may have been exposed to infected ones.

This classic technique for containing the spread of a veterinary disease is

called “stamping-out,” and it consists of the government forcing animal
owners to kill all animals that might have been exposed to the disease and
establishing a cordon sanitaire, or quarantine. Cattle-owners, reluctant to kill
healthy animals and concerned about economic loss, often opposed stamping
out policies. In the Netherlands, the first national Livestock Act dated to
1799 and a government fund was created to pay farmers for culled animals.
When rinderpest returned in 1865, the cattle export trade plummeted and
veterinarians could not agree on the correct combination of stamping-out,
establishing cordons sanitaire, or trying other measures such as isolation and
treatment. After a year of debate, a newly elected conservative national
government mobilized the military to force farmers to surrender their cattle
for slaughter as part of a stamping-out campaign. This campaign, against
which the farmers fought, stopped the rinderpest outbreak within three months.
The 1870 Livestock Act established a national Veterinary Service (although
that was also contentious). These examples from European countries respond
ing to the crisis of rinderpest outbreaks reminds us that there was no single
correct policy for preventing and controlling rinderpest during this time period.
In the Ottoman empire and what is today the Middle East, rinderpest
devastated communities during the late 1800s. For example, the disease broke
out in Rison Le Zion and Mikveh Yisreal (present-day Israel, then called
Palestine) in 1894-1895. Outbreaks in Palestine were thought to be imported
with cattle from Damascus, Egypt, or Turkey - demonstrating the multiple
trade routes that connected the outposts of the vast Ottoman empire.
Veterinarians from the Veterinary School in Istanbul were sent to try to control
these outbreaks; they instituted restrictions on animal movement and attempted
treatment and prevention with serum from resistant animals. By the 1890s,
laboratory experimental research was beginning to yield some beneficial
discoveries for both human and animal diseases: Pasteur’s rabies treatment
(1885), tuberculin (1891), the diphtheria antitoxin (1895), and serums (sera)
against specific diseases (discussed below). However, for most disease out
breaks, the most effective control techniques for epizootics continued to be
quarantine, cordons sanitaire, and stamping-out. This general pattern con
tinued even as European imperialism spread rinderpest around the world
during the nineteenth century.
Rinderpest: The Imperial Disease

Wherever Europeans and their animals traveled, rinderpest traveled with them
and unwittingly helped them to invade, explore, and colonize. Animal diseases
were one component of the violence and destruction brought by Europeans to

Africa, East Asia, and India. This was an example of what historian Alfred
Crosby called “ecological imperialism:” European colonialism depended in
part on the introduction of European cattle diseases that devastated the cattle
owning cultures, such as the Maasai, vaShona, Bahima, and Zulu in sub
Saharan Africa. Colonialism was not a monolithic and superior system of
Western dominance; rather, it was a process of mutual adaptation, negotiation,
and conflict between the Indigenous peoples and the new European arrivals.
Veterinary knowledge about rinderpest moved in multiple directions. As we
will see, animal experts in regions of Africa and Asia influenced European
knowledge about animals and healing, just as European veterinary knowledge
and institutions were brought to India, Java, and South Africa.
From Europe, rinderpest spread in Asia in the late 1860s and 1870s, carried
by steamships. Once established in Asian ports, rinderpest moved between
countries quickly. In 1872-1873 Japan was confronted with an outbreak,
which probably was due to imports of live cattle from China. In India, the
first of a series of rinderpest outbreaks began in water buffaloes and cattle in
1868. Between 1872 and 1877, the province of Berar alone lost more than
90 percent of its cattle and buffaloes to rinderpest, an estimated 11 million
animals. Indigenous cattle owners compared puschima (rinderpest) to cholera
in humans - highly contagious and often lethal. They attempted to control
rinderpest by restricting open grazing, keeping healthy animals away from sick
ones, and fumigating cattle shelters by burning aromatic resins. The British
colonial government installed the Indian Cattle Plague Commission to investi
gate the disease and make recommendations for controlling it. As historian
Saurabh Mishra has demonstrated, this commission’s report included import
ant ideas from Indian cattle owners: the control measures mentioned above;
and the belief that a mild infection with the disease would protect the animal if
later exposed to virulent puschima (the basis for vaccination). In 1871, the
Indian Cattle Plague Commission confirmed that the outbreak was similar to
the European one and estimated that the disease could kill 200,000 cattle every
year in India. Recommendations to control rinderpest and to curb livestock
losses included the establishing of veterinary departments and a veterinary
school, and eventually an act for the prevention of rinderpest spreading.
In India in 1871, a stamping-out policy was not even mentioned, perhaps
due to the question of who would pay for the destroyed animals. This is a
particular problem in colonies, where the major goal is to send economic
profits back to the colonizing government. If animals simply died of the
disease, the government was not responsible for paying the cattle-owners.
For small-scale Indian farmers, rinderpest was devastating, contributing to a
series of famines that killed millions of Indian people. The enduring spread of
rinderpest and its impact on the rural economy, however, became a priority for
the colonial government when it began to affect British-owned farms and the

colonial government’s profits. These experiences with rinderpest stimulated

veterinary research, contributing to the establishment of the Imperial
Bacteriological Laboratory in Poona in 1889 and the Indian Civil Veterinary
Department in 1891. Both worked to develop a vaccine against rinderpest but
failed. Two more major famines, 1896-1897 and 1899-1900, affected both
humans and cattle as fodder and crops failed. With British colonial policies
protecting only the wealthier farmers, untold millions of native cattle died,
leaving peasants impoverished and starving.
A similar pattern can be observed in the former colonies of the Dutch East
Indies (now Indonesia). From December 1878 onward, severe outbreaks of
rinderpest, introduced with cattle from India, occurred on Java, Sumatra, and
Borneo. These outbreaks and the resulting food shortages caused tremendous
distress among the population. The Civil Veterinary Service, established in
Batavia (now Jakarta) in 1853 and consisting of only a few veterinarians,
asked for assistance to control the outbreak. Jacobus Lameris (1842-1918) an
expert on rinderpest, and a team of eight other veterinarians were sent to the
colony to control the disease. The local vets worried that the experts had never
seen the local type of buffalo before, and that Dutch methods of disease control
and treatment would not work in the local environment. At first, Lameris
advised the government to let the disease burn out by simply waiting for the
animals to die in great numbers. But stockowners, who would lose a lot of
money, demanded a rigorous stamping-out policy. At the end of 1879, about
75,000 buffalo, cattle, sheep, and goats had been slaughtered in Java, at the
expense of the colonial government. Government officials then ordered a
double north-south bamboo fence to be built. This fence crossed the entire
island to separate the rinderpest-free area of Java from the rest of the territory.
Military forces conducted surveillance and sealed off infected areas to avoid
further spreading of the disease, thus condemning the (mostly poor and
Indigenous) cattle-owners who lived there. The disease raged for six years,
finally contained in 1884 after a loss of more 223,000 animals and devastation
for the peasant cattle-owners.
Along with the draconian military presence, the fences, and the stamping
out campaigns, the colonial government decided to develop a local veterinary
workforce and invest in veterinary research. To support the work of the
Veterinary Service, “Mantries” (paraveterinary assistants) were trained and
appointed from 1880 onward, while Indigenous veterinarians were trained at
the Dutch Indian Veterinary School at Buitenzorg on Java, which was estab
lished in 1907. This school was attached to the Laboratory for Veterinary
Research built in the same year, and these veterinary institutions were
examples of the innovative experimental research carried out by veterinary
scientists in imperial spaces. We might assume that knowledge about veterin
ary diseases would travel only in one direction - from the great research

centers of Europe out to the peripheral colonies. But this was not the case, as
the Dutch Indian Veterinary School and Laboratory for Veterinary Research
demonstrates. It is remarkable that the research program and publications on
surra, dourine, and Newcastle disease performed in this colonial laboratory
surpassed those of the veterinary colleges back in Europe (what is now the
Netherlands). The curriculum of the Dutch veterinary school (Utrecht) only
began to include tropical diseases in 1912, thirty years behind the Javanese
Veterinary School.
Rinderpest did not stop in Europe and Asia; perhaps its worst devastation hit
sub-Saharan Africa in the 1890s. This was not the first importation of rinder
pest to the African continent, but the earlier outbreaks of the disease were
confined to the continent’s north. In 1841, Egypt was the first country on the
African continent to experience an outbreak of rinderpest. About 75 percent of
Egypt’s cattle and buffalo herds died after they were infected by cattle
imported from Romania (in eastern Europe). This earlier outbreak did not
spread throughout the continent for three reasons: first, Indigenous African
kingdoms had border checkpoints, reflecting their understanding that diseases
were (both spiritually and materially) contagious and Europeans were the
source of the problem. For example, in 1859 the King of Ndebeleland ordered
that Europeans and their cattle were not allowed into the kingdom until they
had been subjected to three months’ quarantine and healers’ cleansing rituals,
which consisted of sprinkling them with medicated solutions. These strict
quarantines helped prevent the disease from infecting the rest of the African
continent. Major geographical features, such as the Zambezi River, also helped
to contain rinderpest since it was difficult to get cattle across them. Finally,
until the disease spread to wild animals, the density of animals was low enough
in many places to slow rinderpest’s progress to the south.
Rinderpest returned with Europeans and their cattle, however, entering
eastern Africa in the Eritrean port of Massawa in 1887. The Italian army, keen
to subdue and colonize Somalia, probably brought the disease with infected
cattle from India, meant to feed the Italian soldiers. This was the beginning of
what is still known in sub-Saharan Africa as “The Great Rinderpest
Pandemic,” a tragedy that changed the history of the entire continent. About
95 percent of Ethiopian cattle died, causing famine and the starvation of one-
third of the human population of Eritrea and two-thirds of the Maasai peoples
of Tanzania, within two years. It is difficult to imagine the sufferings of these
people who, in losing their cattle, had lost not only their food supply but also
their culture and way of life. In Tanzania, the Swahili name for this disease was
sadoka, especially when referring to the epizootic in wild animals. German
colonial veterinarians and officials at first did not believe sadoka was rinder
pest, which enabled them to claim it was an “African” disease that they
could ignore.

Within seven years, this disease spread all over sub-Saharan Africa, killing
80 to 90 percent of all domesticated and wild cloven-hoofed ungulates (such as
cattle, goats, wild buffaloes, and other wildlife). Therefore, rinderpest was also
a modern ecological disaster. Rinderpest swept from the Horn of Africa west to
the Atlantic Ocean and south to the Cape of Good Hope. Within human
memory, no similar devastating livestock epidemic had ever visited Africa. It
is estimated that it killed more than 5.2 million domestic bovines, sheep, goats,
and wild populations of buffalo, giraffes, and wildebeest. Attempts to prevent
rinderpest from spreading by proclamations, days of prayer, inoculation,
isolation, containment, and slaughter of infected livestock all failed. Both
European aggression and fighting between African kingdoms interrupted the
traditional measures for stopping the disease, such as border checkpoints.
Rinderpest destroyed cattle culture, which had been the basis for family
relations, transhumance, and political stability in many eastern and southern
African kingdoms and regions. It is impossible to exaggerate the rinderpest
epizootic’s disruption of African societies and cultures that had been built
around cattle herds. This disruption, another example of what historian Alfred
Crosby has called ecological imperialism, only hastened the violent European
takeover of Africans’ lands.
Rinderpest reached the Senegal river by 1891, wiping out wild animals in
the Rift Valley such as buffalo, waterbuck, impala, eland, wildebeest, giraffe,
and even bush-pigs. After rinderpest crossed the Zambesi River in 1896, it was
reaching the southernmost part of the entire continent. The British Cape
Colony government attempted to stop it by erecting a 1,000-mile-long fence
patrolled by soldiers on horseback and disinfecting the people and possessions
that crossed into southern Africa - similar to what the King of Ndebeleland
had ordered in 1859. Despite these measures, rinderpest marched into the
Republic of South Africa, where the colonial Veterinary Officer reported it
in the Cape Colony and German Southwest Africa (now Namibia) in 1897.
Veterinarians working as government officials attempted stamping-out to try to
stop the disease; nevertheless, rinderpest annihilated the south’s cattle. Within
just ten years, rinderpest had infected an entire continent and changed the lives
of most of its people permanently.
As was the case with the Dutch colonial government in Java, the British and
German colonial governments and European colonists took action to try to
prevent future epizootics. In German Southwest Africa, the colonial govern
ment established a buffer zone or no-man’s-land from east to west across the
whole country. This zone separated the south, where rinderpest was being
stamped out, from the north (location of the Black African tribes and their
cattle). Later, a fence known as the “Red Line” was built in the buffer zone and
enforced by soldiers (this fence is still present today). In the colonies that
would become the Union of South Africa in 1910, the colonial governments

expanded the state veterinary services and established veterinary research

laboratories. Like their colleagues in Java, veterinary scientists at this colonial
laboratory (later the Onderstepoort Veterinary Research Institute, described
below) developed new serums, attempted innovative vaccines, and made
discoveries about tropical diseases that generated important new scientific
knowledge. Rinderpest, a devastating effect of imperialism, thus also trans
formed knowledge about animal diseases in Africa by motivating European
colonial governments to establish veterinary institutions. With no more cattle
to kill, the epizootic finally burnt itself out in 1905. But rinderpest remained
endemic in eastern Africa, reemerging in Kenya in 1907 (and for decades
afterward), and spreading due to raiding and illegal movement of cattle by
Europeans and Africans.
Another disease that travelled, contagious bovine pleuropneumonia (CBPP),
was probably present in some parts of Central Europe around 1700. CBPP
invaded the rest of Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century due to the
French Wars and increasing livestock trade. From Western Europe it spread to
all continents except South America. Often it was confused with anthrax or
rinderpest. It was studied intensively in the laboratories of the newly estab
lished veterinary colleges in France, where it was described in detail based on
pathological-anatomical abductions. The causative agent of this livestock
disease (Mycoplasma mycoides) was not identified until late in the nineteenth
century. Supporters of the miasma theory did not believe in the contagious
nature of this disease and thus disapproved of a system for cull and slaughter.
As with cattle plague in the eighteenth century, these vets made attempts to
preventively inoculate bovines with setons drenched in saliva or lung fluid
from infected animals. Particularly in Belgium, the Netherlands, and France,
experiments with inoculation on a larger scale were executed around 1850.
Most influential were the experiments by Louis Willems (1822-1907), a
Belgian physician (Fig. 4.1). After training in France, Germany, and the
Netherlands, Willems entered a prize contest sponsored by the Academie
Royale de Medecine de Belgique and wrote a positive report on containing
CBPP. His claims received international attention. Except for Britain, where
the Royal Agricultural Society took the initiative, all the major Western
European governments ordered their veterinary authorities to test and evaluate
the Willems tail inoculation method. In most cases a painful swelling
developed, accompanied by fever. Mortality ranged from 1 to 3 percent, while
7 to 9 percent of the animals lost part of their tail. In hindsight, the inoculation
with attenuated cultures of mycoplasma must have induced some immunity.
However, the results were mediocre, probably because inoculation was being
performed on already-infected animals. Therefore, many farmers and veterin
arians worried that inoculation would only perpetuate the presence of the
causal agent among herds. Their resistance was the main reason why

Figure 4.1 Tail inoculation according to Belgian physician Louis Willems

(1822-1907), Cologne, Germany, 1854.
Source: C.Th. Sticker, Die Lungenseuche des Rindviehs und die dagegen
anzuwendende Impfung (Koln 1854), attached plate. Courtesy: Library, University of
Veterinary Medicine Hannover, Germany.
inoculation was replaced by the proven measure of stamping-out (slaughter of

all infected animals) in most countries toward the end of the nineteenth
century.
As a veterinary reflex, stamping-out programs had been a consistent feature
of public animal health strategies in Europe and elsewhere for about three
centuries. As a disease control strategy, stamping-out has even survived to the
early twenty-first century for a very simple reason: it works. As critically as it
was approached in the course of time, particularly from an animal protection
point of view, killing diseased animals and those in proximity proved to be the
most cost-effective means of preventing and eradicating infectious livestock
diseases. In the case of CBPP, the emerging national veterinary services could
choose between a strategy of stamping-out or the pre-Pasteurian form of

vaccination (Willems’ tail inoculation). Veterinary bureaucracies, particularly

on mainland Europe, were anxious to demonstrate their professional value.
The choices they made differed from nation to nation, depending on the
political economy: the strong national approach with centralized veterinary
state supervision versus a liberal economy with local autonomy, where disease
control was left to municipal and regional boards. Only the state had the
resources to support eradication programs and compensate farmers, the ability
to order unpopular slaughter and trade restriction, and the power to punish
those who ignored the imposed rules.
Compared to rinderpest, CBPP did not cause as much social, cultural, and
demographic disruption. It was considered more a problem for the rural
economy. CBPP revealed the difference in public appreciation between
physicians and veterinarians around the middle of the nineteenth century.
Just as veterinarians had trouble controlling this lung disease, medical doctors
stood powerless against cholera outbreaks among humans. Nevertheless, med
ical doctors maintained their status of learned men despite their failure to cure
people suffering from cholera. On the other hand, veterinarians were roundly
criticized for their inability to cure lung disease/CBPP, while their economic
benefit for a healthy livestock economy was questioned until the 1900s, when
they could provide effective preventives or therapies for some diseases.
The rinderpest panzootic (global outbreak) and spread of CBPP stimulated
the establishment of veterinary institutions in many parts of the world. By
1900, the United States had taken over the Philippines and other parts of the
old Spanish colonial empire, and the Americans inherited the problem of
rinderpest epizootics. Rinderpest had entered the Spanish Philippines in
1887, imported by infected animals from Indochina and Hong Kong.
Veterinarians from the Spanish army tried to contain the outbreak, with little
success. The American invasion in 1898 brought a second wave of rinderpest
that was much worse. The American army spread the disease along with the
soldiers and their draft animals, and to protect the new colony the U.S. colonial
government established a veterinary department in 1899. Sixty civilian
American veterinarians, functioning as inspectors of livestock imported
through the port of Manila, worked closely with the U.S. Army’s Veterinary
Corps. But Filipinos continued to fight for independence until 1902, and the
U.S. Army’s military maneuvers continued to spread rinderpest. In the period
1901-1902 alone, more than 629,000 cattle and water buffaloes were killed by
the disease. Spanish and American authorities did not apply a slaughter policy
but tried to contain rinderpest by imposing quarantines against imported
animals from China and Australia in the harbors. In 1905, the colonial
veterinary department was placed under the management of the U.S.
Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Animal Industry, making it an arm of
the U.S. government rather than a small colonial office. This greatly increased

The Disease of Madness: Rabies 151
numbers of veterinarians, and two years later the Philippine Veterinary

Medical Association was established (1907). Rinderpest stalked the
Philippines, causing up to 90 percent of cattle to die at times, until the 1940s.
Around the world, the ruinous effects of rinderpest were part of European
colonialism. Where European animals traveled, rinderpest came along; and
European science followed it. Increasing numbers of veterinarians associated
with the military, colonial governments, and even colonial farmers’ associ
ations went to these colonies for employment (and the more ambitious ones,
for scientific fame). In this way, rinderpest stimulated the formation of veter
inary regimes of control that included regulations, field stations, checkpoints,
research laboratories, professional associations, and schools. These veterinar
ians working in these institutions and in private practices tried to understand
and control animal disease problems while legitimizing veterinary medicine as
a state-sanctioned and state-supported profession. Their activities, in turn,
supported the goals of colonial governments and helped to transform animal
husbandry and the land in places like eastern and southern Africa, Southeast
Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Rinderpest was an agent of death and destruction
to indigenous African and Asian cattle, and to the lifeways of the people who
raised them. It also significantly disrupted natural ecosystems by killing wild
grazers. As one observer in eastern Africa wrote, rinderpest created landscapes
of desolation. As we discuss later in this chapter, these were the landscapes
that stimulated some of the most important developments in the veterinary
sciences and disease research.
The Disease of Madness: Rabies

Another greatly feared disease was rabies. Rabies, lyssa, hydrophobia (Latin),
Tollwut (German), водобоязнь (Russian), kuduz (Turkish), rage (French),
has been associated with dogs since ancient times. As with other animal
diseases, until the 1800s it was primarily diagnosed by observing the symp
toms: dogs that appeared “mad,” snarling, salivating, jerking, or convulsing,
and biting other animals and humans. Once a bitten person or animal became
ill, the disease was almost 100 percent fatal. Today tens of thousands of people
die from rabies annually, particularly in parts of Africa and Asia and in any
place with a high number of unvaccinated dogs. Humans can also be infected
by bites from rabid foxes, cats, wolves, monkeys, bats, raccoons, or skunks.
The centuries-long circulation of various recipes against bites of infected dogs
indicates the regular reemergence of this ancient disease.
Several theories about what caused this disease existed; today, we know that
rabies is caused by an RNA virus from the Lyssavirus family. You may be
surprised to learn where the name “lyssavirus” came from. Since antiquity, the
idea persisted that rabies was caused by the lyssa, a “worm” that was located

under the tongue of all dogs that could cause them to “go mad.” (Today we call
this anatomical structure the frenulum. Look under your tongue: humans have
a frenulum also.) Cutting out this alleged “worm” in healthy dogs was a
standard preventive measure that was practiced until well into the nineteenth
century. For a long time, spontaneous generation was taken as the cause of
rabies. Other rabies causation theories were summer heat, poisoning, lack of
water, bad food or tainted water, incurable canine immorality, and unsatisfied
libido. (Some French and German towns even considered establishing
“brothels” for city dogs to prevent rabies!) The traditional therapy in humans
consisted of cauterization of bite wounds followed by applying various drugs
from herbal, mineral, or animal origin. Cattle and other livestock, if bitten by a
rabid dog, were bled and the bite wound was cauterized. As we have seen in
the case of other diseases, the treatments corresponded to theories about what
caused rabies. Infection of livestock and humans represented a societal prob
lem: the financial losses of dead cattle and the great fear among humans of a
horrible death were considerable.
Towns and regional governments responded with regulations designed to
control the dog population and therefore control rabies. From antiquity
onward, laws, decrees, and placards were issued in Europe and Asia, allowing
or even encouraging the mass killing of infected or suspected stray dogs to
prevent rabies. Many cultures associated rabies with the late summer, the so-
called dog days, and an outbreak of rabies usually led to mass killing of dogs in
the affected region. This often meant that dogs were chased and stoned,
burned, or beaten to death. In ancient Greece and Rome, there were even
designated days for the destruction of dogs; kynophantes and dies caniculares,
respectively. In some countries “dog slayers” were appointed to do this job.
(These should not be confused with dog butchers, who slaughtered dogs for
human consumption or for the preparation of medicine based on dog tissues.
Dog meat was consumed in Europe until well into the twentieth century and is
still consumed in Asia today.) Of course, some dogs learned to evade their
pursuers, often forming groups that may even have helped the virus to spread.
Dogs with owners had a better chance of survival. Although many larger
towns and cities charged dog-taxes to limit dog populations, even poorer
people quietly kept dogs on chains or leashes or in yards. The muzzle, which
prevented the dog from biting, also has a long history around the world.
A Japanese regulation of 1695 ordered owners of aggressive dogs to keep
them confined and muzzled. Especially during epizootics of rabies, healthy
dogs were ordered to be kept confined to avoid contact with infected animals.
Any suspected case of rabies usually meant the dog would be killed immedi
ately, or at least isolated from other animals and people. In cities, regions, or
countries with formalized public health systems, animal healers were required

The Disease of Madness: Rabies 153
to notify the officials about suspected cases of rabies. In predominantly

Muslim areas, dogs were regarded as unclean animals and forbidden except
for a small number of exceptions. Although this was a spiritual law, it also had
the effect of controlling rabies.
Despite these efforts, citizens found dogs difficult to control. For 10,000
years, dogs had evolved in association with humans. Dogs were clever, they
understood how to live near and evade humans; and they reproduced effi
ciently. They were small enough to hide and quick enough to run away
successfully. People valued their dogs as sources of companionship, work,
and food; and they hid them from the dog catchers. Unable to control the
canine population, some places, especially islands or isolated areas, chose to
completely ban the importation of dogs. For example, compulsory quarantine
for all dogs and a ban on importing dogs was proposed in Britain in 1793. In
1897 these measures were adopted to eradicate rabies from the UK, which was
successful. Apart from separate Dog Acts and Rabies Acts, this disease was
one of the first animal diseases to be included as notifiable in Cattle Acts that
were enacted in many countries in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Generally, enforcement of veterinary supervision on a national level proved
more successful than on a regional or local level.
In 1800, several theories about what caused this disease existed, but one
thing was clear: the bite of a rabid animal conveyed the disease. This observa
tion led to the study of rabies in early veterinary schools and research insti
tutes, especially in France. These veterinary institutions usually focused on
horse and livestock diseases, but rabies was the exception that brought atten
tion to diseases of dogs (and other smaller animals, such as cats). In 1823, the
physiologist Frangois Magendie (1783-1855) inoculated two healthy dogs
with saliva from a human victim of rabies. One dog developed rabies and
infected other dogs and sheep by biting them. Lyons veterinary school profes
sor Pierre-Victor Galtier (1846-1908) further revealed the etiology of rabies,
particularly the role of saliva and nervous tissue in transmission during bites.
By 1879, he demonstrated that the disease could be transmitted from dogs to
rabbits using injections of blood and saliva. This established an animal model
that could be studied in the laboratory. As we will see, the famous microbiolo
gist Louis Pasteur also began studying rabies at about this time, and the work
of Pasteur and his colleagues on rabies led to major discoveries in vaccine
development. Pasteur and his colleagues developed an effective post-exposure
treatment for humans in 1885. Some historians believe that Pasteur used
Galtier’s ideas without crediting him fairly. Ironically, Galtier accidentally
infected himself during experiments with rabies and had to be treated with
Pasteur’s emergency vaccine. We return to discussing rabies later in this
chapter.

Indigenous Healing Regimes around the World Continued

to Thrive
Although Western veterinary medicine was introduced in Java in the nine
teenth century, local stockowners continued to use traditional medicines. The
local population had at least one name for each disease, while livestock
keepers seemed to have had an elaborate knowledge of livestock diseases.
Some of this knowledge was brought into formal veterinary concepts and
practices. There is evidence that Dutch veterinarians occasionally acquired or
utilized Indigenous knowledge. For instance, farmers in West Java treated foot
and mouth disease with ayer asem, derived from tamarind. A mixture of salt
and tamarind was applied to the blisters on infected animals. Another example
is surra, a disease of equines that was unknown to most Europeans. Based on
close observation, Indigenous Javanese animal owners believed that surra was
transmitted by flies. Western veterinarians were slow to accept the Javanese
experience, until the link between trypanosomiasis and tsetse flies was demon
strated in Africa in 1902.
A clash between Western scientific and local knowledge also occurred in the
British-ruled Cape Colony (part of today’s South Africa) in the 1870s through
1890s. British vets appointed by the Cape Colony government, with their
Western ideas on miasmatic environmental or contagious causes of livestock
diseases, were often opposed by European settler farmers (Boers) and
Indigenous Khoikhoi shepherds and farmers. In the case of liver flukes in
sheep, for instance, farmers were advised to drain their land, which in hind
sight could be considered bad for the environment. However, farmers let sheep
roam in brackish bushes or administered salt to get rid of internal parasites, as
was also done in Australia. The Boers used many home remedies, made from
indigenous plants, or ones based on Khoikhoi knowledge. The British colonial
vets put efforts into the establishment of an experimental farm in 1880 and the
enactment of the Contagious Diseases Act in 1881, which increased their
power to control the livestock of the Khoikhoi and Boer farmers. In many
places, animal owners did not rely on formal veterinary medicine. Printed
sources such as books, recipes and pamphlets remained major sources of
knowledge for animal owners that enabled them to treat their own animals.
In the United States, for example, two popular books by the physician George
Dadd stressed the importance of rational empiricism: The Modern Horse
Doctor (1854) and The Modern Cattle Doctor (1851). The organized veterin
ary profession viewed Dadd with suspicion because he called into question
standard treatments such as bleeding and purging; but his books provided
widely used guidelines for veterinary care.
These examples remind us that, although the European-style veterinary
regimes were increasing in scope and power around the world, it is important

Veterinary Institutions 155
to remember that most animal health care was still provided on an individual
basis by folk healers and animal owners. This veterinary marketplace, and the
local knowledge that went with it, was well established. It often powerfully
contested the developing veterinary regime. Outside of Western Europe,
veterinarians were almost always outnumbered by local healers.
Additionally, they were usually employed by the European military or local,
regional, or national colonial governments - whose major concerns were often
epizootics and zoonoses. Therefore, in most settler colonies, animal health care
could be loosely divided into two separate realms: individualized, traditional
healing and the imported veterinary regime of the colonial government.
Although the specifics of these veterinary regimes varied from place to place,
all had some combination of regulation and the development of physical
institutions, including schools and laboratories. These institutions’ goals were
to understand and control the most economically serious animal disease
problems. In the process, they also legitimized veterinary medicine as a
state-sanctioned profession during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Veterinary Institutions
Schools: Continuing the Imperial Veterinary Education Model

Like the history of medical schools, in veterinary medicine the early centers of
education were in France, followed by Scotland. The “Paris school” of clinical
(human) medicine, hospital based, had its counterpart in the early schools of
Lyon and Alfort and their competitors. Another center of medical education,
built up within the Scottish Enlightenment of the late 1700s, encouraged the
development of veterinary education in Edinburgh (see Chapter 3). Along with
the French, German, and Spanish schools, these nodes of veterinary education
launched further expansion of the European-style schools into Asia and the
Americas. For example, the German veterinary educational and research
traditions were very important in Asia. In Japan after the Meiji Restoration
(1868), the first European-style veterinary school was founded in Tokyo in
1876. The Meiji government actively recruited teachers of “Western methods”
from Germany, France, and Britain. Between 1900 and 1910, new veterinary
departments were founded in at least two universities in China (in Jilin and
Guangzhou), based on agricultural animal husbandry and the need to control
epizootics. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Chinese government selected students
to be sent to Europe and the United States for veterinary training. Returning to
China, veterinarians such as Luo Qingsheng (^ЖФ) (Nanjing Agricultural
University) founded veterinary departments or schools using the Western
curriculum.

In Edinburgh, William Dick’s school and a competitor, the school headed

by John Gamgee (1831-1894), trained the next generation of young leaders
who transported the formal educational model to North America during the
1860s-1880s. Andrew Smith (1834-1910), who graduated in 1861, was
recruited to Toronto (Canada) to found what became the Ontario Veterinary
College (1862), the first permanent school in North America. He was joined by
fellow Edinburgh graduate Duncan McEachran (1841-1924), who established
the Montreal Veterinary College (1866) in French-speaking Quebec, Canada.
McEachran’s school was very progressive. With a three-year curriculum based
on the latest in comparative pathology and medicine, the school was home to
one of the great leaders of modern medicine, William Osler. Back in
Edinburgh, a classmate of Andrew Smith, James Law (1838-1921), was hired
by Cornell University in 1868 to establish the first school of veterinary
medicine in the United States. At Cornell, Law trained the scientists and
veterinarians who established the research and meat inspection programs at
the U.S. Bureau of Animal Industry. The Edinburgh educational model was
not the only one transferred to North America, however. The U.S. veterinary
profession was also shaped by the Parisian veterinarian Alexandre Liautard
(1835-1918), trained at Alfort and Toulouse, who ran veterinary schools in
New York City beginning in the 1860s. Liautard edited a popular journal and
was highly influential. Other early veterinary leaders included Heinrich
J. Detmers (1835-1906), educated at the Royal Veterinary Colleges in
Hannover and Berlin, Germany. Detmers immigrated to the United States
and taught veterinary sciences/medicine at several state universities in the
1870s and 1880s: Iowa, home to the first state (public) university veterinary
school in the United States; and the veterinary faculties of Kansas, Missouri,
and Illinois. Finally, Detmers moved to the School of Veterinary Science at the
Ohio State University in the 1880s, where he established the first bacteriology
course in an American veterinary curriculum and served as director of this
School. Through Detmers and his students, the German model was very
influential in the U.S. state (public) universities.
In south Asia, the British imperial regime (the Raj) brought veterinarians to
India and what is now Pakistan. These were mostly graduates of the Royal
Veterinary College, London, and they included the talented researcher Griffith
Evans (1835-1935), who had also acquired a medical degree while posted
with the military in Canada. Sent to India in 1877, Evans researched animal
disease problems and eventually discovered the trypanosome that caused the
disease surra in horses and camels (both important animals for military
transport). Veterinary education in British India has a fascinating history: as
early as 1821, military veterinary surgeon J.T. Hodgson trained Indians to be
veterinary assistants to the corps of Indian cavalry. In 1862, the army veterin
ary department opened a school at Poona that concentrated on equine health

care. The first permanent veterinary school that addressed a broader range of
animal health problems was the Punjab Veterinary College established in
Lahore (1881-1882). The Bengal Veterinary College began accepting local
students for a three-year course in 1896, and its students were expected to
address problems with cattle diseases. By 1900, new veterinary colleges
had been founded in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, and post-graduate
training was available for field veterinarians at the Imperial Institute of
Veterinary Research. The Indian veterinary regime was hierarchical, from
the more elite “veterinary assistants” at the top to the most-humble “low caste”
veterinarians in local towns and cities. Although this structure has evolved
quite a bit since then, the robust system of formal veterinary education
continues in India today.
The French-Spanish model, based on the national veterinary school at
Madrid, also spread rapidly with imperialism and the development of new
nations in Central and South America in the second half of the nineteenth
century. Schools were established at Llavallol, Argentina (1883); Santiago,
Chile (1898); Lima, Peru (1902); Montevideo, Uruguay (1905); and Havana,
Cuba (1907), and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1913). These schools adapted
European knowledge to the political and agricultural needs of their locations,
and governments could hire European-trained veterinarians from several coun
tries. For example, the founders of the School of Veterinary Medicine estab
lished in Havana, Cuba, had been trained in Madrid, Cordoba, and Zaragoza,
Spain (Francisco Etchegoyen Montane and Francisco del Rio Ferrer);
Toulouse, France (Julio Brower Etchecopar); and New York, USA (Honore
Laine). The Chilean government imported Julio Besnard from Toulouse, and
several other French-trained veterinarians were engaged to oversee national
meat inspection, the president’s horse guard (Daniel Monfallet), and the
development of bacteriology laboratories. Besnard even established a
Zoological Garden in which scientists could study comparative anatomy and
physiology, and animal diseases such as foot and mouth disease and anthrax in
numerous species. In 1905, a military veterinary school replaced the old
cavalry school, and this school’s curriculum was heavily influenced by the
German model. Another interesting example is the establishment of the veter
inary school at Montevideo, Uruguay. In this case, the government enticed
Daniel Elmer Salmon (from the U.S. Bureau of Animal Industry) to come to
Uruguay and establish the school. Therefore, this school was based on the
model at Cornell University in New York, USA (as was the school established
in Manila, the Philippines, by U.S. military veterinarians in 1910). These
complex networks of veterinarians, and the further spread of European-style
veterinary regimes, deserve more study by veterinary historians - especially in
terms of how local circumstances both constrained and shaped the imported
European institutions.

In the European-colonized regions during the late 1800s, only a few gradu
ate veterinarians had relocated permanently, and these formed the elite of the
new veterinary regimes. They almost always carried very heavy duties and
held multiple offices. Andrew Smith, for example, ran the Toronto/Ontario
Veterinary School for over forty years, helped establish the Ontario Veterinary
Association, pushed for national legislation to forbid non-graduates from
practicing animal healing, served as the Dominion stock inspector, and mili
tary veterinary surgeon, and worked on commissions to address recurrent
epizootics. In his spare time, Smith studied and passed the examination to
become a member of the (British) Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. Even
after the turn of the twentieth century this remained true. In the United States,
Leonard Pearson (1868-1909) served as the Dean of the University of
Pennsylvania Veterinary School, developed and oversaw a model bovine
tuberculosis eradication plan, was the Pennsylvania State Veterinarian, served
as an officer of multiple veterinary associations, and declined an offer to
become Chief of the U.S. Bureau of Animal Industry. Pearson died at a young
age of “overwork” (archival letters hint at suicide), a major loss to American
veterinary medicine. By 1900, there were still only 8,000 graduate veterinar
ians in the United States to care for tens of millions of animals spread over a
vast territory, carry out state and federal meat inspection, conduct research, and
run disease eradication campaigns. Until enough home-grown veterinary
leaders could be trained, the early veterinary elite suffered with heavy work
loads. They also had a great deal of influence over the shape of the developing
veterinary regimes in the Americas and places such as Japan, the Philippines,
and Australia.
Australia’s veterinary schools developed mainly from the Edinburgh model
of veterinary education. Graham Mitchell (graduate of the Dick Veterinary
School in Edinburgh) and, later, William Tyson Kendall (graduate of the Royal
College of Veterinary Surgeons, London) emigrated to Melbourne. They
worked hard to start a veterinary school in the 1870s-1880s; in 1908 it had
become part of the University of Melbourne. Another Edinburgh graduate,
James Douglas Stewart, campaigned for and designed a new veterinary school
associated with the University of Sydney. With two locations, urban Sydney
and more rural Camden, this school’s curriculum encompassed both equine
medicine and the control of livestock diseases. As Dean of this school, Stewart
was remarkable for sponsoring native New Zealanders and women as students
at this school (at a time when women and minority groups were mostly
excluded from veterinary education).
Veterinary schools benefited from many of the scientific discoveries of the
1800s, beginning with the application of antisepsis and anesthesia in surgery.
Antisepsis traces its history to early notions of cleanliness when manipulating
animal and human bodies. However, antisepsis only became well established

in human and animal surgery after the work of English surgeon Joseph Lister
(1827-1912), who famously developed carbolic acid solutions to spray on
wounds and the surrounding areas and protective dressings to maintain clean
liness. Although these methods significantly increased survival rates, espe
cially with thoracic and abdominal surgery, veterinarians were slower to adopt
them overall (compared with physicians). Isolating superficial wounds from
dirt was difficult, especially in the case of livestock. Anesthesia was similarly
slow to become standard practice in veterinary practice, in part due to the
expense of ether and chloroform for such large animals, and because animals
could simply be physically restrained with ropes. For humans, anesthesia was
used from the 1840s onward in dentistry, surgery, and childbirth.
But for veterinary medicine, the major problem remained the recurring
outbreaks of livestock diseases, which stimulated the formation of various
veterinary institutions with attached laboratories where research was con
ducted to better understand the underlying principles of health and disease in
both animals and humans. To this goal often laboratory animals were used as a
model, next to the application of physics and chemistry, the two major natural
sciences influencing and enforcing (veterinary) medicine.
Laboratories: Colonial and National

The establishment of colonial and national laboratories was an important
development for veterinary knowledge. Most of these laboratories were free
standing institutions, but some were connected to the newly founded veterin
ary schools. There, research was conducted on questions related to the trans
mission of livestock diseases. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, this
included mainly rinderpest and sheep pox, while attention was drawn to
contagious pleuropneumonia and bovine tuberculosis somewhat later.
Research on veterinary topics took place in all kinds of labs around the world.
National examples include the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Robert Koch
Institute in Berlin, and the Istanbul-based Bakteriyolojijane-i Baytari
(Veterinary Bacteriology Laboratory) headed by Adil Mustafa Sehzadebasi.
There were also municipal bacteriological labs, (military) hospitals, (bio)
chemical institutes, bacteriology, vaccinology, and serum institutes, colonial
or tropical institutes, and general hygiene and public health-care institutes.
Additionally, laboratory methods were used to test drinking water supplies,
meat from slaughterhouses, commercial products, and in the pharmaceutical
industry. The boundaries between human and animal medicine were not as
sharply divided then as they are today: scientists from various disciplines
worked closely together on comparative medicine.
In tropical areas of the world, medical laboratories often conducted research
on veterinary topics. Almost all used experimental animals. In 1888, a medical

research laboratory was established on Java in the former Dutch East Indies.
One of the research officers was physician Christiaan Eijkman (1858-1930),
who studied polyneuritis in fowl. He noticed that the symptoms of beriberi in
chickens used in his laboratory disappeared when these were fed with unpol
ished instead of polished rice. Eventually this led to the discovery of the
etiology of human beriberi (thiamine/vitamin B-1 deficiency) and contributed
to a general understanding of vitamins in nutrition (for humans and animals).
Eijkman himself at first was convinced that beriberi was caused by a bacter
ium, but his assistant, animal physiologist Gerrit Grijns (1865-1944), con
vinced him that thiamine present in rice membrane played a crucial role. Polish
biochemist Kazimierz Funk (1884-1967) shortened the term “vital amine” to
create the word “vitamin.” In 1929 Eijkman received the Nobel Prize for his
work on vitamin B. In this same laboratory in 1890, physician Joost van Eecke
(1860-1895) diagnosed hemorrhagic septicemia in buffaloes, a disease which
was until then considered a form of rinderpest by Dutch vets. Some veterinar
ians worked in these medical research teams. Other vets performed research at
the Pathological Laboratory of the Deli Land Cultivation Company at Medan
and investigated trypanosomiasis, piroplasmosis, and rinderpest. There, a
disease called farcin du boeuf (tropical actinomycosis) was first diagnosed in
cattle suffering from chronic skin abscesses.
Perhaps the most well-known and influential international network of dis
ease research institutes was the Pasteur Institutes. Based in Paris, where
scientists were initially trained before being sent around the world, the network
included laboratories that had been established in places such as today’s
Vietnam (Southeast Asia); Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco in northern Africa;
Madagascar; St. Petersburg, Russia; and Tehran, Iran. Each of these institutes
was a unique blend influenced by the local disease problems, the scientific
interests and personality of the institute’s director, and the standard Pasteurian
techniques and approaches. Historians have approached the international net
work of Pasteur institutes from the perspective of human medicine. However,
just like the parent Institut Pasteur in Paris, all these institutes had a broad view
of the interesting and necessary disease problems that should be studied, and
they often carried out important research on animal diseases such as rabies.
Comparative medicine was an integral part of the Pasteurian approach.
National governments began supporting animal disease laboratories, often
associated with meat and food inspection efforts, during the second half of the
nineteenth century. One example was the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI),
established in the United States in 1884 to address the twin problems of
trichinosis in pork and contagious bovine pleuropneumonia (CBPP). Its first
director was Daniel Elmer Salmon (1850-1914, Fig. 4.2), who studied at
Cornell (USA) and the Alfort veterinary school (France). Salmon established
the first major microbiological laboratory in the United States at the BAI,

Figure 4.2 Daniel Elmer Salmon (1850-1914), the first American who was
granted a DVM degree (from Cornell in 1876) in the United States. First
director of the Bureau of Animal Industry, U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The bacterial genus Salmonella was named in his honor.
Source: Public domain, Library of Congress (USA).
choosing research problems that could be easily justified to farmers and

government officials. Annual reports always included calculations of the
estimated numbers of animals saved and their economic worth as well as the
BAI scientists’ technical research. Some of this research, notably the Texas cattle
fever experiments of the 1890s, transformed the scientific understanding of
causation and transmission for both animal and human diseases. The Texas cattle
fever experiments established the roles of insect vectors in transmitting diseases
and served as an important stimulus to research on many animal and human
diseases (including yellow fever and malaria). The BAI also developed important
strategies designed to eradicate animal diseases across vast, sparsely settled and
relatively unregulated territory (a very different situation from Europe).
CBPP, a disease that long plagued cattle in Europe, had spread during the
1850s-1860s to places such as the United States and Australia (where it
became enzootic). It spread easily because the incubation time is 3 to 7 weeks
and outbreaks follow a slow course. The morbidity rate is 10 percent, while

mortality is about 50 percent. Twenty-five percent of recovered cattle remain

carriers for a very long time. By the end of the nineteenth century, the etiology
of this disease was elucidated by the French veterinarians Emile Roux
(1853-1933) and Edmond Nocard (1850-1903). CBPP had puzzled veterinary
researchers: it was caused by Mycoplasma, a bacterium that was difficult to
culture in the laboratory; and it was difficult to control because it had a long
incubation period (during which the animals often did not show symptoms).
CBPP was highly contagious in animals being shipped or housed in close
quarters. In 1879, the United States experienced an outbreak so severe that the
British government blocked U.S. cattle exports to the UK and Canada. The
BAI developed a federally coordinated area-eradication strategy, based on
dividing the country up into different levels of infection and corresponding
restrictions on cattle movement. While experiments on finding an effective
vaccine against the disease failed, the specific area-eradication strategy suc
cessfully eliminated the disease from the United States by 1892. (This strategy
was a model for some other nations’ modern disease eradication programs and,
a century later, for the successful global elimination of smallpox in humans.)
Drawing on the rapidly increasing knowledge of blood-borne immunity,
scientists used a comparative medicine approach to develop tools to fight diseases
in the late 1800s. Next to the pioneering work of Russian scientist Ilya Ilich
Metchnikov (1845-1916), German physician Emil von Behring (1854-1917)
was renowned as a pioneer in serum therapy and discoverer of diphtheria and
tetanus antitoxin. He worked closely together with German physician and chemist
Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915), the founder of modern chemotherapy. Observations of
animals that survived an illness led to the identification of substances in the blood
that could transfer resistance to the disease to another animal (or even humans).
Scientists also quickly learned that large animals, particularly horses, could serve
as “factories” to generate blood sera that provided resistance to diseases such as
diphtheria. In 1895, the development of diphtheria antitoxin in horses was the first
major serotherapy. Veterinary and medical microbiologists, including von
Behring and Shibasaburo Kitasato (1853-1931), injected horses with toxins and
small amounts of infectious material. Later, they harvested the horses’ blood sera;
and although they did not yet understand exactly what factors supplied the
protection, they knew that purified sera injected into victims of diphtheria,
cholera, tetanus, and other infections saved many lives. These early “biologicals,”
as the animal-manufactured treatments were called, promised future discoveries
to help control the ravages of infectious diseases in animals and humans.
Development of Veterinary Pharmacology in Laboratories

This brings us to the beginning of veterinary pharmacology. Until the end of
the eighteenth century, handbooks and manuscripts dealing with drugs

(materia medica) usually contained uncritical descriptions of therapeutic

effects in patients. The first two more critical handbooks on veterinary drugs
were both published in 1840 by the French veterinarian Henri M.O. Delafond
(1805-1861) and German veterinarian Carl Hertwig (1798-1881). The first
half of the nineteenth century witnessed experiments in laboratories in attempts
to find explanations for these observed effects. Experimental techniques were
aimed at investigating the physiological and chemical modes of action of
substances on laboratory animals, and an effective protection against
poisoning. An important part of research was dedicated to the isolation of
active substances from medicinal herbs. Morphine, emetine, strychnine, col
chicine, and quinine were extracted and isolated and the pharmaceutical indus
try started to produce these commercially.
Pharmacokinetic research by French researchers Frangois Magendie
(1783-1855) and his successor Claude Bernard (1813-1878) followed during
the nineteenth century. Their interest in the structure and synthesis of drugs
was aimed at understanding the relation between structure and operation. The
first synthesized drug was the anesthetic chloral hydrate in 1832 and employed
since 1869. In 1875, aspirin was first used in therapy. Salicylic acid was
extracted from willow bark. For ages the antipyretic operation of this bark
was known. More synthetic drugs followed that were listed in handbooks.
From the 1870s onward, the pharmaceutical industry started to produce and
market synthetic agents. From then on veterinarians had synthetic antipyretic,
anti-infective, laxative, anesthetic, and emetic drugs at their proposal.
Legislation to control the release of new veterinary drugs became effective
from the turn of the century. In the United States, for example, the Pure Food
and Drugs Act was established in 1906.
These newly developed drugs as well as new surgery equipment and
techniques were first tested on laboratory animals. During the nineteenth
century their number increased rapidly, causing public criticism, particularly
when vivisection was applied (as we discuss later in this chapter). Research
projects dealing with animal breeding (crossbreeding) and testing animal
fodder to increase growth and production were performed at experimental
farms, attached to veterinary and agricultural colleges and institutes. Vaccine
and serum production (previously mentioned) were particularly important
reasons to establish veterinary laboratories. Medical and veterinary acts to
control contagious diseases were adopted in many countries in the last quarter
of the nineteenth century. These acts usually included provisions for traditional
measures such as quarantines, but they also established medical and veterinary
services for surveillance and institutes and laboratories to produce vaccines
and chemotherapeutics for human and animal diseases. Since serotherapies for
human diseases were mostly produced in horses, veterinary institutions were
logical places to do this work. These institutions were excellent examples of

the comparative medicine approach, as first articulated by Rudolf Virchow.

Major producers of veterinary serotherapies and biologicals included the State
Serum Institute in Vienna (established 1893), the Danish State Serum Institute
(1902) located on the island of Amager in Copenhagen, and the National
Serum Institute established in Rotterdam in 1904.
Laboratories: Food Hygiene

Another important topic was the transmission of zoonotic diseases, directly
from animals to humans (glanders, anthrax), or indirectly via consumption of
food of animal origin (meat, milk, eggs). Initially, research findings in vet
school laboratories formed a major impediment to the introduction of meat
inspection. Namely, it was shown that meat from animals that had died from
rinderpest was not harmful to humans. More and more cases where meat from
diseased animals was consumed without any detriment to human health were
described. This led to the one-sided conviction that all meat from livestock
suffering from different diseases posed no threat to human health. If only such
meat was heated long enough, no danger could occur. However, from
1850 onward the standing of meat inspection as a veterinary discipline
increased when the scientific background of several diseases in humans related
to consumption of food of animal origin were discovered one after the other.
This was another example of comparative medicine. For example, Dutch and
German researchers worked together in the 1890s on bacteriological meat
research in the Hygiene Institute in Amsterdam, later Institute for Tropical
Hygiene. In cooperation with the local slaughterhouse laboratory, these scien
tists discovered and described thermostable toxin-forming bacteria as the
causes of food poisonings, as well as the development of standard procedures
for such research.
Around 1850 scientists became aware of the problem of drug residues in
meat and milk. There was a long tradition of giving animals substances to
obtain therapeutic, prophylactic, or growth-promoting effects. Apart from
treatments such as injections, the majority of drugs were administered as
additives to feed or drinking water. The potential danger of veterinary drug
residues present in foods of animal origin was recognized when scientists
warned against the excessive use of mercury (sublimate), lead, creosote,
arsenic, and strychnine in veterinary practice. Nonetheless, in the1850s and
1860s, animal drug manufacturers were quite successful in advertising and
marketing and were generally not hindered by restrictive legislation. The
Spanish physician and chemist Mateo Orfila (1787-1853) is considered the
father of toxicology and forensic medicine. He studied the toxicological
properties of various herbs, drugs, and poisons and the speed of uptake in
various tissues of the body, particularly in dogs. For food-producing animals,

Figure 4.3 Bacteriological meat research at the Amsterdam abattoir

laboratory in 1900 by veterinarian Dirk van der Sluijs (1849-1923)
and his assistant.
Courtesy: Collection Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University Museum, 0285-151480.
research on applied dose, toxicity level, and withdrawal periods before slaugh
ter was conducted from 1890 onward.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, many municipalities as well as
food-producing companies established independent laboratories where
research was conducted to support food inspection with scientific knowledge
(Fig. 4.3). This was due to changes in the food industry and food supply,
distrust concerning industrially produced food, as well as to an increasing
number of adulterations in the (international) meat and dairy trade. In addition,
foreign markets demanded (veterinary) surveillance to guarantee quality stand
ards of imported meat and dairy. Labs were designated where quality control
of these products was performed according to laws regulating the inspection of
domestic foods as well as food import and export. Research included the
search for safe and effective preservation methods, developing chemical,
physical, histological, and microbiological methods for quality and safety
control of livestock and food of animal origin. Around 1850, the bourgeoisie
in larger cities could go to a pharmacist to have their food inspected. A few
decades later, food inspection services were established with labs where the

broader public could go to in case of food poisoning or fraud. These services

were mainly occupied with adulterations in milk, dairy products, eggs, bread,
and drugs. Chemists working in these labs wanted to suppress chemical
preservatives in meat and meat products such as borax, boric acid, sulfites,
sulfuric acid, salicylic acid, formaldehyde, and benzoic acid. A plea was made
to return to “natural foods.” In 1900, the matter was discussed at the
International Hygiene Congress in Paris, in which it was proposed to ban most
preservatives and colorants. Later congresses showed more tolerance and
admitted small portions of salt, nitrites, and sugar. National Food Acts were
made law in the UK (1875), Germany (1879), and the United States (1906).
Veterinarians working in laboratories established at municipal abattoirs and
large commercial slaughterhouses were mainly occupied with microbiological
research and investigating cases of meat poisoning. Around 1850 there were
the findings in the field of parasitology that enabled control against parasitic
nematodes (see below). From 1880 onward, meat hygiene research obtained a
more scientific character when bacteriological research carried out in slaugh
terhouse laboratories accelerated. The pioneering work of Pasteur and Koch,
and other microbiologists like Auguste Chauveau (1827-1917), Otto Bollinger
(1843-1909), August Gartner (1848-1934), Emile van Ermenghem
(1851-1932), and Daniel Salmon with their discoveries in the field of bacteri
ology, was decisive for the further development of meat inspection. They
focused on diseases such as bovine tuberculosis, trichinosis, and several
others. The etiology of meat poisonings was mapped after the isolation of
several meat-borne pathogens such as Salmonella spp., Clostridium botulinus,
and Mycobacterium tuberculosis bovis. Around 1890 it became clear that meat
poisonings could be caused by postmortem growth of thermostable, toxin
forming bacteria in meat. Such findings influenced the canning industry, which
adjusted pasteurization and sterilization procedures.
Veterinarians extended the science of meat inspection, while the practical
execution of meat inspection is equal to the pathological anatomy of livestock.
The most widely used, translated, and reprinted handbook on meat inspection
(Berlin, 1892) was published by the German professor Robert von Ostertag
(1864-1940), who had studied human and veterinary medicine. He was also
editor of the Zeitschrift fur Fleisch- und Milchhygiene [Journal for Meat- and
Milk Hygiene], which was published from 1890 onward. Until the 1960s, the
guidelines and regulations on meat inspection were based on this handbook.
Inspection involved ante- and postmortem inspection of each animal by a
qualified veterinarian, by pathological and anatomical examination, and by
bacteriological tests in doubtful cases. Based on this, meat was stamped and
declared sound, conditionally sound, or unfit for human consumption.
Slaughterhouse labs also played an important role in animal disease control,
since they provided statistics on the occurrence of various livestock diseases.

Veterinary Associations and International Cooperation

During the second half of the nineteenth century, traditional empirical meat
inspection was transformed into an applied veterinary science, and this grew
along with veterinary associations. Research findings on food safety were
published in handbooks and specific scientific journals, while theoretical and
practical food inspection became part of the veterinary curriculum. The efforts of
veterinarians to establish veterinary public health and to elevate the scientific
prestige of the profession were strongly supported by national veterinary associ
ations. Veterinary associations were very keen on obtaining legal protection of
the title “veterinarian” by which the competition of other animal healers could be
eliminated: “the battle against empiricism,” in their rhetoric. Often it was a slow
process before such legislation was granted. Governments feared unemployment
among unlicensed healers, who often still outnumbered the formally educated
vets. Moreover, many animal owners (and officials) believed the work of
unlicensed healers to be effective and important in maintaining animal health.
Indeed, not all empiricists can simply be dismissed as quacks. Many of them
were very skilled and as effective as the educated, licensed veterinarians. But
change was coming: many professions were organizing at this time in European
countries, and veterinarians seized the chance to push for restrictive licensing
that required formal education. The Netherlands passed a law defining “veterin
arian” as an educated, licensed individual in 1874. In Britain, the Veterinary
Surgeons Act was adopted in 1881, which made it illegal for unqualified
individuals to use the title of “veterinary surgeon.” However, these acts were
symbolic because many empiricists continued their practice in both countries.
Veterinary associations recognized the potential job opportunities in food
inspection services and slaughterhouses, and a possible broadening of the legal
basis of the profession. In Romania, for example, members of the Society of
Veterinary Medicine (founded 1871) pledged to work together on food
hygiene, contagious diseases, and forensic medicine in the service of the nation
and the well-being of all its people and animals. Not only would the livestock
economy be enhanced, but as well protecting the food supply gave veterinar
ians a strong role in the public health. Legislation and food inspection require
ments also helped elevate veterinarians to nationally prominent roles. Cattle
Acts or Contagious Disease (Animal) Acts were established in Austria (1844),
India (Tamil Nadu, 1866), the Netherlands (1870), Switzerland (1872), Prussia
(1875), England (1878), Canada (1879), France (1881), Germany (1886), the
United States (1903), and Australia (Quarantine Act, 1908). Under these acts,
State Veterinary Services were established in various countries. In this way, a
large sector of (human) public health was entrusted to vets. This can be
considered a very important step in the scientific and societal recognition of
the veterinary profession.

Figure 4.4 British veterinarian and inventor John Gamgee (1831-1894). He

initiated the first international congress for veterinarians in 1863 in Hamburg.
Source: Reinhard Froehner, Kulturgeschichte der Tierheilkunde: ein Handbuch fur
Tierarzte und Studierende. Band 2: Geschichte des Veterinarwesens im Ausland
(Konstanz: Terra, 1952) 110.
It was the remarkable veterinarian and inventor John Gamgee (1831-1894,

Fig. 4.4), son of a Scottish vet, who took the initiative to organize the first
International Veterinary Congress in Hamburg, Germany, in 1863. This was
well before the first international medical congress was held (London 1881).
About 100 participants from 10 European countries mainly discussed meas
ures such as quarantine length and isolation. Delegates framed their concerns
as a European defense against dangerous Asian diseases. The second and third
congresses held in Vienna (1865) and Zurich (1867), respectively, also dealt
with stamping-out and inoculation strategies against CBPP and rinderpest, as
well as the usefulness of trade and cattle movement restrictions. Although
these were primarily veterinary-technical debates, they prepared the basis of
national and international legislation on controlling livestock diseases. John

Gamgee was also founder of a second veterinary school in Edinburgh. He

visited mainland Europe and noted that European standards of veterinary care
were much better than in Britain. For example, he reported that only 8 percent
of horses in Paris were lame, compared to the high figure of 42 percent in
Britain. After studying rinderpest, Gamgee was a convinced follower of the
germ theory. He routinely used the rectal thermometer and established that
fever as a feature of rinderpest. As an inventor, Gamgee was also involved in
the development of refrigeration technology and the frozen meat trade.
Considering the problems with contagious livestock diseases and meat poison
ings, in 1872 he made a plea for ending the harsh and inefficient live cattle
trade. Instead, he argued, transporting and selling inspected meat from animals
killed near where they lived would stop the spread of diseases among
live animals.
An important step in livestock disease control was taken during an inter
national conference hosted by the Austrian government in 1871 in Vienna. The
recommendations listed in the final report “Principles for an International
Regulation for the Extinction of the Cattle Plague” received wide international
attention and supported the eradication of this disease in many countries in
Europe. The necessity of organized veterinary action, including an early
warning system for reporting an outbreak to neighboring nations by fast
communication (telegraph), was stressed, next to government compensation
of farmers for slaughtered animals. These recommendations proved to work
well during the last outbreak of rinderpest in Britain in 1877, caused by a
shipment of infected animals from Hamburg. As soon as the German veterin
ary officials had noticed that this livestock was infected, they warned their
British colleagues, who could limit the outbreak by immediate action.
After a break of 13 years due to the Franco-Prussian War, four more
international veterinary congresses were held in the nineteenth century.
During the 7th congress in Baden-Baden (Germany) in 1899, the name was
changed from International Veterinary Congress into World Veterinary
Congress. This better reflected the delegates: over 1,000 participants from 39
countries, of which 16 delegations came from countries outside Europe.
A Permanent Committee responsible for the organization of the congresses
was established during the 8th meeting in Budapest in 1906. These efforts
grew into an internationally influential organization, which by 1959 had
adopted the name World Veterinary Association (WVA). Since 1955, this
organization has established official relations with the global Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO).
From the first meetings in 1863, the WVA was designed to gain international
cooperation regarding animal diseases spreading globally and it had grown
into the only non-governmental organization (NGO) representing the veterin
ary profession globally.

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of various
international congresses, which also had veterinary topics on the agenda. The
French government organized the first International Sanitary Conferences in
1851. The main aim was to standardize international quarantine regulations
against the spread of cholera, plague, and yellow fever. Up to 1938, in total
14 of these conferences took place, and they would play a major role in the
formation of the World Health Organization in 1948. International Congresses
on Hygiene and Demography were held in Europe from 1877 onward.
Veterinary issues such as animal food, zoonotic diseases, and sanitary provi
sions were part of the programs. Between 1899 and 1912, five International
Congresses on Tuberculosis were held in which scientists exchanged infor
mation about the relationship between bovine and human tuberculosis. The
first International Congress on Tropical Diseases, which included veterinary
topics, was held in 1913.
These institutions - regulation, laboratories, schools, associations, and inter
national organizations - owed their existence to several social factors such as
European imperialism, industrialization, and the threats to those factors posed
by animal diseases. The historical spread of veterinary educational institutions
also provided training grounds for the professionals who asserted their author
ity over animal health and disease, thus promising governments and other
patrons the economic benefits of preserving livestock and the social benefits of
helping to preserve human health. However, these promises depended on
making veterinary medicine “scientific” and allying its leaders with (human)
public health and medicine through comparative pathology and medicine.
Next, we turn to the major intellectual and practical scientific developments
during the nineteenth century that enabled veterinarians not only to compete in
the veterinary marketplace but also to participate in regulating human and
animal bodies and the global animal economy.
The Growth of European Sciences and the Growth of

Veterinary Medicine
Historians have written volumes about the developments of the life sciences
and the medical sciences during the nineteenth century. We consider these
developments only as they helped shape veterinary regimes, according to these
themes: how these sciences emerged from comparisons between human and
animal bodies; how veterinary practices and disease-control procedures inter
acted with developing ideas about disease and society; and how scientific
disciplines developed from the veterinary point of view. Although many of
the names and achievements, such as those of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch,
will be familiar, we will focus on veterinary ideas, research, and practices. This
focus is valuable in part because it changes the stories that have been carefully

Growth of European Sciences & Growth of Veterinary Medicine 171
crafted by supporters of different heroes and national traditions, bringing a

richer and more sophisticated understanding of these complex events. From
the establishment of microbiology and bacteriology to comparative pathology
and “one medicine,” veterinary problems and veterinary scientists were
important co-creators of modern medicine and public health as we know them
today. In turn, the promises of “scientific” solutions to long-standing animal
disease problems supported the growth and expansion of professional, state-
supported veterinary medicine.
Outbreaks of animal disease were commercial crises, not only bankrupting
farmers and drovers but also interrupting international credit cycles and
threatening the financial and political solvency of governments. Outbreaks of
contagious animal diseases led to quarantines and prohibitions against moving
animals domestically and between countries. One rational and very practical
and efficient measure based on this theory was quarantine, derived from the
Italian word quaranta, meaning “forty.” Physicians had learned that isolating
diseased people from healthy people for an (incubation) period of at least
40 days prevented contagious diseases from spreading. This was applied to
arriving ships in the harbor of Venice to avoid outbreaks of bubonic plague;
and similar principles could be applied to animal diseases. This was very
controversial in capitalist societies because government restrictions impeded
the free market. Both materially and metaphorically, a serious epizootic was a
serious threat to prosperity and, potentially, to political power and social
stability. The stakes were high and the pressure on veterinary leaders was
enormous. These factors shaped both the development of the veterinary sci
ences and the veterinary response to disease outbreaks during the nineteenth
century.
New Approaches to an Old Question: What Caused

Animal Diseases?
Between 1850 and the 1890s, European veterinary medicine experienced
wide-ranging changes in ideas about etiology (theories about what caused
animal diseases). In the 1850s, veterinarians could choose between several
types of disease causation theories: environmental (including the effects of
climate, miasmas, and toxins); contagionist (including zymotic theories); and
anti-contagionist (such as the humoral theories and the hereditary theories).
These categories or types of causation theories are somewhat artificial. Often,
veterinarians explained the causes of individual diseases using ideas from
more than one of these types of theories. For example, German anatomist/
pathologist Friedrich G.J. (Jacob) Henle (1809-1885) classified sheep pox,
anthrax, and rinderpest as miasmatic diseases that could later develop to be
contagious in larger groups of animals. The eminent British veterinarian John

Gamgee stated in 1866 that cattle plague (rinderpest) was caused by a type of
dangerous poison originating in the body of the sick animal after being spread
by contagion. While the disease was not strictly caused by environmental
conditions, Gamgee believed it was native to a particular place, climate, and
environment: the interior steppe of Russia. Nonetheless, over time, environ
mental causation theories were joined and slowly overtaken by contagionist
theories, especially germ theories. In the 1890s, both these types of etiological
explanation were joined by another theory that implicated the broader ecologies
of insect-borne diseases. A good example of this ecological theory (mentioned
above) is the work of Theobald Smith, Fred Kilborne, and Cooper Curtice on the
disease Texas cattle fever in the southern United States. They observed the
development of a microorganism in blood-sucking insects that transmitted it to
cattle, causing the disease. In summary, the general trends in prevalent etio
logical theories in veterinary medicine changed as follows: from a mixture of
broad humoral, contagionist and environmental theories; narrowing increasingly
to more reductionist germ theories; with the addition of ecological, vector-borne
disease theories of germ transmission in the 1890s.
How did the competition between these multiple theories affect veterinary
activities in controlling and treating animal diseases? There is no single
answer. Often, veterinary practitioners selected treatments that combined these
theories, for example, recommending both improved diet and bloodletting for a
sick animal, combined with isolation in case the illness was contagious.
Diseases that affected a single animal looked different from an outbreak in
most of the herd, but even then, multiple causes could be at work: maybe the
animals ate the same toxic plants, or maybe an unhealthy miasma affected
them. One thing is certain: germ theories did not immediately or completely
replace the other causation theories. No “revolution” suddenly replaced older
ideas with newer ones. In veterinary medicine, we see a broad variety of ideas
and responses continuing throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s. New
ideas were often slowly accepted. Veterinarians with different training and
backgrounds, working in different places and situations, used the ideas that
seemed most effective to them at the time. Moreover, individual veterinarians
often had a great deal of influence on local laws and regulations. At the level of
municipalities and regions, we can trace changes in veterinary policies over
time that reflect trends in disease causation theories.
Veterinary medicine in South Africa, 1850-1900, provides an excellent
example. Cattle diseases such as pleuropneumonia and rinderpest, and sheep
diseases such as heartwater and lamsiekte, stimulated the Cape Colony (British
South Africa) government to establish the formal position of Veterinary Surgeon
in 1876. The first person to hold this office, William Branford, trained in London
and then served as an instructor at the Royal Edinburgh (Dick) Veterinary
College for seven years. Branford, reflecting the knowledge of the 1860s and

mid-1870s, believed that the unique attributes of the environment around Cape
Town caused the diseases afflicting animals there. Branford was not an anti-
contagionist; he recognized some diseases as transmissible from sick to healthy
animals. However, he understood the Cape environment to be the most import
ant determinant of whether signs of a disease would appear in an animal. His
recommendations for preventing diseases in cattle and sheep relied on carefully
regulating animals’ seasonal diets, housing, and work regimes. The next person
to serve as Cape Colony Veterinary Surgeon, Edinburgh graduate Duncan
Hutcheon, succeeded Branford in 1880. Hutcheon advocated the germ theories
that were rapidly developing in Europe. However, Hutcheon first had to acquire
knowledge about the influences of South African environment and geography
on animal diseases, which he then combined with germ ideas. (Hutcheon had
many difficulties at first persuading Afrikaner farmers to accept germ ideas.)
Around 1900, Hutcheon, the Swiss-trained veterinarian Arnold Theiler, and
other veterinary scientists increasingly focused beyond the germ theories to
explain the etiology and transmission of African animal diseases. They realized
that direct transmission of bacteria from one animal to another (the major
premise of germ theories) could not explain or control common diseases such
as heartwater, nagana (trypanosomiasis), redwater, and East Coast fever. To
understand these diseases, South African veterinarians combined Indigenous
African expertise with new ideas emerging from America: they suspected that
insects, such as ticks and mosquitoes, spread these diseases. Controlling the
environment, cleaning up “germs,” and fighting insect-borne diseases all guided
veterinary research and practice in South Africa after 1900.
One other crucial theory about disease causation remained important
throughout this time period: the toxin theory. Toxins were compounds that
poisoned the body, and animals could get sick by directly inhaling or eating
toxic substances. Jotello Festiri Soga (1865-1906) made important discoveries
about the role of toxic plants in causing diseases in grazing livestock during the
1890s (see Fig. 4.5). Soga, whose father was Xhosa African and whose mother
was Scottish European, was the first South African to qualify as a veterinarian
(he graduated from the Royal (Dick) Veterinary College in Scotland). In 1889,
he became the first Black official in the Cape Colony civil service. Here we see
another interesting combination of Indigenous Africans’ knowledge, collected
by Soga, and the practices of European experimental science. For example,
Soga investigated a disease called nenta in the Khoikhoi language of local
herdsmen (Afrikaner farmers called this disease krimpsiekte). Nenta affected
all breeds of sheep and goats, causing lameness and paralysis. Soga’s col
league and boss, Duncan Hutcheon, had tried and failed to find a microorgan
ism that caused this disease.
After talking with Indigenous African herdsmen, Soga surmised that the
animals were being poisoned by eating a toxic plant also called nenta by the

Figure 4.5 Portrait of Jotello Festin Soga (1865-1906), first South African to
graduate from a veterinary school and first Black South African employed by
the Cape Colony civil service. Soga combined Xhosa knowledge with
European science to elucidate the role of toxic plants in causing diseases in
grazing livestock during the 1890s.
Source: Public domain.
herdsmen. He experimentally fed this plant to some goats and reproduced the
disease. Thus, Soga proved that the plant called “(klip)nenta” (Tylecodon
ventricosus) caused the disease nenta/krimpsiekte and he recommended eradi
cating this plant where livestock grazed. He also researched the medicinal
properties of many South African plants and today is known as the father of
ethnobotany in South African veterinary medicine. Sadly, Soga suffered from
racial discrimination, and despite his education and research contributions, he
never held a permanent position in the government veterinary services.
Historians’ recent attention to Black veterinarians has led us to rediscover
Soga’s major research on plants in veterinary medicine, and this reminds us of
how important the toxin theory of disease causation still is today (although
histories of disease seldom mention it).
Parasitology
It was in Italy that the basis for microbiology was laid by physician Francesco
Redi (1626-1697), a pupil of Galilei. In 1684 he described 108 parasitic
species and looked for specific causes of a disease. With his observation that

maggots cannot develop from rotting meat, unless flies laid eggs on it, he
challenged the prevailing idea of spontaneous generation. His pupil Giovanni
Cosimo Bonomo (1663-1696) made a remarkable observation on scabies, a
mite infection of the skin that was (and still is) widespread, particularly among
poor people living under bad hygienic circumstances. Before Bonomo
described it, mites were not considered to be a cause of the disease. It was
attributed to humoral factors such as abundant melancholic humor, corrupt
blood, or pungent ferment caused by internal ailment. The drawings made by
Bonomo in 1687 prove that he did actually study the mite as a causative agent
of scabies, observing a tiny worm which reproduced in the human skin. (Under
the microscope he had seen an adult mite laying eggs and the turtle-like larvae
that hatched.) As an effective therapy, he recommended treating the skin with a
sulfur ointment. Macroparasites, such as large tapeworms, could also be
observed with the naked eye. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the
complete life cycles of a number of parasitic diseases in humans and animals,
including ones with a zoonotic character, were elucidated with the aid
of microscopes.
A well-known example of a fatal parasitic disease which caused consider
able losses among infected sheep or bovine herds in winters was liver-rot. It
was long known that this disease was due to the presence of large numbers of
parasites in the liver of affected sheep, the so-called liver-fluke or Fasciola
hepatica. These parasites live in aquatic mud snail species in wet or flooded
pastures and thus invaded grazing sheep. The life cycle of sheep liver fluke
was experimentally discovered in the period 1881-1883, independently by
German zoologist Rudolph Leuckart (1822-1898) and Algernon Thomas
(1857-1937), a New Zealand biologist. A major finding in the cycle of
pathogenic nematodes was made in 1852 by German physician Friedrich
Kuchenmeister (1821-1891). Then he published his theory that bladder
worms (cysticerci) are juvenile tapeworms, originating from eggs of these
tapeworms. He later proved this by an experiment in which he fed pork
containing cysticerci of Taenia solium to prisoners awaiting execution. After
they had died, he recovered the developing and adult tapeworms in their
intestines. It was clear that cysticercosis was caused by the ingestion of the
eggs of Taenia solium.
Next to his work on liver fluke, Leuckart is also remembered for his work in
tapeworms. In 1861 he showed that the bladder-worm Cysticercus inermis,
found in the masseter muscles of bovines, developed into the long tapeworm
Taenia saginata in humans. Leuckart also proved that Taenia saginata only
occurs in cattle (and humans), and Taenia solium only in swine (and humans).
Another risk was infection with Taenia echinococcus, a small tapeworm
occurring in dogs, but for which humans are intermediate hosts. Dogs get
infected by sheep; eggs from this tapeworm can develop to bladder-worms in

the human liver, brain, and lungs. Infection in humans often occurred where
many sheep and dogs lived in close contact, such as in Iceland or the Basque
country in northern Spain. There, but also elsewhere, slaughter waste of sheep
slaughterhouses was fed to working dogs who in turn infected humans. To
break this cycle, dogs were banned from slaughterhouse premises. By the
results of parasitological research meat inspectors were able to conduct pre
ventive control. Systematic examination of each slaughter animal involving
the incision of certain organs and tissues revealed the presence of worms or
bladder-worms. The occurrence of these parasites declined during the
nineteenth century.
An important parasite that played a significant role in the development of
meat inspection is the small roundworm Trichinella spiralis. Although known
to zoologists, Trichinella was not considered harmful until research around
1860 showed that humans could become severely infected. Trichinae predom
inantly occurs in the intestinal tract of rats and pigs. The larvae encapsulate in
their muscle tissue. Humans get infected by consuming raw pork, which could
lead to 6 to 30 percent mortality by encapsulation and buildup of trichinae in
the heart or diaphragm. In 1835, the first-year medical student James Paget first
observed the larval stage of the nematode Trichinella spiralis while witnessing
an autopsy in a London hospital. He took special interest in the presentation of
muscle with white speckles, described as a “sandy diaphragm.” However, the
credit went to his professor, anatomist Richard Owen, who named the parasite
and published a report. However, Owen did not realize that the worm in human
muscle was a larval form. Further steps in Trichinella research were taken in
Germany. The adult worms were described by Rudolf Virchow in 1859.
Pathologist Friedrich A. von Zenker (1825-1898) confirmed this observation
in 1860 and recognized the clinical significance of the infection, concluding
that humans became infected by eating raw pork. Leuckart was the first to
document the life cycle of Trichinella spiralis both in swine and humans. Von
Zenker and Leuckart stressed the public health danger of trichinosis in the
1860s and supported Rudolf Virchow’s campaign to create meat inspection
laws in Germany.
Due to the consumption of raw ham and sausage, serious outbreaks of
trichinella had occurred in Germany, involving hundreds of victims.
Between 1860 and 1890, Europe witnessed 90 outbreaks of trichinosis. This
was also due to the import of huge quantities of bacon and pork in refrigerated
vessels from the United States from 1876 onward. In 1879 the meat from
almost 5 million pigs was exported to Europe from the United States, and
8 percent of it turned out to be infected with Trichinella. During the nineteenth
century, meat inspection was instituted at first mainly on a local level.
Particularly in countries with a high consumption of raw pork, federal or
national meat inspection included laboratories testing for Trichinella.

Germany began banning importation of infected meat, forcing exporting

nations (such as the United States) to develop their own meat inspection
programs to control animal infections transmissible to humans.
Understanding diseases as the result of infection with macroparasites or
microparasites (including bacteria) developed in the context of changing ideas
about disease causation.
Environmental Theories of Disease Causation

Environmental theories can be summarized in this phrase: the belief that
unhealthy environments lead to sick animals (and people). The unpleasant
odors of rotting vegetation, trash heaps, and sewers (and even graveyards)
were thought to contain particles that caused diseases in people or animals.
Disease-causing bad air (miasmas) was especially dangerous during climate
conditions (heat, wind) that allowed the miasmas to spread widely, causing
illness in groups or populations of animals and people. This standard theory of
miasmas explained epidemics for centuries. In addition, people often thought
that unfamiliar environments produced sickness in animals brought from other
places, for example, from the Global North to the Global South or vice versa.
This belief played a very important role in imperialism and settler colonialism,
because horses and food-producing animals were essential components of
both. Especially during the European invasions of areas in the Global South
during the nineteenth century, an understanding of how to keep European
animals alive and well was critical to imperial success.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, questions about acclimatiza
tion and improvement took on deep sociocultural meaning in the context of
European colonialism. Peoples whose lands had been invaded, plundered, and
colonized were often characterized as primitive, unimproved, or barbaric, and
so were their animals. The ability to “civilize” such animals and peoples
depended on the ability to change them according to European expectations.
Animal breeding and inheritance were thought to be governed by a combin
ation of heredity and environment. Ongoing ecological imperialism meant that
Europeans brought their breeds of domesticated animals with them: horses,
cattle, sheep. In new climates and environments, European breeds of animals
often did not survive well at first. As we have seen, the specter of diseases
hung heavily over circulations of animals between regions and continents.
European colonizers complained that each place, from South Africa to
Australia to Vietnam, seemed to have its own suite of diseases fatal to
European animals.
Europeans believed that animals native to a particular area could survive
because they were used to its atmosphere, while “foreign” animals died when
brought to the same place. This theory was mainly based on heredity and the

notion that different “races” of animals lived naturally in the climate/environ-

ment best for them. However, if “foreign” animals survived for a year, they
were thought to be “seasoned” or “acclimatized”: their bodies had managed to
change enough to fit the new environment. To accomplish this, animals needed
to be cared for properly, with good stables, clean water, nutritious food, and
limited work (especially during very hot days). People who did not follow
these careful instructions could expect their animals’ health to decline. Another
way to create an acclimatized animal population was to interbreed imported
animals with the indigenous herds. Native animals, although viewed by
Europeans as unproductive and inferior, were interbred with European breeds
in the hope that a carefully controlled infusion of native blood would help
European animals acclimatize. The resultant offspring often survived more
readily in the new environment, reinforcing a hereditary theory about animals’
adaptation to new environments.
Environmental theories never entirely disappeared because they explained
so many observations about the survival of animals in different environments.
Environmental theories were also easily expanded to encompass the idea that
parasites and insects caused or spread diseases. A general understanding of
how the “seeds of disease” could be present in the atmosphere or air existed
at least since the days of the Veronese physician Girolamo Fracastoro
(1478-1553). Fracastoro wrote that sick people (or animals) could transmit
these “seeds” (contagium vivum) by direct contact to people (or animals)
around them or by breathing the “seeds” into the air, where they multiplied
and spread. Healthy animals could then become infected from the atmosphere.
This theory easily accommodated the idea of “germs” spreading through the
air, which developed 300 years later. Combined with the power of new
technologies, such as the microscope, environmental theories helped to explain
the diseases encountered by peoples raising animals in many places, from the
warm equatorial regions to the cooler, drier north.
Contagionism and Anti-Contagionism

As we have emphasized in veterinary history, ideas and theories changed
slowly over time, and the nineteenth-century debate over the theory of “con-
tagionism” is an excellent example. Some historians of (human) medicine
made this debate into a battle between two sides: those scientists who advo
cated contagion as a cause of disease (contagionists) and those were against it
(anti-contagionists). The anti-contagionists were often viewed by these histor
ians as “backward,” while the contagionists were portrayed as “progressive”
because their ideas led toward our thinking today. But this is historically
inaccurate, especially for the case of veterinary medicine, in which we see a
spectrum or range of ideas over time (more recent medical histories also take

this position). For centuries, people had observed that a healthy animal (or
person) could acquire an illness from a sick one; contagionism was not new.
But most classical theories of disease causation, from the Ayurvedic to
Chinese traditional to Greek humoral theories, defined disease as a functional
disorder in the body of the animal. Because these theories were so ancient and
widespread, it was difficult for most veterinarians, physicians, and scientists to
abandon them. For example, the French veterinary professor Philibert Chabert
(1737-1814) believed that the equine disease glanders occurred due to indi
vidual predisposition, inadequate feeding, and poor working and housing
conditions. Later, a professor named Dupuy at the same veterinary school
(Alfort) compared glanders to human tuberculosis, which physicians con
sidered to be a hereditary disease of families rather than a strictly contagious
one. (This belief about tuberculosis continued, in some form, into the 1900s.)
At the same time, both Chabert and Dupuy acknowledged that glanders spread
rapidly in a stable. For the case of glanders, Chabert and Dupuy combined
environmental, hereditary, and contagious theories. It was very common for
veterinary and medical investigators to use combinations of causation theories
to explain diseases.
The leading scientists of the time (1830s-1850s) knew that the body was
complex. Illness could occur without any evidence of something foreign
entering the body. Whether the body responded with a fever, or pustules, or
diarrhea, these symptoms arose from organs and tissues that had their own
roles and activities within the body’s metabolism - and these activities were
causes of “disease” (the lack of normal function). To many scientists, the idea
that tiny, unseen particles alone caused disease seemed unrealistic and too
simple. In other words, the idea that disease could only be caused by an
infectious particle was reductionist - this idea reduced the complexity of
diseases to one simple thing. But diseases were not simple to veterinarians
and physicians; and what they observed was sometimes not completely
explained by the reductionist theory of contagion developing in Europe
after 1850.
Many anti-contagionists, including the eminent German physician Rudolf
Virchow, focused on the complex disease processes within the body. As we
described in Chapter 2, Virchow contributed to cell theory and created a new
way of classifying and thinking about diseases as pathologies of individual
organs. Virchow was the world’s expert on animal tissues and how those
tissues changed with disease. His explanation for the cause of glanders illus
trates the complexity of his thinking. In 1863, Virchow wrote that glanders was
transmitted when a horse inhaled some type of irritating agent that stimulated
the body to form a granuloma that exuded pus - the distinctive sign of this
disease. Aspects of anti-contagionism remained important throughout the late
1800s, bolstered in part by the observation that strict cordons sanitaires did not

always prevent the spread the most dread diseases. In nineteenth-century

veterinary medicine, this point was driven home by the experience of rinder
pest. Many scientists fell somewhere in the middle as “contingent contagio-
nists” (those who believed in contagion under certain conditions), and
common observation of animal epizootics supported this view.
Contagionists believed that disease could only be passed from one animal to
another due to the transfer of a material substance. With their interest in animal
diseases and their ability to experiment on animals, veterinarians were early
leaders in contagionist research. For example, in 1664 Jacques de Solleysel
succeeded in experimentally passing glanders from an infected horse to a
healthy one. He wrote that a “venom” transmitted glanders. A century later,
the director of the veterinary school at Lyon (France), Claude Bourgelat,
confirmed that glanders was directly transmitted to humans when several
Lyon veterinary students died of it after being exposed to infected horses
and cadavers. The Danish veterinarian Erik Viborg (1759-1822) speculated
that a “poison” contained in the pus exuded from the noses of glanderous
horses spread the disease. In 1802, Viborg also demonstrated that lymph from
the swollen glands of horses with another disease, strangles (Streptococcus
equi), transmitted that disease to healthy young horses. The French veterinary
schools were vibrant centers of research on infectious animal diseases such as
glanders, strangles, rinderpest, and sheep pox. They also investigated diseases
passed to humans, such as tuberculosis, glanders, and anthrax. Contagionist
beliefs were common among the Maasai and Zulu cattle-herders of sub
Saharan Africa, as well. They believed that wildlife, such as wildebeest,
impala, and eland, served as reservoirs for diseases that spread to their cattle
herds and killed their animals.
By the 1860s, European contagionists were also becoming reductionists:
they believed that particles caused diseases to pass from one animal to another.
They did not know what these particles were because they could not see them
or observe their actions. Especially in the case of diseases caused (as we know
today) by viruses, researchers could only trace tissue damage - the footprints
of the contagious particles in the animal’s body. Jean-Baptiste Auguste
Chauveau (1827-1917), professor at the Lyon (France) veterinary school,
conducted some of the most important early work on animal and human
diseases such as smallpox, anthrax, tuberculosis, and sheep pox (although he
is relatively unknown compared to Pasteur and Koch). Chauveau’s sheep pox
experiments demonstrated the existence of contagious particles in 1868-1869,
when he was able to diffuse and filter them out of “virulent liquid” from the
pustules of infected sheep. Although Chauveau could not see the particles
under the microscope, he believed that they were there because his filtrate
caused pox when injected into healthy sheep. This research influenced phys
icians and scientists, such as the British physiologist John Burdon Sanderson.

Sanderson wrote that he learned Chauveau’s techniques while visiting the

Lyon veterinary school in 1869 - and he immediately replaced his own
“inferior” laboratory methods with those of Chauveau.
By 1870, many contagionists suspected that the infectious particles were
living things, not just inert crystals or chemical compounds. The theory of
contagium vivum/contagium animatum, as declared by Burdon Sanderson,
stated that disease was sparked by living particles that had invaded the tissues
of the sick animal or person. What sort of life did these particles possess? And
what explained their ability to transform from an inactive state to causing
tissue damage and the signs of disease? Living things that lived on animals’
tissues - these ideas reflected both an understanding of parasitology and
agricultural ideas about how seeds grew in the soil. Zoologists and physicians
compared the contagion vivum to a tiny insect or parasitic “animalcule” - clear
references to parasitology. Veterinarians were quite familiar with the problems
of internal and external parasites, which multiplied in/on animals’ bodies. Too
many parasites could cause illness or death in the host animal; by analogy, if
the infectious particles were living and reproducing, they too could cause
disease in this way. As historian Michael Worboys has shown, among
British scientists the agricultural metaphor of “seeds” that germinated in the
proper soil also made sense. For disease, the seeds or “germs” literally
propagated in animal bodies, but only if the conditions were correct within
the body. This explained many problems for contagionists in the late 1800s,
for example, why certain diseases affected certain species, and why some
animals exposed to the same materials got sick and others did not.
Germ Theories and the Development of Microbiology

and Bacteriology
Although microscopes had been used by natural historians before the mid
nineteenth century, technological advances and falling prices made these tools
much more widely available by 1850 and increased the resolution with which
people could observe insects, parasites, and other microorganisms. Not surpris
ingly, the rod-shaped Bacillus anthracis, one of the biggest bacteria (length 8
microns), was the first pathogen for which the microstructure was identified. It
took decades before mechanical innovations in microscopy, such as compound,
polarizing, and phase-contrast microscopes and immersion oil, enabled the
identification of smaller bacteria. Within this context, the microscope became
the symbol of medical and veterinary progress in the nineteenth century, as did
the stethoscope around the neck of medical and veterinary doctors.
In the mid-1800s, scientists in Europe had developed several “germ theor
ies” that linked organisms visible under the microscope with diseases of
animals and humans. (Similar theories had been proposed much earlier, by

Fracastoro in 1546, for example, but did not catch on at the time.) Many others
studied the tiny organisms, known today as bacteria, devoting their careers to
“discovering,” naming, and classifying bacteria. Some bacterial species are
named after a person, for instance Salmonella spp., after the American micro
biologist Daniel Salmon. Others are named after the shape of the organism
such as Campylobacter spp. (kampulos [Greek], meaning “curved”) or the
location where the bacterium occurs (Escherichia coli, which lives in the
colon). E. coli is also named after the discoverer, the German physician
Theodor Escherich. Although most bacterial species are not pathogenic for
animals or humans, these scientists were most interested in the pathogens.
They classified bacteria using criteria including shape, size, and position of the
bacterial cell; its reaction to chemical dyes; its morphology and activity
(flagella, for example); and whether it could transform into spores. Three basic
shapes of bacteria were observed: spherical (coccus), rod-shaped (bacillus), or
curved rod shape (comma or spiral form). One of the most commonly used
classifications today is based on the microorganisms’ reactions to chemical
dyes, Gram staining, a color reaction developed by the Dane Hans Christian
Gram (1853-1938). Different structures of the bacterial cell walls react differ
ently to the dyes/stains, dividing bacteria into the categories of Gram positive
(taking up purple stain) or Gram negative (taking up pink/red stain).
The development of histological techniques from around 1780 onward
included microtomes, fixation, and embedding techniques and staining
methods to differentiate between various tissues and cells. These techniques
stimulated research on the concept of tissues and cells and particularly lesions
therein. The same is true for cytology and blood research. Classical methods in
bacteriology included culturing methods with various media, in vitro experi
ments with flasks, test tubes, Petri dishes, centrifuges, and incubators. Louis
Pasteur, for instance, cultured bacteria in liquid media during his research on
alcohol and lactic acid fermentation. He thus proved that spontaneous generation
of microorganisms did not occur. He also showed that avoiding food spoilage by
means of heating (later called pasteurization or sterilization), a technique used in
canning, was based on killing bacteria. Robert Koch introduced solid media
(gelatin, agar) and aniline coloring agents to stain bacteria to better visualize and
classify these. Developments in chemical methods enabled the determination of
the chemical composition of foods (protein, carbohydrates, fat), which initiated
the discourse on healthy food for humans and animals alike.
For the next several decades, the specifics of exactly how these microorgan
isms caused disease were open to investigation and debate, and scientists
around the world joined their European counterparts in the race to discover
various “germs” and how they affected animals’ bodies. At this time
(1850-1900), European institutes were the centers of scientific training; but
most veterinarians could not afford to study there. This was certainly true for
those from the Americas, which were (in the words of one U.S. veterinarian in

the 1880s) a scientific backwater at the time. The few elite veterinarians who
had trained in Europe were especially keen to use the new laboratory tech
niques to solve disease problems. As we will see, they used the exciting new
techniques of bacteriology/microbiology to hunt for the microbes that caused
disease, which sometimes succeeded and other times led to premature asser
tions. It was not uncommon for a disease later determined to be caused by
plant toxicity or viruses to be wrongly attributed to bacteria at first. Like other
scientific theories, germ theories were not one unified theory; nor were these
ideas understood and deployed the same way everywhere. Ideas about germs
and disease traveled and changed somewhat as they moved around the world,
and different people understood them and used them in different ways.
Veterinary disease problems are excellent examples of the complex ways in
which germ ideas and practices were deployed. During outbreaks of rinderpest
in Britain in 1865 and India in 1869, British veterinarians were well aware of the
new germ ideas, and many were also contagionists. But they were practical, too.
The benefits of inoculation against rinderpest were still uncertain in the 1860s.
(This pre-Pasteurian form of inoculation existed but was not reliably effective.)
Led by the Gamgee, British veterinarians advocated a system of isolation and
stamping-out the disease by killing all cattle in infected herds. This made sense
based on long experience with the disease and the high level of government
concern. But the germ theories promised even more, according to its supporters:
tests to detect the disease (without injuring the animal) and vaccines to prevent it
from spreading to healthy animals. The promise of prevention was particularly
appealing to agricultural leaders and government officials since it would poten
tially save a great of money. It was in the realm of agricultural chemistry that
some of the most famous discoveries about animal diseases would be made.
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), considered to be the father of microbiology,
was a French chemist who began his research career studying the diseases of
wine grapes for the French government. Pasteur and his colleagues were
skilled with microscopes and with techniques borrowed from agricultural
chemistry, and they carried out a series of elegant experiments that called into
question the ancient doctrine of spontaneous generation (life could generate
from anything). Studying microorganisms in flasks of broth led Pasteur to
imagine the processes of disease developing in the body as a kind of
“fermentation,” a process that could be interrupted or controlled. Working
with the physiologist Claude Bernard, Pasteur focused on fermentation in
fluids such as milk and urine. He invented a process (“pasteurization”) that
could stop the fermentation and kill the “diseases” of wine, beer, and milk. He
then wondered if diseases in animals worked in a similar way and spent five
years studying silkworm diseases. These experiences prepared him to begin
studying veterinary diseases in the 1870s. As we will see, Pasteur was well
connected and well read; and he was very good at what we today would call
“science communication” and “public relations.” Pasteur also stood on the

shoulders of several French physicians and veterinarians and employed some

extremely talented people in his laboratory (such as Charles Chamberland).
Much has been written about Pasteur, so we will refocus the Pasteurian story
from the veterinary point of view.
Pasteur was not the only researcher working on animal diseases in the
1870s; another major figure is veterinarian Jean Joseph Henri Toussaint
(1847-1890), an 1869 graduate of the Lyon veterinary school. In 1876,
Toussaint took up a professorship at the Toulouse veterinary school, where he
taught anatomy, physiology, and zoology. But his passion was the rapidly
developing field of microbiology. He began by analyzing blood, urine, and tissue
samples of animals dying of sepsis and other diseases, and (like other researchers
at that time) saw bacteria under the lens of his microscope. Beginning work on
chicken cholera, an epidemic disease of poultry, he found large numbers of
bacteria that he thought caused the disease. Toussaint sent Pasteur some cultures,
and Pasteur famously (as a result of a coincidence) inoculated healthy chickens
with old cultures. The chickens not only survived but did not die when they were
later inoculated with large amounts of live, virulent cultures. Pasteur concluded
that this was a way to create a vaccine: by exposing the cultures to oxygen for a
time, they became weakened and could then be safely used in healthy animals.
Meanwhile, Toussaint began trying to weaken the cultures of the bacteria that he
found in animals that had died of anthrax.
Rabies was the disease that made Pasteur internationally famous. In the
1880s, Pasteur’s laboratory began inoculating rabies-infected material from
sick animals directly into the brains of dogs and rabbits, reasoning that the
“canine madness” developed there. When experimental animals died, the
scientists removed the brain and spinal cord tissue. By drying and preparing
these tissues, Pasteur’s laboratory created a crude vaccine that could protect
rabies-exposed dogs by inoculating them with successively more virulent
material. Today we understand this effect as stimulating the immune system
to fight the virus; but at that time Pasteur did not know exactly how it worked.
This was still true when he undertook his most risky experiment in 1885:
inoculating a human, a 9-year-old boy who had been badly bitten by a rabid
dog. Pasteur used his series of inoculations, and the boy recovered. Pasteur
became famous, and his laboratory began mass-producing the rabies inocula
tion material. This method was not perfect, however: it caused some serious
side effects; some scientists feared that it could actually cause the disease; and
many laypeople were opposed to putting foreign “putrid” material into their
bodies. (There were even anti-vaccination groups.) As we have seen, new
ideas and procedures take time to become widely accepted. However,
Pasteur’s fame for saving the lives of rabies victims was rewarded when the
French government paid to establish a new, state-of-the-art microbiological
laboratory, the Institut Pasteur in Paris. There, scientists conducted research on

both veterinary and human medical disease problems, including rabies,

anthrax, silkworm diseases, and cholera in chickens. It was an early center
of comparative medical research and the pride of France.
Pasteur had a German competitor, however, in the physician Robert Koch
(1843-1920). Reflecting the political enmity between their two countries, the
advocates of Pasteur and Koch waged bitter battles over who was the greatest
microbiologist/bacteriologist. From the veterinary point of view, the
approaches and practices of Pasteurians and Koch’s followers were different
and complementary. Pasteur founded microbiology, the study of microorgan
isms such as bacteria, fungi, and protozoans; Koch founded bacteriology,
which was more narrowly focused on bacteria. (We can think of bacteriology
as a subdivision of microbiology.) While Pasteur’s chemical manipulations
created vaccines and other tools, Koch systematically developed the tech
niques of culturing, staining, and manipulating bacteria. Most of these tools
and techniques eventually became important in veterinary practice, and many
are still used today (including the pink and purple stains, eosin and hematox
ylin). Koch was mentored by Rudolf Virchow and the German anatomist/
pathologist Friedrich G.J. Henle, who wrote the influential treatise Von den
Miasmen und Kontagien und von den miasmatisch-kontagiosen Krankheiten
(On the Miasmas and Contagions and Miasmatic-contagious Diseases) that
stimulated the discourse on germ theories. Henle is remembered for drawing
up the fundamental rules for the clear definition of disease-causing microbes,
the so-called microbiological postulates. In 1884 his postulates were refined by
Robert Koch and Friedrich Loffler, based on their research on the etiology of
cholera and tuberculosis. These postulates were published by Koch in 1890 as
a fundamental basis for proving a microorganism caused a disease. (See
textbox.)
The Henle-Koch Postulates (Robert Koch, Friedrich Loffler, and Friedrich

G.J. (Jacob) Henle)
First used by Koch to establish the etiologies of cholera and tuberculosis;
published 1890.
For a microorganism to cause a disease:
1. The microorganism must be present in large numbers in animals with signs of
the specific disease. The microorganism must not be present in healthy
animals.
2. The microorganism must be isolated from sick animals and grown in pure culture.
3. When inoculated with the microorganism, healthy animals must become ill with
the same disease.
4. A pure culture of the microorganisms must then be isolated from these sick animals;
it must be identical to the microorganism isolated from the original sick animal.

In the 1870s, Koch was working as a country physician when cattle in the
area began to die of anthrax. Koch knew this disease could infect multiple
species (including humans). As we described in Chapter 2, anthrax was a
common and deadly disease that several scientists had been studying for
decades. In 1849, Koch’s countryman F.A.A. Pollender observed little solid
rod-shaped bodies (stabformiger Koperchen) in the blood of an infected cow
under his microscope (he published his findings in 1855). Another German,
Christian Joseph Fuchs (1801-1871), later a professor at the Karlsruhe veter
inary school, had noticed many granulated threads in the blood of a cow with
anthrax in 1842. In the late 1840s, French physician P.F.O. Rayer and his
student, Casimir Davaine, also found small, elongated bodies present in
anthrax-infected blood and tissues obtained from the Montmartre (Paris)
abattoir. They were able to infect healthy sheep by injecting blood from sick
animals, and they published their results (setting off a battle with the Germans
about who was “first” to identify the causative microorganisms).
Working with the most sophisticated microscope of the time, with a Zeiss
oil-immersion lens, Koch observed numerous rod-shaped microorganisms in
the blood of dying animals. With his more sophisticated microscope, he was
able to see the microorganisms much more clearly than his predecessors had;
and he found it in both sheep and cattle. Koch knew anthrax was a zoonotic
disease. (Remarkably, Koch kept cultures and infected experimental animals in
his house, but he and his wife did not become ill.) Veterinarian Friedrich
Brauell (1807-1882) in Tartu, Estonia, was the first to demonstrate anthrax
bacilli in human blood in 1856. The blood originated from his veterinary
assistant, who had contracted anthrax from dissecting an infected sheep and
then died of the disease. This tragic accident enabled Brauell to connect human
anthrax with the disease in sheep, and he suspected the bacilli were the factor
that transmitted the disease. In 1860, Henri M.O. Delafond (1805-1861),
director of the veterinary school of Alfort, France, succeeded in culturing
anthrax rods in small jars. However, he could not decide whether these were
the cause or result of the disease. Delafond performed thorough research on
anthrax cadavers, and he introduced the use of rabbits as test animals.
Building on all this work, Koch was able to infect experimental animals and
he figured out how to grow the microorganisms in the aqueous humor from
cow’s eyes (obtained at the local slaughterhouse) by 1875. He was even able to
watch the microorganisms, named Bacillus anthracis, form spores when
exposed to the air. He suspected that the rod-shaped bacilli, in their normal
life’s activities, caused damage to the host animal’s body and thus signs of the
disease. However, a question remained: did the rod-shaped microorganisms
themselves cause the tissue damage and signs of the disease, or did the damage
result from some other “poison” from the sick animal’s blood? Koch ruled out
poison or toxicity by transferring the rod-shaped bacilli into fresh aqueous

humor up to 20 times; in this process, any poison or other chemical would have
been washed away. After 20 transfers, the bacilli still caused the disease when
injected into healthy experimental animals. The microorganism kept multiply
ing even as it traveled from one animal or culture to the next, thus establishing
a chain of infection. Koch demonstrated his findings to other scientists and
managed to persuade them of his theory. In 1876, Koch published his famous
paper, “The Etiology of Anthrax Based on the Developmental Cycle of
Bacillus anthracis,” which established a definite linkage between the presence
and life cycle of a microorganism and the tissue damage and signs of the
disease in host animals.
This represented a major change in understanding diseases. Diseases could
be understood as generalized phenomena, such as fevers. They could also be
specific to organs, such as nephritis (kidney disease). Germ theories of
disease causation made diseases specific to a particular microorganism.
Koch believed that an animal with anthrax must have Bacillus anthracis in
its body. Otherwise, it did not have true anthrax. Many people, including
many other scientists, did not believe this at first. However, Koch’s research,
particularly observing the Bacillus anthracis life cycle, explained many
aspects of anthrax that had puzzled observers for centuries. The disease
seemed to reappear in “cursed fields” for years. Koch explained this by
showing that the Bacillus spores survived harsh conditions for long periods
of time. When animals grazed on the same pasture in later years, the spores
were still there - sitting and waiting for the next host animals. Activated by
the warm, moist, and mainly anaerobic conditions inside the body, the
Bacillus emerged from its spore-shell and began to multiply. Rapid multipli
cation explained how quickly the disease could kill an infected animal.
Koch’s careful and detailed experiments, and a public presentation, per
suaded many scientists that the living, multiplying Bacillus and not a
blood-borne chemical poison caused the disease, but not everyone agreed.
In France, Jean Joseph Henri Toussaint and Louis Pasteur, working separ
ately to test the microorganism-contagion theory, conducted further experi
ments that supported Koch’s conclusions and began to test possible vaccines
to stimulate immunity to pathogens.
Toussaint, professor of anatomy and physiology at the Toulouse veterinary
school, had been a pupil of French veterinary pathologist Auguste Chauveau.
Both were interested in how animals developed immunity to pathogens. In
1880, Toussaint achieved promising results by applying low concentrations of
phenolic acid and heat to anthrax microorganisms (Bacillus anthracis), thus
creating an inactivated anti-anthrax vaccine. Toussaint double-vaccinated
about twenty sheep in a successful trial conducted at a farm belonging to the
Alfort veterinary school. Hearing reports of Toussaint’s success, Louis Pasteur
and his colleagues began experiments using Toussaint’s method. In 1881,

Figure 4.6 Louis Pasteur’s vaccination against anthrax during a trial in

Pouilly-le-Fort on May 31, 1881.
Source: L’ Illustration, November 3, 1881.
Pasteur was challenged to make a public demonstration of an anti-anthrax

vaccination at a farm in the commune of Pouilly-le-Fort, France (Fig. 4.6).
Groups of sheep were vaccinated with either Pasteur’s secret vaccine or
placebo; then challenged with anthrax infection. This public experiment was
an international sensation in the newspapers, and the pressure on Pasteur and
his colleagues was intense to prove the value of germ theories and vaccines.
Fortunately for them, the vaccinated sheep survived - a successful trial of the
Pasteurian anti-anthrax vaccine. Although Pasteur received the credit for
creating the successful anti-anthrax vaccine, historians later discovered that
he and his colleagues had in fact used Toussaint’s method - without
Toussaint’s knowledge, and without giving Toussaint proper credit for his
discovery. From his provincial and junior position, Toussaint was unable to
battle Pasteur for priority; and, suffering from a severe neurological illness, he
died at a young age. Overall, the anthrax vaccine story gives us some insight
into scientists’ “race for fame” during the late nineteenth century. It also
demonstrates how scientists from different disciplines (veterinarians, chemists,
physicians, etc.) worked on similar research topics, an important basis for
comparative pathology and “one medicine.”

Comparative Pathology and “One Medicine”

The phrase “one medicine” (OM) was created by German physician Rudolf
Virchow, whom we introduced in the discussion about pathology in Chapter 2.
However, the similarities between animal and human disease had already been
noticed. Based on autopsies and feedback from the pathology dissection table
to the clinic, these scholars were convinced that the cause of disease lay in
abnormalities in organs (lesions), abnormal tissues, and cells, as described by
Giovanni Batista Morgagni (1672-1771), Pierre Louis (1787-1872), Xavier
Bichat (1771-1802), and Rudolph Virchow. The Paris hospital also stimulated
the development and use of diagnostic tools such as the stethoscope from Rene
Laennec (1781-1826), the percussion hammer, the ophthalmoscope, and the
fever thermometer. Between 1850 and 1900, comparative pathology and OM
formed the network of scientific relationships and research methods in which
the various European theories of disease causation were investigated.
Comparative pathology and OM developed from the combined influences of
Darwinian evolutionary ideas, observations about animal and human bodies
and diseases, and the developing laboratory sciences.
The British natural historian Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was a wealthy
gentleman farmer who bred and raised animals such as fancy pigeons. Popular
animal breeding influenced Darwin’s publication, On the Origin of Species
(1859), which was a public sensation. In this study, Darwin laid out a theory of
biological evolution for all life on the earth. According to this theory, all
species should arise and develop through a process of natural selection of
inherited variations by which the individual’s ability to survive is increased.
Certain variations would then increase in animal populations over many
generations. Origin synthesized several existing lines of European thought
about the development of life on earth over long periods of time, using
practical examples (such as breeding cattle) to provide evidence for its conclu
sions. Origin’s conclusions transformed the human-animal relationship,
animal breeding, and ideas about animals’ susceptibility to injury and disease.
Most famously, supporters of Darwinian evolution directly linked the ancestry
of humans and non-human animals. This sparked intense controversy in some
societies, based on the theological belief that a deity created humans separately
from all other animals. Anatomists had, for centuries, noticed homologies
(similarities) between human and animal bodies. For scientific veterinary
medicine, human-animal homologies supported the idea of “one medicine”
and the use of animals as experimental proxies for humans. Human and animal
bodies could be similarly studied as susceptible to certain diseases, in need of
acclimatization when moving to different regions, and subject to “improve
ment” through controlled heredity or breeding.

Observations about human and animal health and disease confirmed this
theoretical relationship, particularly with comparative anatomy (see Chapter 1)
and comparative pathology. Comparative pathology is the study of abnormal
ities caused by disease in animal and human bodies. Because they could freely
perform postmortem examinations, the more elite veterinarians were experi
enced and skilled pathologists. In the late 1800s, pathologists added histo
logical and microscopic examinations of tissues to their postmortem
observations, thus expanding pathology to include the rapidly developing
laboratory sciences. Many of the diseases studied by pathologists were zoon
oses, so it made sense for physicians and veterinarians to work together. Also,
animal diseases provided proxies, or models, for human diseases. Finally,
epizootics were expensive and devastating, and governments relied on scien
tists from multiple disciplines to address them. Sometimes the investigators
themselves became “test subjects.” For example, in the 1880s-1890s it
became clear that glanders is caused by infection with a bacterium (B. mallei).
Knowing that glanders was a potentially fatal zoonosis, Latvian veterinarian
Kristaps Helmanis (1848-1892) in St. Petersburg (Russia) and Oto Kalnins
(1856-1891) in Tartu (Estonia) worked hard to develop a specific and sensitive
diagnostic, the “mallein test” for horses and other equids. Tragically, Kalnins
and some of Helmanis’ co-workers died after becoming infected with B.
mallei, thus proving this bacillus’ zoonotic infection capabilities.
Helmanis was a leader in establishing both a Pasteur Institute and studies on
zoonotic diseases at the Institute for Experimental Medicine in St. Petersburg
(IEM). This outstanding multifield biological research center brought together
interdisciplinary teams of scientists who made many contributions to know
ledge about infectious diseases in both humans and animals. In many other
places, however, the problem for veterinarians was that physicians often
attempted to exclude them from scientific investigations. Also, highly trained
veterinarians were busy controlling disease outbreaks and had less time to do
basic research. There were only 20 or 30 trained veterinary pathologists
working around the world in the late 1800s. Many had low-level positions
with little money or support; and technologies such as the microtome,
mounting media and coverslips for microscope slides, were crude and expen
sive. Nonetheless, veterinary comparative pathologists worked long hours to
collect information from postmortems, microscopic observations, and
animal experiments.
Using comparative pathology techniques, veterinary and medical research
ers sought to understand the entire course of a disease within the body - human
and animal. This was especially true in French veterinary research, where
Auguste Chauveau, Henri Bouley, and other veterinary leaders studied human
and animal pox viruses (vaccinia, variola, cowpox, and sheep pox) and Jean
Joseph Henri Toussaint became the second scientist (after Koch) to

successfully cultivate a pathogen (chicken cholera). The research of Chauveau

and others was based in the French veterinary schools, and this model spread
to other nations. Early veterinary education in Romania in the 1850s, for
example, was established by General Dr Carol Davila (1828-1884) and taught
by him and the surgeon Vasile Lucaci (1806-1890) in the Bucharest medical
school until the Higher School of Veterinary Medicine was founded in the
1880s. In the Western Hemisphere, several veterinary schools were established
on the model of comparative medicine. By the late nineteenth century, this
included the Montreal Veterinary College and related professional associations
(Quebec, Canada); the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of
Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, USA); and the (now defunct) New York College
of Veterinary Surgeons and Comparative Medicine and Columbia Veterinary
College and School of Veterinary Medicine (New York City, USA). Here,
veterinarians such as Duncan McEachran (1841-1924) and physicians includ
ing William Osler (1849-1919) led the development of veterinary comparative
medicine in full partnership. This emphasis in veterinary education trained
generations of North American veterinarians to see themselves and their work
as contributions to “one medicine,” including finding the causes of diseases.
Researchers worked hard to find bacteria and other microorganisms that
caused the major animal diseases, but some diseases yielded their secrets more
quickly than others. Bovine tuberculosis is an excellent example. The famous
Robert Koch figured out how to stain and culture Mycobacterium tuberculosis,
an acid-fast bacterium that he and others established as the causative organism
of human tuberculosis. For 25 years, microbe hunters (including Koch) used
comparative medicine techniques to try to understand the relationship between
bovine and human tuberculosis. Koch developed tuberculin, which he thought
might be a treatment for human tuberculosis; but unfortunately, tuberculin did
not help sick patients. Instead, it became a testing tool - for both humans and
animals (cattle). Veterinarians visiting Koch’s laboratory carried tuberculin
back home with them; this included the American Leonard Pearson
(1868-1908), who conducted the first tuberculin testing on cattle in the
Western Hemisphere in 1892. Between 1895 and 1902, researchers in the
United States and Europe debated whether tuberculosis in animals was a
different disease from that in humans. Koch famously declared that these were
two different diseases; and the American bacteriologist Theobald Smith
(1859-1934) separated M. tuberculosis bovis from M. tuberculosis in 1898.
However, veterinarians and other scientists were correct in asserting that
bovine tuberculosis (M. tb. bovis) was transmissible to humans, where it
caused serious infections in children (Pott’s disease of the spine, for example).
Comparative medicine and developments in laboratory research slowly
changed veterinary education, training, and status over the next century.
From around 1850 onward, the status of professional scientists began to grow.

As a result of the strong growth of scientific knowledge, the gap between

laymen and scholars increased. By 1900, scientifically trained experts had
obtained higher prestige, particularly after scientific breakthroughs. The pos
ition and functioning of universities also changed. Universities were mainly
the sites of classical education until the 1850s. Then a professionalization and
scientization process began, in which research financed by governments or
scientific foundations began to be more important within universities.
University graduates were no longer financially dependent on an audience of
interested laymen, from which they distinguished themselves and who were
excluded more and more. Graduates also organized themselves into profes
sional associations for engineers, physicists, chemists, physicians, veterinar
ians, and many others.
How did these technological and intellectual developments affect physicians
and veterinarians’ practices? They benefited not only from the feedback from
pathological findings to the clinic, but also from the use of newly developed
diagnostic tools such as the stethoscope (auscultation). This was part of the
systematic way of examining and diagnosing patients by inspection, palpation,
percussion, and auscultation. In addition, the new knowledge on microbiology
was also applied in the clinic where disinfection, aseptic surgery, became the
standard. In 1867, English physician Joseph Lister (1827-1912) successfully
introduced spraying phenol to sterilize surgical instruments and to clean
infected wounds. Instead of wood, leather, bone, horn, and ivory, human and
veterinary medical instrument manufacturing companies designed equipment
of metal and glass that could be easily sterilized. Next to sterile surgery and
obstetrics, which decreased mortality significantly, the introduction of general
anesthesia, applied first in 1846 with diethyl ether, and local anesthesia with
cocaine since 1884, had dramatically changed standard surgical practices in
both human and veterinary medicine by 1900.
The development of prophylactic vaccines and treatments instigated a
breakthrough in the acknowledgement of medical and veterinary progress after
1900. This process would continue into the twentieth century (Chapter 5), and
it owed its success in part to the growing value of the basic sciences in
informing medical and veterinary practice (Table 4.1).
As with physicians, veterinarians could increasingly rely on the tools gener
ated by scientific investigations: cultivation of bacteria, diagnostic tests, sera,
and vaccines. But this process was slow, and sometimes these new tools and
products did not change basic veterinary practices very much. Veterinarians
still controlled livestock epizootics using the time-tested cordons sanitaires
and slaughtering sick or exposed animals, and they treated illnesses, lameness,
and injuries in horses with the old techniques of drenching, cauterizing, and
suturing. Even after they were developed, specialized medications and treat
ments sometimes remained too expensive for use in larger animals in the early
twentieth century. However, veterinarians increasingly began caring for

Table 4.1. Milestones in microbiology and therapy
MILESTONES IN
MICROBIAL STUDIES AND
THERAPY, 1840-1880
General theories of disease causation, the development of scientific
disciplines, and technologies as they influenced Western veterinary
medicine
1 C. 1840 THEORIES
• Imbalance of qi, prana or humors
• Miasma theory I
• Contagium vivum \
• Spiritual or divine causes
• Technologies: stethoscope, compound microscope
2 C. 1850 PARASITOLOGY
• Technologies: dissection, compound microscope, microtome
• Tapeworms, roundworms (Paget, Owen, Leuckart, Von Zenker)
• Trichina, pathologies of tissues, cellular theory (Virchow)
3 C. 1880 MICROBIOLOGY I
BACTERIOLOGY
• Technologies: oil immersion microscopes, vaccines,
antisepsis techniques, culturing & staining
• Microscopic "animalcules" and microorganisms
• Anthrax (Davaine, Koch, Toussaint. Pasteur)
• Tuberculosis (bovine, human) (Koch)
another category of potential patients: companion animals, or pets. These

animals were familiar and smaller, and because they were often used as
laboratory animals, the latest scientific developments had been tested for them.
Increasingly, their owners were willing to pay for specialized veterinary care.
Although companion animals did not become a major patient population for
veterinarians until the mid-twentieth century (or later) in most places, some
veterinarians devoted time to caring for dogs, cats, and other pets in earlier
times.

Pets and Pet Keeping

Dogs, cats, and other small animals had lived alongside humans for thousands
of years. These animals assisted with hunting and security, with herding
domesticated animals, and with controlling rodents that infested humans’ food
supplies. They also provided companionship and, in some cultures, were
worshipped or accompanied humans to the afterlife. Historians have found
clues in documents, paintings, archaeological artifacts, and other sources that
indicate how highly different groups of people valued animals for emotional,
cultural, and religious reasons. It is reasonable to assume that animal healers
provided services for these animals, which were often well cared for and well
fed. With the eighteenth-century formation of the veterinary profession, how
ever, there is not much evidence that they spent much time treating companion
animals. Companion animals kept by very wealthy people were the obvious
exceptions. By the late nineteenth century, veterinary practices and schools in
urban areas increasingly treated the illnesses and injuries of dogs and other pet
animals. Of course, these animals’ proximity to humans also exposed people to
zoonotic diseases, such as rabies and parasitic worms transmitted by infected
dogs; these problems were research topics for veterinarians and
other scientists.
Dogs, cats, birds, and other small animals were also the main victims of
animal experiments conducted from the sixteenth century onward (the period
covered by this book). Anatomists such as Gasparo Aselli and William Harvey
sought to understand the functions of the living animal body, and they
established vivisection (dissecting a living animal) as a crucial practice for
physiology research. By the time the first modern veterinary schools were
founded in France, questions about the very nature of life and how animals’
bodies functioned were worked out using experiments that we find cruel today
(remembering that anesthesia was not available or widely used until the end of
the 1800s). Inherent in this experimental model was the assumption that
animal bodies’ functions were analogous to those of humans, and that know
ledge about animal physiology informed that of humans. Although anatomists
and physiologists defended vivisection as the only way to unravel the body’s
mysteries, their critics developed and published anti-vivisection arguments by
the 1700s. Along with multiple entries about horses and other domesticated
animals, Diderot and D’Alembert’s famous Encyclopedie (see Chapter 3)
included medical articles written by vitalists against experimentation on living
animals. Not only were such experiments cruel to the animals, but they also
failed to yield good results due to the trauma on the animal’s body.
By the mid-1800s, love for companion animals combined with concerns
about the cruelty of many animals’ lives stimulated wealthy Britons to form
popular societies devoted to protecting animals. They drew on the earlier

Pets and Pet Keeping 195
writings of Jeremy Bentham (see Chapter 2), John Lawrence, and others who
argued that animals could suffer and therefore had a right to be protected in
civilized societies. This philosophical idea was the basis for parliamentary
legislation, from the 1822 Martin’s Act onward, which provided limited
protection to domesticated animals. Initially, British animal protection groups
focused on the most visible signs of animal cruelty: overwork and abuse of the
horses that did the hard work of transporting people and goods. In India, where
bullocks did this work, colonial British authorities formed societies for the
prevention of cruelty to animals in the 1860s. Bengali members of these
societies argued that ancient Vedic principles called for treating animals
kindly. Concern about the welfare of working horses expanded into other
groups that advocated vegetarianism and opposed animal experimentation.
In Western Europe and the United States, the growing urban middle class
often adopted cats and dogs as domestic companions. After a long history of
adoration and affection on the one hand and demonization and killing as a
result of superstition and disease (rabies) on the other hand, these animals were
becoming accepted members of middle-class households. Cat and dog pedi
gree associations were established, organizing dog shows and exhibitions with
prizes. Pets were depicted as iconic and aesthetic subjects by artists in news
papers, books, and art exhibits. Authors and artists portrayed companion
animals as emblems of civilized morality and economic success. At the same
time, the rise of companion animals led to a paradox of exploitation and
affection for the different kinds of animals that reflected how people valued
them. Due to urbanization, livestock disappeared from urban citizens’ experi
ences, especially in wealthy countries. Urban officials created laws that banned
pigs, cattle, and other animals. Urban citizens no longer saw slaughterhouses
and other reminders of the short and often brutal lives led by livestock, and
horses were beginning to disappear from cities. Increasingly, urban citizens’
main exposure to animals was seeing dogs, cats, and other companion animals.
Kindness to these animals covered up the harsh reality of other animals’ lives.
This difference between the emotional treatment of small animals in cities and
the commercial approach toward livestock in the countryside only intensified
during the next century.
In Britain, its colonies, European nations, and the United States, the gospel
of animal protection increasingly centered on dogs at the end of the nineteenth
century. Popular dog stories and dog “heroes” encouraged ordinary people to
view dogs as special - the “best friends” of humans who deserved the best
care. Unfortunately, many dogs suffered homelessness or ill treatment. The
worst fate for dogs was to become a subject of medical experimentation by
medical or veterinary students. Dogs had been used for vivisection for
centuries. But with the increasing popularity of pet ownership in many
European nations, animal protection advocates increasingly argued that

medics’ cruelty to dogs led to cruel treatment of humans. Many anti-

vivisectionists believed that the serotherapies, vaccines, and other products
of medical research were immoral and tainted because they were tested and
produced by animals’ suffering. The crude serotherapies, they argued, intro
duced foreign material into peoples’ bodies even as the development of these
biologicals required cruel experiments on laboratory and experimental
animals. Medical researchers responded to these criticisms by arguing that
the lives of a few animals could save those of many humans, and that modern
medical science was essential to “civilized” society. Veterinarians could not
make the same argument, but as we will see in the next chapter, they too
justified animal experimentation in terms of humanitarianism and institutional
ized the practice of using animal bodies for experiments and demonstrations.
This had some unintended consequences. European Enlightenment prin
ciples of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries encouraged the recognition
of suffering, both animal and human, and social principles that would maxi
mize happiness and humanitarianism. By establishing similarities between
humans and animal bodies, natural philosophers contributed to concerns about
animal suffering and its effects on humans. Conducting public or semi-public
demonstrations about animal physiology, such as suffocating birds and small
animals in Robert Boyle’s air-pump apparatus, inadvertently brought their own
observational and experimental methods under broader scrutiny. Was vivisec
tion justifiable? Even Albrecht von Haller found his animal experiments to be
gruesome, and he questioned whether they were justified on moral grounds. It
is important to remember, also, that these new ideas were seldom accepted
right away - especially if they contradicted long-standing medical practices,
since most experimenters were philosophers or physicians.
In the United States, animal protection associations maintained veterinary
hospitals in large cities that treated horses and pet animals. The most famous
was New York’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals “hospital for
dumb animals,” which provided veterinary care for 15,000 dogs, 4,000 cats,
and 2,000 horses each year by 1910. These hospitals promoted the idea of
medical care for pet animals, and pet owner’s affection for their animals
encouraged them to seek and pay for veterinary care. Veterinarians in large
European and American cities established private hospitals for pets (which
also provided boarding) in the early 1900s (Fig. 4.7). Some were lavish, with a
home-like atmosphere complete with women attendants to care for and play
with the animals. Still, most veterinarians in private practice cared for a few
dogs and cats in the context of a general practice located in an office or a day
clinic. To treat pet animals, veterinarians needed to change the way they
viewed their patients. Horses, cattle, and other animals were economically
valuable. Dogs and cats were not; but their value lay with the “sentiment”
attached to them by their owners. Unlike the rough men working with live
stock, these animals’ owners were often women and children. They expected

Pets and Pet Keeping 197
Figure 4.7 Poster of Clinique Cheron in Paris from 1905 in art nouveau style
by T.A. Steinlen (1859-1923).
Courtesy: Rijksmuseum Amsterdam RP-P-1968-308, public domain.
kind treatment, clean facilities, and the use of the latest anesthetic and anal
gesic techniques. By the 1920s, pet owners increasingly expected scientifically
trained veterinarians to provide the same services for pets that their owner
could expect at a hospital for humans. During the next century, veterinary

leaders increasingly leveraged this combination of emotional value and scien

tific medicine to survive several challenges to the veterinary profession.
The Intensifying Storms of War

Nineteenth-century wars relied heavily on animal power, and armies on all
sides expected to sacrifice more horses, oxen, dogs, and other animals than
soldiers. Early in the century, the Napoleonic Wars used hundreds of thou
sands of horses. Military conflicts continued throughout the nineteenth century
(Peninsular War, 1807-1814; Crimean War, 1853-1856; American Civil War,
1861-1865; Franco-Prussian War 1870-1871; several colonial wars) requiring
a steady stream of war animals and healers or veterinarians to keep them
healthy. To specialize in this veterinary field, armies sent students to the early
veterinary schools and paid for their education. Some schools, for instance in
Germany and Turkey, were mainly established for the purpose of training
military veterinarians and their curriculum focused on the problems common
to military horses, including horseshoeing. Many nations established formal
military veterinary services with veterinary inspectors at home and in the
colonies during the nineteenth century. Established in 1880, the British
Army’s Veterinary School trained veterinary officers in basic first aid of
animals, the selection of horses for remounts, and tropical diseases. A new
Army Veterinary Department replaced the old regimental system of employing
army vets. In other countries, similar military veterinary services were estab
lished, in the homeland as well as in their colonies. A corps of military vets
developed around the world, although it took a long time before veterinarians
reached the higher ranks as officers.
Since the horse was so important for mobility during warfare, army com
manders wanted to have enough horses available as a backup, immediately
behind the forward moving troops. These horses were kept at temporary
stations (“remount depots”), along with hospitals for horses and dogs returning
from the battlefield. Army veterinarians inspected the animals before purchas
ing, maintained the healthy horses, treated injuries and illnesses, and dealt with
stray animals and euthanasia. The Napoleonic Wars were excellent early
examples of the need for these complex horse care systems. The Peninsular
War (1807-1814) was a military conflict between Napoleonic France, which
invaded the Iberian Peninsula for control over Spain and Portugal. The British
Army joined the fight in support of Spain. In this campaign and all Napoleonic
Wars, the horse played a significant role. The newly established veterinary
service of the British Army was organized by regiment at that time: horse
doctors were recruited directly into cavalry regiments. They saw the problems
of trying to maintain replacement horses, care for the injured and recover the
stray horses, especially when the army was moving. The British Army

The Intensifying Storms of War 199
developed and began using horse remount depot hospitals during

this campaign.
By the mid-1800s, new technologies of war caused new challenges for
horses and soldiers alike. During the war between the United States and
Mexico (1846-1848), for example, the U.S. Army had added a few veterinar
ians in addition to the farriers it had hired since 1792. (By 1847, there were
only about 15 qualified vets in America, all immigrants from Europe.) During
the American Civil War (1861-1865), the Union cavalry counted 284,000
horses; however, only six veterinarians were assigned to the Union Army.
Dreadful injuries from exploding shells and repeating rifles caused the deaths
of tens of thousands of horses; even more died of glanders, respiratory
diseases, and gastrointestinal illnesses. In Europe, the Crimean War
(1853-1856) was fought between the Russian empire and a coalition of
British, French, and Ottoman troops. The Russians attempted to extend their
empire at the expense of the Ottoman empire. In this war, the armies used
modern technologies such as explosive naval shells, railways, and telegraphs.
However, the Crimean War also quickly became a symbol of logistical,
tactical, medical, and veterinary failures. Human and animal losses were
enormous. The demand for professional modern nursing care of wounded
and diseased soldiers (Florence Nightingale) and horses gained worldwide
attention. Again, the veterinary care of sick and injured horses, including
proper equipment and medicines during transport by sea, as well as on the
battlefield during the severe winters of 1854 and 1855, proved to be
wholly inadequate.
The Crimean War was notable for another innovation: canned meat and
other food for the soldiers, which varied greatly in quality. In 1855, a million
portions of canned meat were supplied to the allied armies in Crimea.
Inspecting the armies’ food rations eventually became another responsibility
for army veterinarians. The use of canned meat in households became common
in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, the rising meat-packing
industry was also stimulated by the military, which needed food that could
easily be transported and preserved for longer periods. Until then, armies were
fed with herds of cattle that moved along in the rearguard. Traditionally,
people had looked for ways to preserve food and based on empirical experi
ence, and processes like cooling, smoking, salting, and drying had been
applied throughout the ages. Large-scale canning techniques promised to feed
armies more efficiently, but poor techniques and corruption caused major
problems. The U.S. meat-packing industry was mostly unregulated, and profit
was the only motive. The cans contained not just meat but were also adulter
ated with cheap additives such as ground-up cereals and offal. The quality of
the canned “meat” was usually very poor, probably due to microbiological
spoilage, and it caused food poisoning among the soldiers. Similarly, in

1877 the British Army and Navy stopped the imports of frozen meat from the
United States, which was uninspected during transport and spoiled due to lack
of proper refrigeration. The problem was so bad during the Spanish-American
conflicts (1890s) that soldiers complained that their canned meat had been
“embalmed.” Some historians assert that more soldiers died from diarrhea,
dysentery, and food poisoning than Spanish bullets. The scandal directed
public attention in the United States to pure food movements and stimulated
the passage of state and federal pure food laws.
These military needs, for food and horses, contributed greatly to the devel
opment of modern European-style veterinary regimes during the 1800s. In
turn, veterinarians were crucial to military success. As the new century of the
1900s dawned, the world looked ahead with hope but also faced the gathering
storms of war.
Conclusions
From this survey of the 1800s, we can conclude that:
1. In the early 1800s, the veterinary marketplace had not changed very much.
Veterinarians educated at the new schools competed with farmers, farriers,
healers, castrators, dentists, and others for patients. Livestock (especially
cattle, sheep, and goats) and equids (especially horses and mules) were the
most important veterinary patients in most parts of the world.
2. Fast-developing knowledge about the natural world, including how animal
bodies functioned in health and disease, was the basis for “scientific”
studies of animals in the European tradition that eventually spread around
most of the world. Elite veterinarians contributed to, and incorporated,
scientific knowledge into European-style veterinary education.
3. Colonialism, global trade networks, and other circulations of animals
around the world led to disease outbreaks (epizootics). Animal experts
in Asia, Africa, and Europe attempted to control epizootics using trad
itional practices: quarantine and slaughter of sick and exposed animals.
A major disease that veterinarians attempted to control was rinderpest,
which destroyed up to 90 percent of infected animals. Sub-Saharan Africa
suffered greatly as both domesticated livestock and wildlife were wiped
out by rinderpest, which was imported by Europeans. Rinderpest was an
imperial disease.
4. Indigenous healing methods continued to thrive around the world where
local people had important knowledge about animal diseases. Healers
treated animal diseases and injuries with botanicals and other medications,
cautery, and simple surgeries. Indigenous healing regimes were often
familiar with concepts such as quarantine and isolation for infectious
diseases and associating some diseases with flies and other vectors.

Conclusions 201
Indigenous knowledge contributed to veterinary knowledge (see the case

of nenta in South Africa).
5. With an increasing global consumption of animal products (meat, dairy),
veterinary leaders began training programs in food hygiene (especially
inspection). Veterinarians argued that they were uniquely qualified to conduct
inspections of slaughterhouses, dairy facilities, and meat and milk products.
6. With the development of new tools (better microscopes, etc.), veterinary
leaders envisioned a “scientific” veterinary medicine (similar to human
medicine) from the 1850s onward. Laboratory investigations became
increasingly important in food hygiene and veterinary research.
7. Veterinary schools based on the European model were founded in many
countries throughout the 1800s. Graduates of these schools established
veterinary associations that worked hard to develop laws and regulations
that restricted the practice of animal healing and food inspection to
graduate veterinarians.
8. The development of germ ideas (especially about disease causation) slowly
led to changes in veterinary education, disease control, and food inspection.
Other ideas about disease causation included the roles of the environment
and insects in spreading disease, the contagium vivum, parasitism, and
toxins. Veterinarians and animal healers working in different places and
situations used the ideas that seemed most effective to them at the time.
9. By working to establish microbiology, comparative pathology, and “one
medicine,” veterinarians were important co-creators of modern medicine
and public health as we know them today. “One medicine” and compara
tive pathology studied disease in both humans and animals (especially
zoonotic diseases). Veterinarians worked alongside physicians and other
scientists in interdisciplinary teams. The French veterinary schools, and
their daughter schools in Canada and the United States, were centers of the
“one medicine” and comparative pathology approach.
10. Most veterinarians worked on horses and livestock, but a few also treated
companion (pet) animals. These animals’ owners valued them for emo
tional reasons, and in the West citizens formed associations for the human
treatment of dogs and other animals. Pet owners increasingly expected
scientifically trained veterinarians to provide the same services for pets
that their owner could expect at a hospital for humans.
Question/Activity: What major scientific discoveries or developments occurred

in your country or region of the world? Can you connect these scientific
developments to epizootics or outbreaks of animal diseases? How were these
scientific ideas different from the beliefs of animal owners? When did veterinary
practice for companion animals or pets develop in your nation?

5 Veterinary Medicine in War and Peace,
1900-1960
Introduction
By 1900, the major components of modernity had been created: the highly
organized, bureaucratic nation-state that regulated people, animals, and envir
onments; large-scale agriculture; industrialization; and new technologies such
as electricity, the telegraph, and the internal combustion engine. The first half
of the twentieth century (1900-1960) would see an intensification of modern
ization. As Sigfried Giedion wrote in his book Mechanization Takes Command
(1948), mechanization in disparate societal sectors was a crucial component of
this modernization, and it assumed control of peoples’ lives. Examples of
innovations he discussed included the assembly line, agricultural production,
the slaughterhouse, systems of hygiene and waste management, and kitchen
tools. European science was an important driving force that equated modern
ization with “progress” in solving social problems (such as how to feed the
world’s rapidly growing human population). Despite implications of “pro
gress,” modernization had negative effects: the destruction of local peoples’
lifeways, huge increases in burning fossil fuels that damaged the earth’s
atmosphere, and political, social, and economic instabilities that led to two
global wars. In many parts of the world, animal agriculture and animal healing
remained local activities, but were increasingly tied to global economies.
For veterinary medicine, the early 1900s saw both a continuation of the
previous centuries’ themes and new developments and problems.
Veterinarians and animal owners around the world were still faced with
outbreaks of animal diseases that traveled quickly on ships and railroads.
Veterinary institutions, regulations, and regimes continued to develop in many
parts of the world, with an increasingly narrow definition of “veterinarian” as a
graduate of a European-model veterinary school. Veterinary researchers con
tributed a great deal of knowledge and evidence to bacteriology as well as in
the new sciences of immunology and virology. But veterinary medicine faced
important changes due to mechanization and modernization, also. Methods of
raising livestock began to intensify, with ever-larger numbers of animals
crowded into enclosures and buildings. Public health officials and agricultural
202

Introduction 203
leaders often clashed, putting veterinarians in difficult positions. The biggest

change, however, was the slow but steady replacement of animal power with
that of engines. Horses and oxen used for power, transportation, and traction
were valuable animals for whom owners would be willing to pay for veterinary
care. Most veterinarians and animal healers focused on these animals, with
little attention paid to pets and smaller animals with low economic value. With
mechanization, veterinarians lost their most valuable patients. In many places,
veterinarians learned to shift between individual clinical care and herd health
and preventive medicine.
Veterinarians also participated in, and were shaped by, the great upheavals
of the 1900s, especially uprisings and instability in colonized regions, World
War I, the global economic depression, World War II, and postwar recovery.
Maps of the world’s nations quickly became outdated as empires collapsed and
new nations arose. The Western European colonial regimes, such as the British
in India, weakened or dissolved; and revolutions based on socialism and
communism upset old monarchies and capitalist governments (the Russian
Revolution and the 1949 Revolution in China, for example). Between the
advent of World War I, in 1914, and the end of World War II, in 1945, much
of the world lived with war and violence or the equally challenging crises of
poverty and famine (that outlasted the wars). For many of the world’s people,
these were years of crisis. Paradoxically, this time period also increased the
pace of scientific and technological developments, especially during the
war years.
For veterinary medicine, new therapies and tools, such as antimicrobials and
vaccines, greatly increased the ability to control animal diseases and enabled
the industrialization of food animal production in the West. In the period
1900-1945, and particularly during the postwar reconstruction, which lasted
until 1960, veterinarians oversaw large-scale eradication schemes as a disease
preventive measure. They found new roles as government food inspectors,
army veterinarians, and preventive medicine specialists for large herds. These
changes were not driven primarily by the new therapies and tools, however,
but by changes in the roles of animals in societies. Of course, in most of the
world, small-scale animal agriculture and local animal healing practices con
tinued. These practices remained the backbone of human-animal interactions
(and survival) for much of the world’s population.
The global animal economy began to change during this time period,
however: food animal production industrialized, and engines replaced horses
in transportation and agriculture. These trends, which began in the United
States and Europe, have arguably been the most profound transformation in
human-animal relationships since domestication. Under this new regime,
food-producing animals lived and died out of sight of the humans who
consumed them. Milk appeared in bottles; cheese, yoghurt, ghee, and other

204 Veterinary Medicine in War and Peace, 1900-1960
milk products could be purchased rather than made at home. Meat, already
butchered and cut into pieces, was displayed in a sanitary shop. As animal
production industrialized, food prices decreased, and meat consumption
increased; these trends continue today. The other major force shaping the
global animal economy was the replacement of horses and other animals with
mechanized power and transport. To be sure, in many areas of the world, small
farmers continued to use donkeys and other draft animals along with machines.
Mechanization has spread unevenly. In the West (except for the military),
horses became obsolete for most work purposes in society and agriculture by
the rise of cars, trucks, and tractors in the first half of the twentieth century,
particularly when roads were improved. The equine-oriented veterinary pro
fession in the mechanizing nations had to adapt quickly as their most important
patient population disappeared. This was perhaps the greatest challenge the
young profession had yet faced.
The Decline of the Horse Economy

Today it is hard to grasp the degree to which economies and broader society
depended on horses. In 1720, before industrialization and mechanization
began in the West, the number of horses worldwide was estimated at 27
million. Around 1815 this figure had risen to 55 million, while a peak of
110 million horses globally was reached between 1910 and 1920 (Fig. 5.1).
European nations (France, Germany) and the UK reached their peak horse
populations earlier than North American countries (Canada, United States),
reflecting developments in rail and urban transportation. Especially in North
America, horses remained important for agricultural use. With its largely
agricultural economy, Russia had the largest horse population at the beginning
of the twentieth century, estimated at 23 million. However, tremendous losses
of the equine population followed due to the Russian Civil War (1917-1922)
and both world wars. During the process of collectivization (especially 1929
onward), the horse population dropped from 34 to 16.5 million, contributing to
severe famines and poverty in the vast rural areas.
Until the 1920s, horses represented the most important clientele for veterin
arians, in society and agriculture as well as for the military, while the veterin
ary curriculum was built around the horse as model animal. Cattle, pigs, sheep,
and poultry had economic value as food producers, but the workhorse had
practical value. Veterinarians served livestock owners, but horse owners dom
inated the marketplace for animal care. Because of these interests, equine
medicine had developed the most over the centuries. Veterinarians’ focus on
infectious diseases, such as glanders, also reveal how horse diseases played a

The Decline of the Horse Economy 205
Horse population (in millions) in Britain, Canada, France, Germany and the USA
5 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 30
Years
Figure 5.1 Graph showing horse population (in million) in Britain*, Canada*,
France, Germany#, and the United States (right y-axis) in the period
1870-1980. (*Only farm horses, #non-military use.)
Sources: Wilfried Brade, ‘Die deutsche Reitpferdezucht - aktueller Stand und
wirtschaftliche Bedeutung’, Berichte uber Landwirtschaft - Zeitschrift fur Agrarpolitik
und Landwirtschaft 91 (2013) 1:2; G.K. Crossman, The Organisational Landscape of
the English Horse Industry: A Contrast with Sweden and the Netherlands, thesis Univ.
Exeter 2010) Fig. 2.2; J.P. Digard, Une histoire du cheval. Art, techniques, societe
(Arles: Actes Sud, 2004); Emily R. Kilby, ‘The Demographics of the U.S. Equine
Population’, in: D.J. Salem and A.N. Rowan (Eds.), The State of the Animals 2007
(Washington, DC: Humane Society Press, 2007), p. 176; F.M.L. Thompson, Horses in
European Economic History. A preliminary Canter (Reading: British Agricultural
History Society, 1983), p. 59. Courtesy: Monique Tersteeg B.Sc. Department of
Population Health Sciences, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University.
significant role in the rise of comparative pathology. In addition, after the

discoveries of Charles Darwin and Georg Mendel, much veterinary attention
was paid to theories about heredity. Could problems in horses - particularly in
their legs, hooves, and lungs - be explained and prevented by knowledge of
genetics? Did purebred horses naturally have good legs, lungs, and hooves? Or
were hybrids better? Would inferior horses pass this quality on to their
offspring? Veterinarians embraced this field and supported pedigree adminis
tration, enrollment in breed associations, and inspection of stallions. Horse
breeding was an important tool for veterinarians and horse breeders who
increasingly saw themselves as animal engineers.
Animal Engineering
Because horses, mules, oxen, and other draft animals were crucial to industrial
and economic activities, scientists and engineers focused on assessing and

improving “horsepower.” The British engineer James Watt was credited with
inventing the term “horsepower,” a unit of how much work a horse could
perform over time, after studying farm horses and ponies working in coal
mines. To increase horses’ energy output while keeping maintenance costs
low, animal breeders crossed stronger, heavier horses with local animals.
Scientists interested in nutrition and efficiency calculated ratios of energy
consumed (feeding) to energy output. Veterinary leaders noticed this “scien-
tization” of animal breeding and feeding, and some (such as American
Leonard Pearson [1868-1909]) even advocated restructuring veterinary edu
cation to produce “animal engineers” along with clinicians. The “animal
industry” needed horses that were not only strong and efficient, but also
resistant to lameness and injury. This engineering view of draft animals valued
them in quantitative terms, like machines; the goal was to maximize power
output relative to energy input (and, of course, profit).
Maximizing efficiency in equine bodies meant controlling breeding pro
grams. At this time, several nations around the world maintained state-run
horse-breeding farms. Along with private farms, these large establishments
supplied horses to governments, armies, urban transportation companies, and
agriculture. In Korea, for example, the island of Jeju specialized in producing
horses, cared for by specialized teuri herders. Ten state-run horse farms and
numerous private farms utilized veterinary services and the latest technologies
at the end of the 1800s. At this same time, draft-animal breeding during the late
Qin dynasty (China) blended traditional Chinese and Mongolian techniques
for feeding and breeding, drawing on China’s long history of horse breeding.
By the end of this dynasty (1911), which was very interested in technology,
ideas about increasing the efficiency of horses, cattle, and buffaloes began to
appear in government guidelines for running state-owned farms. The famous
state stud farms of Europe (France, Germany, Hungary, Austria, Poland,
Czech Republic, Spain, etc.) developed horses for cavalry, riding, and sport
and employed veterinarians throughout the long nineteenth century. While
these specialized breeding farms did not produce most of any nation’s working
animals, they were testing grounds for applying new ideas about scientific
breeding and animal husbandry to the old problem of making an animal a
“more efficient machine.”
Urban populations of horses and other draft animals peaked at the end of the
nineteenth century, just as graduate veterinarians’ numbers were rising. In
European and American cities, the ratio of horses to humans varied from
1:10 to 1:15, on average. Hundreds of thousands of horses and oxen moved
freight and people in the great cities of South and East Asia; and horses
walking on treadmills powered urban factories and mills worldwide. Not
surprisingly, these horses’ heavy workloads meant frequent lameness and
breakdowns. In the United States, large urban stables kept veterinarians on

retainer (paying them a monthly salary) to treat or (often) shoot lame horses
not worth saving. A surprisingly high percentage of European and North
American veterinarians earned their living in urban areas, reflecting the large
numbers and high value of horses. In the United States in 1900, a horse was
worth $50-$60, compared to $30 for a dairy cow, $35 for beef cattle, and $3
for a pig or sheep. Owners were more likely to pay for veterinary care if the
animal was valuable. Also, most municipalities employed veterinarians to
purchase and supervise the care of the city’s horses (used for police, fire
fighting, and hauling). Some cities even had their own horse hospitals, indicat
ing cities’ reliance on healthy horses. Veterinary schools’ curricula, reflecting
this reality, still focused on horses. Most veterinary associations were based
in cities.
With their core business and focus on equine medicine, understandably,
veterinarians and veterinary authorities feared the consequences of the transi
tion from horsepower to machine power in the urban environment as well as in
the countryside. What could this mean for the future of the profession?
After a spectacular drop, then a slow increase beginning in the 1970s, the
world’s equine population is estimated at 60 million today. However, this
latest increase is also due to a major change in the functioning and valuing of
most horses: they have become companion animals used in sports and recre
ation. That change in equine roles only became widespread after the 1950s,
however; and only for those wealthy enough to own a horse for leisure
purposes. In most of the world, horses were slowly replaced as the major
means of transport by motorized vehicles during the first half of the 1900s. The
transition from horse to motorized power proceeded unevenly, slowly, but
still unavoidably.
Horses had long been cultural and social icons as well as crucial economic
resources. This meant that owners’ attitudes toward horses, both as living
beings and as technologies, influenced how horses maintained or lost eco
nomic value and social relevance. Between 1907 and 1917 cars replaced
horses as the regular means of transport for people and goods in the United
States, for example. About 140,000 cars and 3,000 trucks were registered there
in 1907. Long-distance transport of people and goods was made by railroad,
and short distances by foot, bicycle, or horse-drawn carriage. Not many people
still rode horses. In 1915, the number of cars surpassed the number of
nonagricultural horses for the first time. The number of cars processed at
assembly lines rose to almost 5 million, and the number of commercial,
agricultural, and military vehicles, to almost 400,000 in 1917. The equine
population hit its peak in 1917, and by 1930 cars per U.S. citizen had
surpassed horses
For urban dwellers horses had become an anachronistic, wasteful, and
dangerous minority on the roads. The environment started to play a role as

well. In 1908, New York City’s 120,000 horses left a pungent 1.3 million liters
of urine and 2.6 million kilograms of manure on the streets daily. Pleas were
made for a horseless city with clean, odorless streets with transportation by
cars, motor bus lines, and electric trams. Unpaved dirty roads were replaced by
asphalt, and stables were banned inside larger towns and cities. Another plea
for reducing horse work came from the urban animal protection movements.
The coming of the motor vehicle would liberate horses and mules from harsh
and exhausting servitude. Horses of sport, pleasure, and fashion would have
better lives. These humanitarian arguments provide a sense of how progress,
technology, and modernity became entangled with humanity, cruelty, and
sentimentality in the opening decades of the twentieth century.
Automobiles became popular at the expense of horses as a means of
transportation. Not only in urban America but also in larger cities in other
countries around the world people rapidly adopted mechanized transportation.
However, developments often were slower. For instance, Germany did not
become motorized like the United States, Britain, and France until the 1930s.
In many countries like India and Australia, railways were built during the
colonial period, while the European tradition of horse-powered carriage trans
portation for passengers, goods, and mail was adopted, but at a much smaller
scale, and only for people in high social status. In much of Asia, the majority
still used bullock- or oxen-powered transportation, particularly in rural areas,
inland waterway systems, bicycles, and the human-powered carts or rick
shaws. In North Africa, camel caravans continued to play a role as traditional
means of transport, as did horses, donkeys, and mules in Central and South
America, next to a slow increase of cars, trucks, trains, and other motorized
transport. The means of transport and power that people chose depended on the
conditions: the climate, distances, costs, and cultural considerations.
It is important to keep these regional differences in mind when examining
the market for veterinary services. For instance, regarding the business for
veterinarians, apart from looking at horse populations, it is also important to
map out where these animals lived. As historian Philip Teigen has pointed out,
many horses lived in urban areas of the United States. By 1910, 14 percent of
the total horse population and 6 percent of all mules lived in non-rural areas.
Due to the high density of economically valuable urban horses, many veterin
arians located their private practice in cities; they also did so because many
food animals were kept within towns. Veterinarians in the countryside had to
travel long distances to care for animals, which made their practice less
profitable (time is money, after all). Not only in cities, but also in the country
side veterinarians were confronted with the process of mechanization. There,
the horse was replaced by tractors and trucks. Again, this worried veterinarians
in the United States, since 16 million horses were kept on farms against 1.3
million horses performing non-agricultural work in 1930. Moreover, prices of

horses had dropped significantly in the 1920s. In Europe, the situation was
different. In Britain, for instance, most horses were used outside agriculture,
while as many resided in the towns as in the countryside. Nevertheless, the
tractor would eventually replace farm horses.
Rural Horses and Tractors

The mechanization of many aspects of agriculture began simultaneously in
Britain and the United States. Due to this process, new machines such as
combines, cultivators, and milking machines found their way to farms in the
twentieth century. Of these, the tractor was one of the most important innov
ations. In the 1920s it was estimated that one tractor equaled sixteen horses.
However, the replacement of horses, particularly heavy draught horses, by
tractors in agriculture started later than the rise of cars within urban life. First,
the heavy steam tractors were introduced on big farms. These machines proved
to be useful for belt work (threshing grain) but slow and impractical for field
work. They were also expensive and could be dangerous, so by 1908 gasoline-
powered machines were replacing steam-powered ones in North America.
However, many North American farmers with small to medium-sized holdings
could not afford a tractor or truck until around World War II.
In Europe, Britain was the leading country with mechanization, where about
50,000 tractors were in use in 1939. In total, these represented more traction
force (expressed in horsepower) than all agricultural horses at that time. In
many other European countries, this transition happened after World War II as
part of postwar recovery programs. Many smallholders continued their work
using heavy horses as well as tractors until the 1960s and 1970s. Farms
represented the last bastion of animal power, owing not only to economics
but also in part because replacing horses meant upsetting the entire structure of
farm work. Motorization was most profitable on large farms in sparsely
populated regions (with a limited labor supply) such as Canada, Argentina,
and Australia. By the 1930s, these respective countries became the world’s
largest exporters of wheat.
As Figure 5.2 shows, the tipping point of horse replacement by tractors
occurred in 1944 in the United States and in 1948 in Canada. However, this
was a slow process. For several years after acquiring a tractor, many farmers
kept one or two horses for particular tasks (cultivating young plants, for
example) or because they liked their horses. France also possessed a large
agricultural sector, yet the transition to tractors took much longer. The same
holds for Germany, which - despite its pioneering role in motor vehicle
substitution - had a large unmechanized agricultural sector until after World
War II. Germany therefore had a high horse population compared to France
and Britain and a rather late transition to tractors. In Australia, despite

Years
Figure 5.2 Graph showing the tipping point of horses (in millions)
replacement by tractors ( x 1000) in Canada and the United States in the
period 1920-1980.
Source: William J. White, “Economic History of Tractors in the United States,” EH.Net
Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. March 26, 2008; Darrin Qualman: www
.darrinqualman.com/high-input-agriculture/canada-tractor-numbers-and-horse-
numbers-historic-1910-to-1980/ Courtesy: Monique Tersteeg B.Sc. Department of
Population Health Sciences, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University.
mechanization in agriculture, it took the tractor from 1918 to 1950 to com

pletely replace the horse. After the famine of 1921, and due to a loss of horses
during wars, Soviet agricultural authorities wanted to replace horse traction
with tractors. They ordered tens of thousands of tractors, combines, and other
agricultural equipment from the United States. However, industrialization of
Soviet agriculture still proceeded slowly over vast territories, so there was a
continuing need for horses.
Compared with North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, the
transition from horse to motorized power on smallholder farms in Africa, Asia,
and areas of Central and South America happened much later, only partially,
or - in some regions - not at all. Next to horses, oxen and water buffaloes
represented the standard traction power. Oxen, also known as bullocks in
Australia and India, can be regarded as the first “tractors.” Usually yoked in
pairs, they can pull more weight and in general are more powerful than horses,
particularly in terms of endurance. Often, they are also used as a source of
power to grind grain or supply irrigation. Depending on circumstances, some
working oxen were shod with two half-moon-shaped irons for each claw.

Unlike horses, oxen cannot balance on three legs; therefore, shoeing was done
after throwing the ox to the ground and lashing all four feet to a heavy wooden
tripod. The domestic water buffalo (both river and swamp types) is spread over
the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and China. For centuries they have
been very suitable for tilling rice fields, and their worldwide population is now
estimated at 202 million. Apart from traction, the water buffalo has always
been an important source of milk. Their milk is richer in fatty acids and
proteins than that of dairy cattle.
In Africa, depending on social, economic, and ecological conditions, the use
of animal-powered transport slowly spread from the coastal regions by the
activities of traders, settlers, missionaries, and government authorities, who
used imported horses, donkeys, and mules. This happened first during the
colonial periods in South Africa and Egypt. Except for South Africa, the
introduction of animal power in agriculture happened mainly in the twentieth
century. In Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan, mainly oxen or barren cows are used
for traction. After the independence of many African countries, it was assumed
that (following the European example) tractors would soon replace animal
traction. However, tractor hire schemes for smallholders failed, due to high oil
prices and problems with maintaining the machines. Animal traction for tillage
and transport on wheels became a major goal of development strategies in
many countries in sub-Saharan Africa. There, millions of mules (a cross
between a horse and donkey) provide transport and traction. Mules have a
better ability to adapt to the harsh conditions of the highlands and drought.
Compared to oxen, mules are easier to handle for women, who have been
traditionally responsible for transport of water, fuel, and crops. Larger and
more prestigious animals (usually bovines) are traditionally handled by men in
many cultures.
The collapse of the horse industry in the Western world and the rise of
agricultural machines was a gradual transition in most areas. Breeders stopped
producing horses in large numbers, while many farmers had their horses
slaughtered. Sadly, many unique horse breeds disappeared. In Turkey, for
example, the Karacabey Stud was established after independence to develop
the Turkish Karacabey breed. Karacabeys were used for riding and light work;
but the breed declined dramatically as horses were replaced by motorized
vehicles, and today this breed is extinct. In contrast, animal traction in the
developing world was only replaced by tractors to a limited extent, while in
many places transport and traction by oxen, water buffaloes, donkeys, and
mules even increased. The market for veterinary care in those areas remained
focused on these important and valuable animals, especially during contagious
disease outbreaks.
With the decline of the numbers and economic value of urban and agricul
tural horse populations in the Western world, veterinarians there faced great

challenges for their business and profession. Due to the shrinking market for
veterinary services and fears of unemployment, fewer and fewer students
enrolled in veterinary schools. The total number of veterinary students in
North America fell 75 percent between 1914 and 1924. This was not the case
in other countries, where horses and oxen were not so rapidly replaced, the
number of government veterinarians and farm animal practitioners had always
been bigger, and the need for army veterinarians had steadily grown.
Fortunately, veterinarians also provided other crucial services to urban and
rural areas, especially milk and meat inspection. Increasingly, as horses disap
peared, veterinarians concentrated more on safeguarding the food supply.
Veterinarians: Guardians of the Global Food Supply
Changes in Global Circulations of Animal Products

Veterinarians’ responsibilities for meat and milk inspection made the profes
sion vulnerable to political and social controversies, however. In the United
States, the federal government’s Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) controlled
veterinary meat inspection for domestic use and export. The BAI was the
single largest employer of U.S. veterinarians, and the public reputation of
American veterinarians depended on the BAI’s performance. During the
Spanish-American conflict in Cuba (1898), the poor quality of canned and
refrigerated meat supplied to the U.S. Army became a national scandal. Army
generals complained that the meat smelled “like a dead body” and made
soldiers sick. They blamed the huge American meat-packing companies,
who then blamed the BAI and its veterinary meat inspectors. Publication of
the popular book The Jungle (1906) led to the investigation of meat produc
tion. Eventually the BAI chief, eminent veterinarian Daniel Elmer Salmon,
resigned, although corrupt meat-producing companies and lax governmental
oversight were responsible for meat-quality problems. U.S. veterinarians bit
terly resented attacks on the integrity of meat inspection and the veterinary
profession. They argued that veterinary schools incorporated modern bacterio
logical training, the profession advocated increased regulation of animal prod
ucts, and all veterinarians took an oath of integrity and honorable, ethical
behavior. This U.S. example demonstrates the politicized nature of food
inspection and other veterinary activities, especially in the twentieth century.
The food supply and food patterns changed dramatically due to population
growth, industrialization, and urbanization from around 1850 onward, and this
process accelerated in the twentieth century. The increasing demand for meat,
milk, dairy products, and eggs spurred innovations in agriculture and animal
production methods. These innovations included scaling-up, specialization,
cooperation, and mechanization in agriculture as well as more extensive and

Veterinarians: Guardians of the Global Food Supply 213
intensive animal husbandry. Economic growth, together with the use of syn
thetic fertilizers and the resulting surplus of new animal feeds, stimulated the
development of mass production in the livestock sector of the Western world
over the course of the twentieth century. This so-called modern consumption
pattern is characterized by a larger variety of food products, more processed
and convenience foods, and a decrease in seasonal influences. Between
1850 and 1930, the annual per capita meat consumption doubled in
European nations from about 25 to 50 kilograms. It should be noted that these
figures are based on total meat production in a country (that is, carcass weight,
minus exports, plus imports) divided by total number of inhabitants. Thus,
only about 45 percent of the animal is consumed as food - the balance
represents everything from cooling and cooking losses and food left on the
plate to inedible materials such as hides and bones
In cooperation with agriculturists, veterinarians contributed to increased
animal production through changes in animal husbandry and product process
ing. With better feeds, livestock selection, crossbreeding, and inspection, the
carcass weight of cattle increased by 120 percent between 1800 and 1912.
These cattle were smaller and leaner animals, which fattened quickly and could
be slaughtered at a much earlier stage. To improve pork production, European
pigs were crossed with Chinese breeds. Cheese and butter making moved from
farms to collective dairy-processing facilities, private or cooperative steam-
powered creameries with boilers and separators. With selective breeding and
high-protein feeding, egg production became very profitable. Egg yield
increased from about 60 eggs per year per hen (c. 1800) to 135 in 1940.
Factory farming of pigs and poultry, and to a lesser extent cattle, changed from
a small solitary operation - often a family farm - into a component of the
greater production chain from primary production to consumer.
However, it must be stressed that large-scale, capital-intensive farming only
gradually replaced peasant farming, and that around the turn of the century,
livestock production was still mainly based on smallholder farms. This was
true for farmers around the world. As independent farmers or tenants employed
by estate holders, most of their products found consumers via local markets.
Nevertheless, in addition to that flow of foods of animal origin, the increase in
livestock production on larger farms together with modern transport facilities
resulted in a growing global trade in live animals and their products. Later,
after the development of refrigerated ships, the distant (former) colonies
supplied perishables like meat and butter to Europe, to be exchanged for
exported European goods and capital. The trading monopoly of the
European colonial system made way for an international economy in which
European farm products were also exported.
Agricultural historians call the period up to World War I the first of three
global “food regimes,” or eras, which emerged from European colonialism.

During this first historical era in international agricultural development, colo

nial governments extended capitalist production relationships to almost every
continent. These white “settler” governments and companies sent agricultural
exports from sparsely populated countries in Australasia, Africa, and the
Americas to Europe, Britain and later North America. Both before and
following World War I, the efforts of veterinarians helped transform local
agriculture in colonial areas. As historian Diana K. Davis has shown, French
veterinarians in the Maghreb (northern Africa) were crucial agents of coloni
alism. Their activities included facilitating the trade in animals and animal
products, research on infectious diseases, and treating sick animals and
humans. However, these veterinarians also functioned as spies, advanced
troops infiltrating enemy areas, and range managers who helped destroy
nomadic peoples’ lifeways and alter the natural environment. Serving the
French colonial government also served the forcible inclusion of Morocco,
Tunisia, and Algeria into the global food regimes of the early to mid-1900s.
Along with livestock production, veterinarians became involved in inspec
tion and quality control of imported and exported livestock and foods of
animal origin. National and international associations for professional veterin
ary food inspection were founded, and meat and milk inspection became
important issues for international congresses. Food hygiene was also important
for the Office International d’Hygiene Publique (1907) and the Office
International des Epizooties (OIE, 1924), both established in Paris. Foreign
markets increasingly demanded veterinary surveillance to guarantee quality
and safety standards of exported and imported meat. For example, uninspected
meat products exported by the United States were rejected by Germany and
other nations, whose state-inspected meat-producing industries protested that
U.S. meat did not meet German regulatory standards. As discussed in
Chapter 4, the BAI was founded in 1884 to provide meat inspection for
domestic and export markets, as well as to control outbreaks of bovine
pleuropneumonia and other livestock diseases.
For import and export inspection purposes, veterinarians developed quality
and safety control as well as legal procedures for certification. In this way,
these official veterinarians become key components of the extended food
networks, globalization of the agro-food system, and international trade polit
ics. As in the previous centuries, the growth of international trade was regu
larly hampered by outbreaks of livestock diseases. Sometimes these were
caused by smuggling infected cattle (foot and mouth disease) or contaminated
products (trichinosis). Regularly this led to trade wars between nations
whereby governments banned foreign livestock of products, which in turn
was profitable for protecting domestic livestock farming. For instance, in the
early 1890s, virtually all livestock from mainland Europe was prohibited from
landing in Britain. Animals that were allowed into the country had to be

Veterinarians: Guardians of the Global Food Supply 215
slaughtered at the port of debarkation. The rise in meat imports into Europe
made possible by the application of refrigeration meant that meat prices
followed cereal prices and declined after 1880. European nations reacted by
erecting tariff barriers and other measures, such as declaring the imported meat
unsound, to restrict imports. However, as Britain rejected protectionism, her
market remained open to meat imports of all kinds until the outbreak of war
in 1914.
The two world wars and the economic crisis of the 1930s provided the most
severe interruptions to the meat and livestock trade. Both wars seriously
reduced purchasing power in Europe, as national expenditure switched from
production of food to military needs and the people consumed more grain and
less meat. In the early 1920s the international meat and livestock trade was
restored quite quickly after the distortion during World War I. World meat
imports again remained highly concentrated on Britain. Between 1924 and
1928, the UK bought almost 60 percent of the beef, 94 percent of the mutton,
and 72 percent of the pork that entered world trade. In that period, the main
exporters were Argentina (61 percent of world beef supplies), New Zealand
and Australia (45 percent of world mutton supplies), and smaller European
countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands (60 percent of pork and bacon
supplies). Because of the expanding market in the United States, the interwar
livestock trade was mainly between European countries. The depression of
1929 and the following process of self-sufficiency as part of war preparation
had an adverse effect on both the trade in meat and live animals. World War II
caused an even greater reduction in international meat and livestock trade than
World War I. In 1934-1938, world exports of beef had averaged 661 million
tons per year; it fell to 387 million tons in 1948-1952. Beef exports did not
recover to the prewar level until 1960. Instead of Britain, the United States
became the highest beef importer after World War II, acquiring 30 percent of
world imports.
Veterinarians’ roles in the care of food-producing animals and sanitary
inspection of animal products grew in importance during the first half of the
twentieth century, despite the disruptions of war and economic depression.
These activities were crucial for the survival of veterinary schools and the
veterinary profession. Schools’ curricula, many traditionally focused on
horses, shifted to training veterinary students to provide care for food
producing animals and scientific assessment of meat and milk. In many
nations, federal or national governments sponsored and regulated veterinary
education. This was true for most independent nations and also for
European-controlled colonial states. Major exceptions included Britain
(England and Wales) and the United States, with free-market economies and
relatively low levels of governmental oversight. In these countries, both the
(human) medical profession and the veterinary profession fiercely opposed

oversight, which to them felt like “socialism.” Veterinarians wished to regulate

their own profession: to write the laws, control the colleges, and determine the
cost of their services.
The shift to food-producing animals, however, challenged veterinary auton
omy, and this is another example of political influence on the development of
veterinary regimes. Surprisingly, in the United States for several years veter
inary education was under the control of the federal government’s BAI, which
was the single largest veterinary employer. Between 1910 and 1930, the BAI
employed about 10 percent of all U.S. veterinarians. BAI vets worked on
regular salary instead of risking their livelihood in private practice; these were
the best jobs. Because they conducted research on livestock and food inspec
tion, BAI vets needed to have excellent training in bacteriology, pathology,
and other basic sciences. While not providing any money to the veterinary
colleges, the BAI dictated which subjects their students should study,
inspected every veterinary college, and tracked every student admitted. The
BAI angered veterinary faculties by judging the qualifications of the professors
and restricting the number of professors trained at the same school. This
detailed, centralized program of standards for veterinary colleges licensed
the schools - and eight schools did not pass the test, so their graduates could
not apply for BAI jobs or sit for the civil service examinations. Despite
veterinary colleges’ protests, the U.S. federal government remained in substan
tial control of the veterinary profession, through the BAI and the military
services, until the end of World War II.
All these developments show that veterinarians compensated the partial loss
of their activities within the horse economy by entering the market for veterin
ary services in the area of livestock production, food safety, and public health
in the first half of the twentieth century. Veterinary leaders reformed the
veterinary curriculum, incorporating more training in basic sciences such as
bacteriology and focusing more on livestock and food safety. A few even
included a course or two about dogs and other pet animals. Formalized,
European veterinary medicine survived by remaking itself into the profession
that could turn the tools of bacteriology and other sciences into practical
benefits - and fortunately, these sciences expanded rapidly during the twenti
eth century.
Twentieth-Century Scientific Developments and Disease

Outbreaks
Continuing developments in microbiology/bacteriology, immunology, and
virology contributed to the success of large-scale veterinary disease eradication
schemes during the 1900s through 1960s (Table 5.1). The terrible animal
plagues - rinderpest, contagious bovine pleuropneumonia (CBPP) - remained

Twentieth-Century Scientific Developments and Disease Outbreaks 217
Table 5.1. Milestones in microbial studies and therapy, 1880-1960+
MILESTONES IN
MICROBIAL STUDIES AND
THERAPY, 1880-1960+
General theories of disease causation, the development of scientific
disciplines, and technologies as they influenced Western veterinary
medicine
4 C. 1880-1900 IMMUNOLOGY
• Technologies: vaccines of different types, serology,
horses as immune serum factories
• Cellular immunity (Metchnikov)
• Humoral immunity (antibodies) (Behring, Kitasato,
Ehrlich)
5 C. 1900 VIROLOGY
• Technologies: Filtering apparatus to remove larger
bacteria (Chamberland), passaging through laboratory
animals
• CBPP (Nocard & Roux)
• African horse sickness (McFadyean)
• Rabies (Frasfmri & Remlinger)
6 C. 1900-60 CHEMOTHERAPY
• Biologicals
• Salvarsan & derivatives (1910)
• Penicillin (1929);sulfonamides (1935)
• Streptomycin (1940s); many antibacterials developed
• New vaccines against viral diseases
7 C.1980-2020 MOLECULAR
BIOLOGY
• Technologies: component vaccines, recombinant
DNA, PCR, gene therapy
• Prion disease causation theory (BSE, scrapie)
• Rinderpest eradication
• Targeted therapies for cancerous diseases

problems, as did zoonoses such as brucellosis and bovine tuberculosis.

Understanding these diseases, and creating vaccines and therapeutics to help
control them, depended on expanding knowledge in areas such as
thermodynamics, electromagnetism, (an)organic chemistry, atom theory, and
radioactivity. Perhaps most crucially, stronger microscopes revealed the aston
ishing diversity of the microbial world. The stronger the microscope, the more
micro-organisms were identified, from parasites, yeasts, fungi, and bacteria to
viruses. Viruses were much smaller and could only be visualized using
electron microscopes available from the 1930s onward (although their exist
ence was known since the 1890s). Disease control and eradication programs
depended on combining traditional strategies (test and slaughter, the cordon
sanitaire) with the vaccines and other tools being developed from the 1910s
onward. An understanding of how and why these tools worked depended on
rapidly growing fields such as immunology and virology.
Immunology: The Body’s Defenses

Ideas about the body’s defenses against diseases were ancient; but a remark
ably talented generation of scientists began to work out the actual mechanisms
in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There were two types of these mechanisms:
the activities of cells (cellular immunity) and the development of antibodies
(humoral immunity). Ilya Ilich Metchnikov (1845-1916), a Russian/Ukrainian
invertebrate zoologist who supported the Darwin-Wallace theory of evolution,
first observed cellular inflammatory reactions in starfish larvae and water fleas
in the 1880s. Metchnikov found cells he named “phagocytes”: large cells that
roamed the body and engulfed foreign microorganisms. In mammals, this
cellular response included two different types of cells, the leukocytes and
larger macrophages. Metchnikov believed this mechanism explained how the
body defended itself against disease-causing organisms. Almost at the same
time, however, other scientists found that something else in the blood (not
phagocytic cells) could also produce immunity. In 1889, Hans Buchner
(1850-1902) showed that cell-free serum killed bacteria, but that heating the
serum destroyed this effect. The next year, Emil von Behring (1854-1917) and
Shibasaburo Kitasato (1853-1931) worked together in Robert Koch’s labora
tory to prepare immune sera and antitoxins against tetanus and diphtheria, thus
demonstrating humoral immunity. In 1900, Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) pro
posed the side-chain theory that explained antibody specificity (the molecular
structure was finally elucidated in 1959).
The immune sera were generated in the bodies of horses: after injection with
small amounts of toxin, the horse produced antibodies that were protective for
other animals and humans. In subsequent decades, horses functioned as living
factories within laboratories and medical and veterinary schools and for

companies that produced biological products. These immunological discover

ies, and the development of mass production in horses, saved uncounted lives
(especially children with diphtheria). Realizing the complexity of the immune
system, scientists throughout the twentieth century studied serum sickness,
allergies, blood type antigens, and many other aspects of the body’s defenses.
Most of these discoveries were made using farm animals as test subjects.
Chickens were used to identify antibody-producing B cells from the bursa of
Fabricius, while activation of B cells in lymph nodes was discovered in sheep.
Pigs were used in early xenotransplantation studies, including blood transfu
sions and organ transplantations between species. (Some humans even
received transplants of animal organs - including testes and ovaries!)
These discoveries led to advancements in controlling various animal disease
problems. Chickens, for example, had been extensively used as laboratory
animals and thus their diseases were well studied. The causal bacterium of
fowl cholera was detected by microscopy in chicken blood in 1878 by Italian
veterinary pathologist Edoardo Perroncito (1847-1936). Two years later,
Louis Pasteur succeeded in culturing and attenuating the bacterium, which
was later named after him: Pasteurella multocida. He also proposed the
development of a vaccine, but it was veterinarian Theodor Kitt (1858-1941),
professor at the Munich veterinary school, who studied the etiology of Cholera
avium and who developed a serum immunization method. Later, inactivated
agents were developed, providing a longer immunity. All these examples, and
many others, reveal the fact that animal diseases were (in some ways) more
thoroughly studied than those in humans at the turn of the twentieth century.
Moreover, the scientists working on these problems were, from today’s view
point, remarkably interdisciplinary, including chemists, veterinarians, phys
icians, microbiologists, and many others. Despite international scientific
competition, several worked in multinational groups and scientific ideas and
practices circulated around the world due to the increase in published scientific
journals and international congresses. These were exciting times for scientists,
and perhaps the most exciting new biomedical science was virology.
Virology: The Mysterious Diseases

The development of virology was closely tied to developments in immunology
and bacteriology, especially the search for vaccines against common animal
diseases. Volumes have been written about the general history of virology, so
we will only briefly discuss it here in the context of specific animal diseases.
Virology begins with a mystery. Charles Chamberland (1851-1908) was
working in Louis Pasteur’s laboratory when he developed an unglazed porcel
ain filter that would trap bacteria in 1884. Disease-infected blood/serum could
be filtered, thus removing the bacteria and rendering the filtrate serum

noncontagious - if the disease was caused by bacteria. However, for some

diseases, the filtered serum still caused experimental animals to become sick,
proving that some other infectious factor was present. No one could see this
mysterious factor, nor could scientists grow it in the laboratory, so this
unknown factor was called a “filterable virus.” (Virus, from the Latin word
for “poison,” was a general term used for contagious particles.) Ambitious
scientists around the world hunted filterable viruses. In Ukraine, Dmitri
Iosifovich Ivanovsky (1864-1920) used Chamberland’s filter to study tobacco
mosaic virus in 1892. The Dutch microbiologist Martinus Willem Beijerinck
(1851-1931), also working with tobacco mosaic virus, in 1898 called the
mysterious infectious factor contagium vivum fluidum.
Filterable viruses remained mysterious until they could be seen with the
electron microscope, in the 1930s; but before that, scientists studied them by
studying the diseases they caused. Many important animal diseases were
determined to be caused by filterable viruses at the century’s turn. In 1898,
Pasteurian Emile Roux (1853-1933) and veterinarian Edmond Nocard
(1850-1903) found that a filterable virus caused CBPP, while veterinarian
John McFadyean (1853-1941) determined in 1900 that filterable agents caused
African horse sickness. Sheep pox became a filterable virus disease in
1902 with research conducted by French physician Amedee Borrel
(1867-1936), who had worked in Metchnikov’s lab at the Pasteur Institute in
Paris. Borrel compared sheep pox intracellular inclusions with the appearance
of cancerous cells (this viral theory of cancer continued to be an important
research topic for decades). Borrel also introduced the term “infectious
epithelioses” as a category for viral diseases that caused skin lesions (sheep
pox, cowpox, etc.) German pathologist Otto Bollinger (1843-1909) declared
fowl pox to be a viral disease, finding viral inclusion bodies or “Bollinger
bodies” in infected cells. The Albanian microbiologist Rifat-Bey Frashёri,
French physician Paul Remlinger (1871-1964), and their assistant Hamdi
Effendi in Constantinople (Istanbul), and independently Alfonso di Vestea in
Naples, established rabies as caused by a filterable virus in 1903. That same
year, pathologist Adelchi Negri (1876-1912) identified the classic cellular
lesions of rabies in dog brains: Negri bodies, which are cytoplasmic inclusions
in neurons composed of rabies virus proteins and RNA. These were exciting
discoveries for research scientists, and, with one exception (yellow fever), all the
earliest identified filterable virus diseases in mammals were veterinary ones.
Even rinderpest (the dreaded global cattle killer) and foot and mouth disease
(FMD) took on new identities as viral diseases. Despite the low mortality (2 to
5 percent), FMD represented the most economically severe animal plague after
the rinderpest, because animals would not gain weight or produce milk.
Infected animals could not be easily sold, moved, or exported. In 1897,
German physicians Friedrich Loffler (1852-1915) and Paul Frosch

(1860-1928) discovered that a filterable virus agent caused FMD. (FMD was
thus the first animal disease determined to be caused by a filterable virus.)
Turkish veterinarian Adil-Bey Mustafa (1871-1904) and French microbiolo
gist Maurice Nicolle (1862-1932) used the Chamberland filter to isolate the
rinderpest virus from brain tissue and cerebrospinal and intestinal fluid from
infected animals. In 1902, they injected healthy cattle with the filtered fluid,
and rinderpest developed in all the animals, thus proving the transmission by
filterable virus. Dorpat (now Estonia) Veterinary Institute pathologist Eugen
Semmer (1843-1906) demonstrated that the serum from a recovered animal
had both curative and protective powers. Continuing losses from FMD led the
German government to establish a Research Institute on the Island of
Riems in 1910, where Loffler and Frosch could experiment safely with this
highly contagious disease. In 1922, seven different serotypes of FMD were
identified.
These developments of serum-virus methods of immunization against rin
derpest became the standard prophylactic procedure and opened the way for
the development of several prophylactic vaccines. In the 1920s, British
researcher J.T. Edwards of the Imperial Bacteriological Laboratory at
Izatnagar (India) discovered that the administration of an attenuated rinderpest
(Morbillivirus) preparation protected animals from rinderpest for life. In the
early 1950s, Dutch veterinarian Herman Salomon Frenkel (1891-1968), dir
ector of the State Veterinary Research Institute, had developed an effective
vaccine, produced with large-scale in vitro virus cultivation. In Germany,
veterinarian Otto Waldmann (1885-1955) continued the work of Loffler, and
together with Karl Kobe, Waldmann developed an effective vaccine from
formalin and heat inactivated FMD virus in 1938 that was widely used in
central Europe. The DDR (East Germany) was the first country in the world to
introduce an annual vaccination against FMD in 1950.
Other animal diseases whose causation had long eluded scientists “became
viral” in the early twentieth century. Several diseases threatened poultry flocks,
and avian influenza (fowl plague) was probably the deadliest poultry disease.
Italian veterinary researchers Sebastiano Rivolta (1832-1893) and Pietro
Delprato (1815-1880) were probably the first to differentiate the clinical and
pathological properties between fowl plague (influenza) and another disease,
fowl cholera, in 1880. In 1901, Eugenio Centanni (1863-1942) and Ezio
Savonuzzi discovered that fowl plague was caused by a filterable virus, and
this helped to differentiate it from fowl “cholera.” Another poultry disease,
Newcastle disease, was also identified as a filterable virus disease during
epizootics in 1926 in Britain and the Netherlands. First identified in
Indonesia and Newcastle (UK) (although probably present in various places
before then), the disease infected both domesticated and wild birds and it
remains a severe problem for global poultry production even today.

Classical swine fever (hog cholera) was well described for the first time in
1833 in Ohio (USA) and it spread from North America to other continents.
U.S. researchers first believed hog cholera was caused by a cholera bacillus. In
1903, Emile Alexander De Schweinitz (1864-1904) and Marion Dorset
(1872-1935) of the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) proved that a filterable
virus, not a bacillus, caused hog cholera/swine fever. Slovak-Hungarian veter
inary pathologist Ferenc Hutyra (1860-1934), working with colleagues in
Budapest (Hungary) at the University of Veterinary Medicine, confirmed the
Americans’ finding that classical swine fever/hog cholera was a filterable virus
disease (as did other researchers). BAI researchers, many of whom were
veterinarians, continued working on serums developed in hyperimmunized
pigs. Copying Pasteur’s earlier public anthrax demonstrations, BAI veterinar
ians carried out serum-inoculation trials observed by meat-packing company
personnel and hog farmers, thus launching a pharmaceutical industry so large
that some veterinarians specialized only in hog cholera/swine fever
prophylaxis.
Another disease, swine influenza, opened a new vista of interspecies infec
tions by viruses. Swine influenza was studied by physician Richard E. Shope
(1901-1966), working for Paul Lewis at the U.S. Rockefeller Institute
(Princeton). Shope, who had worked on farms as a boy, valued the knowledge
he obtained from veterinarians and farmers, and this led him to the problem of
swine influenza. Shope and Lewis differentiated a filterable virus from a
bacterium present in infected pigs, and Shope proved that the virus caused
the disease. Noting that an outbreak of swine influenza raged during the
catastrophic human influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, Shope wondered if
swine and human influenza were related. In 1933, British virologists Wilson
Smith, Patrick P. Laidlaw, and Christopher Andrewes demonstrated that the
swine and human viruses were antigenically quite similar, thus opening the
question of whether humans could be the source of swine influenza (or vice
versa). After sampling human populations, Shope found that adults carried
antibodies that cross-reacted with the swine virus. Subsequent research (in the
molecular era) has confirmed that influenza viruses are constantly evolving and
transferring between animal and human populations, thus making influenza an
early example of viral disease with zoonotic origins.
Virological research led to some remarkable advances in vaccine develop
ment techniques that circulated between medical and veterinary research
groups. For example, in 1905 French veterinarian Henri Carre (1870-1938),
who was the director of the Alfort veterinary school’s Research Laboratory,
identified a filterable virus as the cause of canine distemper. In the 1930s,
British medical researchers Patrick P. Laidlaw and G.W. Dunkin found that
they could experimentally transmit this virus to another species, ferrets, in the
laboratory. Using this experimental system, Laidlaw and Dunkin established

the identity of the virus (canine morbillivirus) and created a formalin-

inactivated vaccine. They are only the most well-known protagonists in a very
active sphere of veterinary research and vaccine development for viral diseases
after World War I. For example, in the late 1920s veterinary researchers
Raymond Alexander (1899-1965), Petrus du Toit (1888-1967), and
Wilhelm Neitz (1906-1979) at the South African Onderstepoort Veterinary
Institute, and a competing group at the Kabete veterinary laboratory in Kenya,
attacked the problem of African horse sickness using Laidlaw and Dunkin’s
technique. Although this was not immediately successful, the South Africans
next tried Max Theiler’s technique of passaging viruses (yellow fever) through
mice to create a vaccine. (Theiler, son of Onderstepoort’s founding veterinar
ian Arnold Theiler, was working at the Rockefeller Institute in the United
States.) Using this technique, they found that they could decrease the virulence
of the target virus without affecting its ability to stimulate the immune system.
By the early 1940s, they had developed a vaccine that was widely used in
South Africa, Kenya, and elsewhere for thirty years.
Veterinary virology and research on virus-caused animal diseases were one
of the pillars on which twentieth-century virology was established. These
studies reconfigured disease etiologies, elucidated immunological principles,
and contributed to the development of viral cancer biology. At the same time,
scientists were discovering the microworlds of trypanosomes, rickettsia, and
other causative agents of animal and human diseases. Trypanosome diseases
affected humans and many species of domesticated animals across the global
South. Working in the Punjab in 1880, veterinarian Griffith Evans
(1835-1935) identified the trypanosome species (T. evansi) that caused surra,
a deadly disease of horses and camels. In 1894, David Bruce (1855-1931)
identified T. brucei as the cause of sleeping sickness in humans and nagana in
cattle. Although livestock raisers in endemic areas had long associated these
diseases with flies, scientists did not agree that these were vector-borne
diseases until around 1900. Moreover, the bacterial diseases had not disap
peared. Two of these diseases, brucellosis and bovine tuberculosis, illustrate
the importance of zoonotic disease research in the first half of the twentieth
century. Both examples also illustrate ways in which political and social
context affected the deployment of scientific knowledge, a factor that no doubt
contributes to the persistence of brucellosis and bovine tuberculosis in human
populations even today.
“Scourges of Man and Animalkind”: Brucellosis and

Bovine Tuberculosis
One of the infectious diseases that puzzled medical and veterinary bacteriolo
gists around 1900 was brucellosis, also known as “contagious abortion” or

“Bang’s disease” in animals and “undulant fever” or “Malta fever” in humans.

We now know this disease is caused by bacteria of the genus Brucella. It is
characterized mainly by abortion, retained placenta, and reduced milk yield in
cattle. During the nineteenth century, the contagious nature of this disease was
established. The causative bacterium in cattle, Brucella abortus, was isolated in
1897 by the Danish scientist L.F. Bernhard Bang (1848-1932), who had studied
human and veterinary medicine in Copenhagen. Together with his assistant
V. Stribolt, he described the media employed and the cultivation method of B.
abortus; and the disease was named “Bang’s disease” in his honor. Bang is also
remembered for his research on smallpox vaccination, for isolating necrosing
bacillus in swine, and for drawing up a system for the control of bovine
tuberculosis that became a model for many European countries in the early
twentieth century. He did not, however, link Bang’s disease to Malta fever in
humans; that would not happen for another twenty years.
British medical officers recorded a mysterious disease with high fevers in
soldiers during the Crimean War (1853-1856) that was probably the first
record of this disease in the Western literature. David Bruce (1855-1931), an
Australian-born military microbiologist posted to the island of Malta, isolated
a bacillus from the spleen of soldiers that had died of Malta fever, which he
named Micrococcus melitensis in 1893. The Maltese scientist and scholar
Themistocles Zammit (1864-1935) isolated the same bacterium in unpasteur
ized goat’s milk and confirmed this as the source of Malta fever among British
soldiers in 1905 (to the chagrin of Bruce, who had not found the source).
American bacteriologist Alice Catherine Evans (1881-1975, Fig. 5.3), of the
U.S. Department of Agriculture, noticed similarities between B. abortus and
M. melitensis, and after testing them extensively argued that this close rela
tionship meant that the bovine B. abortus might also sicken humans ingesting
it in raw milk. Although severely criticized by both the dairy industry and
prominent scientists, Evans’ results were confirmed over the next several years
and brucellosis was established as a zoonotic infection.
Evans argued that the disease infected humans after ingestion of unpasteur
ized milk and soft cheeses (primarily from infected goats), insufficiently
heated meat from infected animals, or close contact with infected animals’
secretions (she even became infected in the laboratory). Along with laboratory
workers, veterinarians and slaughterhouse workers became infected.
Pasteurization and proper heating of milk and milk products prevented the
disease, but for cultural and economic reasons pasteurization was only slowly
adopted in many places. From 1910 onward, inactivated and live vaccines
against brucellosis for the immunization of young heifers were used with
limited success. European research by serological testing in the 1930s
showed that many farms were infected, with an abortion rate between 6 and
13 percent.

Figure 5.3 Bacteriologist Alice Catherine Evans (1881-1975) working in the

U.S. Agricultural Department laboratory c. 1915.
Source: National Photo Company, portrait c. 1915.
After World War II, attenuated Brucella strain 19 was introduced as a

vaccine. Given to heifers between 3 and 9 months of age, this modified-live
vaccine successfully induced immunity in animals prior to breeding. However,
it could not eliminate existing high levels of brucellosis in breeding herds, and
the most successful way to control the disease was still through old-fashioned
test and slaughter. In Europe, the United States, and elsewhere with high levels
of brucellosis, culling was the basis for successful eradication. In Europe, some
countries used Marshall aid to eradicate Brucellosis as well as bovine tubercu
losis in the 1950s; the U.S. eradication program for brucellosis began in 1957.
In the case of bovine tuberculosis, scientific disagreements threatened the
early control and eradication programs. Bovine tuberculosis (bTB) and its
relationship to human tuberculosis (TB, the leading cause of death worldwide
at this time) stimulated bitter debates among scientists from the 1890s to the
1920s. The debates challenged the strict “one germ - one disease” model and
forced nations to consider various possible control strategies. The question

was: Were bovine and human tuberculosis one disease or two? Robert Koch,
who had first identified and cultivated Mycobacterium tuberculosis, TB’s
causative agent, declared in 1901 that bovine TB could not be the same disease
as human TB. Koch strictly adhered to the “one germ - one disease” model,
and the germ that American bacteriologist Theobald Smith had isolated from
cattle in 1896 (Mycobacterium tuberculosis bovis) was slightly different from
Koch’s M. tuberculosis. Koch advocated ignoring bovine TB, reversing his
own previous opinion that nations should try to eradicate it. His critics,
including almost all veterinarians, pointed out the fact that humans could be
infected with bovine bacilli (particularly children) by drinking contaminated
milk or eating infected meat. They detailed examples of bTB contracted by
veterinarians and laboratory workers. They argued that horrific cases of chil
dren with disfigured faces and twisted backbones could not be ignored. This
was a public debate that appeared in all the major U.S., British, and European
newspapers, magazines, and journals at the time.
Bovine tuberculosis control and eradication programs were delayed, but in
the end the United States, Britain, and European nations instituted anti-bTB
campaigns between 1900 and 1960. Pasteurization of milk killed the bacilli,
but consumers demanded that milk be “pure” and uncontaminated with bacilli
(alive or dead). Cities passed regulations forcing dairy farmers to allow
tuberculin testing and slaughter of positive cows. Scientists were unable to
develop a vaccine against TB for cattle. However, the bovine bacillus was the
basis for a successful human vaccine, BCG, developed by Albert Calmette and
Camille Guerin, French Pasteurians working in Africa. A virulent culture of
Mycobacterium tuberculosis bovis, collected from a cow by the veterinarian
E. I. Nocard, was the basis for this vaccine. This research began in the 1910s,
but World War I delayed testing vaccine preparations in cattle and other
experimental animals. That delay provided more time for the culture to lose
virulence yet retain its ability to induce immunity. Could these aged cultures
safely vaccinate humans? During the next thirty years, BCG was tested (first in
babies) and eventually used around the world as an anti-TB vaccine for
humans. Only the Netherlands and the United States do not vaccinate their
citizens with BCG. No effective vaccine has been developed for cattle, and
bovine tuberculosis still occurs in much of the world today. With the recent
discovery of wild animals that can serve as bTB reservoirs (buffaloes, ungu
lates, and elephants in Africa and Asia; elk and deer in North America; llamas
in South America; badgers, squirrels, and possums; otters and seals), global
eradication of this disease is unlikely despite the maintenance of national
tuberculosis control programs.
Since 1900, veterinarians have been central participants in scientific
research and the practical work of testing, surveillance, and slaughtering
infected animals to control these and other diseases. In turning to livestock

War, Animals, and Veterinary Medicine 227
and zoonotic disease control and herd health, the veterinary profession sur
vived the major challenge of motorized vehicles replacing horses. However,
there was one unforeseen development which brought many of them back to
equine medicine: the care of animals during successive and devastating wars,
during which a massive war horse economy developed.
War, Animals, and Veterinary Medicine

Nineteenth-century wars were horse wars. The Crimean War, the Civil War in
the United States, the Franco-Prussian war, and the first Boer War (December
1880 until March 1881) in South Africa had clearly shown the importance of
mobilizing huge numbers of horses and mules. These animals proved to be as
crucial as men. During the U.S. Civil War, the Union Army used not fewer
than 800,000 horses, while in total over 1 million would die (one-fifth of the
nation’s total horse stock). German forces were able to mobilize 1 million
horses in arelatively short time during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, even greater numbers of military
horses, mules, donkeys, camels, oxen, elephants, water buffaloes, dogs, and
pigeons participated in warfare, as well as army veterinarians to keep these
animals healthy and fit.
Horses and the Boer War 1899-1902 in South Africa

In South Africa, two White populations fought for power amidst the competing
interests of their African neighbors. Boers, independent Dutch farmers who
wanted to maintain self-rule, lived in their own territory in Free State and
Transvaal, where they raised livestock. They were opposed by the colonial
British forces advancing inland from the Cape Colony. During the first Boer
War, large numbers of British troops were defeated by a much smaller number
of Boers in part due to the Boers’ good use of their horses and knowledge of
the terrain. The British government settled for a peace treaty because a larger-
scale war would require the mobilization of more troops, horses, and mules - a
very expensive proposition. In 1899, after the discovery of huge gold and
diamond deposits, British imperial policy led to the second attempt to annex
the Boer republics. The Boers and their African allies fought a British and
colonial force that outnumbered them three to one. At first, the Boers con
quered three British strongholds; but in 1900 they were finally defeated on the
battlefield by the increasing numbers of British and their allies. The Boers kept
the war going for two more years, using guerilla tactics to harass the British.
To force Boer commandos to surrender, the British troops burned Boer farms,
slaughtered their livestock, and imprisoned their wives, children, and African
servants in concentration camps where tens of thousands died of hunger.

British prestige was shaken badly by the fact that one the world’s most
powerful armies could only defeat the minority Boers by applying a scorched
earth policy.
The war was also disastrous for horses. The fate of horses employed in the
British military was very tragic. The major combat force of the British Army
consisted of cavalry and other mounted troops. However, the need for horses
in this war was underestimated by the War Office. The mounted infantry was
as important as the cavalry, while horses and mules were vital for transporting
supplies and artillery. The horse-mounted Boers followed warfare strategies
that were first practiced in the American Civil War, employing a mobile
combat force that moved too quickly for infantry to engage. Compared to
the sturdy, durable and native Boer horses, well adjusted to the local environ
ment, the imported British horses had difficulty in the South African terrain.
The number of animals killed in the second Boer War was huge, with many
dying of diseases. The British Army even shot stray horses to keep them from
falling into Boer hands. About 51,400 mules and more than 400,000 horses
lost their lives, of which 326,000 were on the British side.
Veterinary officers working in the British Army Veterinary Department,
established in 1881, in hindsight criticized the fact that most of the enormous
animal losses did not result from enemy action, but were largely due to disease,
starvation, and poor veterinary management by inexperienced mounted troops.
British veterinarians criticized top Army leaders for poor decisions. For
instance, the veterinary hospitals and remount depots (herds of replacement
horses) were all placed on one location, against the advice of the Army
Veterinary Department. Inevitably, crowding the horses led to a rapid spread
of diseases such as glanders, epizootic lymphangitis and mange. The British
went to war in South Africa with dozens of veterinarians, while Arnold Theiler
(later director of the Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute) was the only veterin
arian conscripted into the Transvaal State Artillery to care for Boer horses. But
British horses died in huge numbers and had to be continually replaced with
new animals.
With the Boer War, the breeding and international trade of horses became
important military and political issues, resulting in the development of a true
global warhorse economy. At the center was the British imperial horse econ
omy, with animals imported from other British colonial nations. About 35,000
horses from Australia and 15,000 from Canada were shipped to South Africa.
From the time of their arrival at Port Elizabeth, their average life expectancy
was only about six weeks. Eventually, the British began replacing their lost
horses with more durable African Basuto ponies and Waler horses imported
from Australia. The British also imported supplies across the Indian Ocean at
huge cost. For example, British mobile veterinary horse hospitals, which each
held 300 sick horses, were shipped to South Africa from India. Even the

War, Animals, and Veterinary Medicine 229
British veterinarians were mostly imported. About 10 percent of the British

veterinary profession, 322 men, served as army veterinarians in South Africa.
Britain also purchased large numbers of horses from other nations to import to
South Africa. On the European mainland, stud farms (the Haras system) had
existed since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to control the production
of horses for war-based uses (riding horses, troop horses). This continued in
the twentieth century, when the Haras system received government support.
By 1910, compared to other countries, Germany spent the most government
money on breeding stations for army horses and employed veterinarians to
care for them. In Britain however, horse breeding was not regulated and was
left entirely to private enterprise, due to the liberal economy. This opened
opportunities for horse breeders around the world, including Europe and the
United States (which supplied more horses than from all the British colonies
combined).
New Roles for Horses: The Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905

Another conflict, fought between Japanese and Russian forces in Manchuria
(China), also demonstrated how animals were still important to modern war
fare, but, increasingly, in new ways. This was a larger conflict than the Boer
Wars, and its trenches, machine guns, and disastrous frontal assaults all
foretold the conditions of World War I. This war included Asian and
European combatants, and hundreds of thousands of horses, mules, and other
animals to support the war effort. Horses served as cavalry mounts, pulled
supply and personnel wagons, and moved artillery from place to place. In this
war, despite the fearsome reputation of the Russian Cossacks, traditional
cavalry attacks began to be less important. The Japanese, with their inferior
horses, avoided cavalry attacks as much as possible; the Russians found their
traditional mounted combat formations to be useless. Tactics had to change,
including abandoning frontal assaults by mounted soldiers armed with swords
and other steel weapons. Instead, armed skirmishes, quick incursions, and
infantry and artillery support would become the major uses for horses and
other animals. The once-proud cavalry officers and troopers often had diffi
culty accepting these new roles, but their best use was now as scouts for
reconnaissance, small surprise attacks, carrying messages, and screening the
infantry - tactics learned from the Japanese, who realized the limitations of
their horses.
As the value of traditional cavalry waned, however, the value of heavier
animals to position cannons and other artillery guns increased. Horses and
oxen dragged massive artillery, and the Japanese were at a major disadvantage
here, too, because their smaller, lighter horses struggled to pull the heavy gun

carriages. Again, compensating for their animals, the Japanese shifted tactics.
They began to use their artillery indirectly, during the whole battle, and
flexibly, moving it around more. In this way, they kept their enemies guessing
and overcame their relative lack of heavy horses. This same strategy would be
used during World War I, when millions of horses did the humble work of
dragging guns, supplies, and wagons through the mud. Traditional cavalry
(reluctantly) became mounted infantry, armed with pistols and rifles. Far from
being rendered obsolete, horses and other animals had become crucial support
assets, and the proper care and resupply of animals continued to be a
military concern.
The experiences during the Boer and Russo-Japanese Wars had a major
impact on military tactics leading up to World War I. Military authorities in
war departments of World War I’s major combatant nations (Austria-Hungary,
France, Germany, Russia) learned an important lesson: the horse - as a factor
in warfare - had not passed into history, but the roles had changed. Modern
technological warfare would require huge amounts of horses and mules, much
more than ever before. Veterinary inspection and care in remount depots as
well as in veterinary field hospitals was considered indispensable, which meant
incorporating veterinarians into twentieth-century military forces (as historians
such as Margaret Derry have argued).
Rinderpest Returns: The Balkan Wars, 1912—1913

The Balkans were a group of nations located strategically between the Austro-
Hungarian and Ottoman empires. In 1912, war broke out between the four
members of the Balkan League (Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia)
and their common enemy, the ruling Ottoman empire. The Balkan “protector
ates” were inspired by nationalism and were discontented with the strong
centralized policy followed by the Ottoman government after the Young
Turk Revolution of 1908. During this so-called First Balkan War (October
1912 to May 1913) the Turkish Army was defeated and lost almost all the
remaining European part of the Ottoman empire. In the Second Balkan War
(June-August 1913), the former allies Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia, joined
by Romania, fought among themselves for the division of the former
Ottoman territories. Bulgaria tried to hold Macedonia, but lost the war against
Greece and Serbia, who divided this area between themselves. Albania
obtained independence.
As in the previous wars, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and similar
numbers of horses and mules were deployed in the Balkan Wars, and tens of
thousands lost their lives. Light cavalry remained important in these wars,
hitting the flanks of infantry, scouting, foraging, and sabotaging supply lines.
Veterinary involvement in both armies increased with the need of maintaining

New Challenges for Veterinary Medicine: World War I (1914-1918) 231
the health of or treating injured war animals. In addition, veterinary surveil

lance was required, because, like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871,
troop movements and provisioning during the Balkan Wars caused the spread
of rinderpest in cattle meant to feed the armies. Spreading rapidly in Turkey,
Montenegro, Macedonia, and beyond, rinderpest continued to plague this
region after the war.
The stories of the horrors of the Boer, Russo-Japanese, and Balkan wars
drew more attention to the poor treatment of horses and general cruelty to
animals in various countries. For instance, Our Dumb Friends League, founded
in Britain in 1897, established the “Blue Cross Fund” in 1912 (after the
example of the Red Cross), which started caring and treating wounded and
diseased horses in the Balkan War. Originally, this institution was aimed at
improving the welfare of the many workhorses in London. In 1902 they
succeeded in obtaining a rule that every coach or wagon pulled by horses
carried a bucket with fresh water, thus preventing the spread of glanders via
municipal water troughs. In 1910 the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals criticized the selling and transport of sick and worn-out horses to
Belgium and the Netherlands, where they were destined for meat consumption.
Instead, they advocated for worn-out horses to be humanely killed in the UK.
But the fates of horses in wars would also be a major concern for the Blue
Cross and other animal welfare societies.
These Balkan Wars set the stage for the Balkan crisis of August 1914, and
thus served as a stepping-stone to World War I. The Balkan peninsula was
strategically located, and dominance of this area was of political and military
importance for the leading European nations. Around 1910 the two great
power groupings in Europe, the Triple Alliance (consisting of Germany,
Austria-Hungary, and Italy) and the Triple Entente (a coalition of Britain,
France, and Russia) were evenly balanced. The losing parties in the Balkan
Wars, Bulgaria, and Turkey, chose the side of Germany and the double
monarchy, countries that promised them restitution of the lost territories. In
various ways, the balance of power within Europe was challenged by the
Balkan Wars, and this unstable situation exploded in August 1914.
New Challenges for Veterinary Medicine: World War I

(1914-1918)
In 1914, foreign (and colonial) policy within Europe was characterized by a
complicated system of rivalry, alliances, diplomacy entanglements, and
(secret) agreements. The main purpose for all involved nations was the assur
ance of mutual aid against outside attacks. The spark in the powder keg that
launched World War I was the assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz
Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist on June 28, 1914. The context of this act

was a conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia about control over

Albania. War became inevitable, and countries of both the Central Powers
(Austria-Hungary and Germany) and Allied Forces (including Britain, France,
and Russia) mobilized their armies. On July 28 Austria-Hungary attacked
Serbia, and Germany invaded neutral Belgium and northern France. Britain
was obliged to defend Belgium and France by treaty and joined the battle on
August 4. Because the United States entered the war in April 1917 on the side
of the allied force - thereby playing a decisive role in the outcome - and more
nations and colonies outside Europe also became involved, the war expanded
into a global scale. Ultimately more than 65 million military personnel from
32 nations were mobilized in one of the greatest wars in world history.
On the long and open eastern front of this war, the German and Austrian
armies were quite successful and forced the Russians after the communist
revolution of October 1917 to a peace treaty in March 1918. On the western
front the initial fast advance of the German Army was blocked and turned into
a static trench warfare which lasted until November 11, 1918, when the
Germans surrendered. This was a global tragedy in which an estimated 8.5
million military personnel and 2.3 million civilians lost their lives. (These
losses became even greater with the ensuing influenza pandemic [1918-1919],
in which an estimated 40-80 million people died.) The fact that about 8 million
equines also died during World War I is less well known.
Horses for Attacking and for Transport

Trenches, barbed wire, poison gas, machine guns, and the introduction of tanks
changed the mode of warfare during World War I. However, animals (horses,
mules, oxen, camels, pigeons, and dogs) continued to play a significant role. In
fact, their role had even increased. In 1870 the horse-to-soldier ratio in the
German Army was 1:4; in 1914 this ratio was 1:3. On the eastern front, where
trench warfare was less common, cavalry divisions remained important for
long reconnaissance rides and artillery traction, as well as for offensive mobile
firepower to break through infantry lines. This also applied to horse-mounted
troops in the initial stages of the war in the west. After it had turned into a
trench war there, armies used horses (and mules) as pack animals mainly for
logistical support, such as carrying messengers and ammunition and pulling
ambulances and supply wagons, particularly in mud and over rough terrain. In
this sense, the loss of a horse was tactically valued higher than the loss of a
human soldier, particularly since it became increasingly difficult to replace
these animals during the war. Since the role of horses was so crucial, transport
of huge quantities of horse fodder to the front by supply train units remained an
important logistical challenge.

The roles of war horses were crucial; however, their fate was indeed tragic.
Although the company of horses increased morale among soldiers, these
strong human-animal relations did not last long, because horses were very
vulnerable to machine guns, mortars, artillery fire, and poison gas. Moreover,
horses contributed to human disease due to poor sanitation conditions, their
manure, and their rotting carcasses. Hundreds of thousands of horses died,
their corpses lining the roads to the fronts, not only from poor feeding and care,
but also of exhaustion, drowning, getting stuck in mud, or falling in shell
holes. They were affected by saddle sores, lameness, colic, glanders, strangles,
scabies, equine influenza, equine infectious anemia, epizootic lymphangitis,
anthrax, and ringworm. Better care (enough feed, more rest, time to acclima
tize, and hoof care) prolonged horses’ lives more than improved medical
knowledge did. Women replaced stable boys to take care of horses in the
remount depots in Britain, and many claimed they were superior to men in
calming and training horses.
World War I stimulated the development of new types of veterinary hos
pitals, complete with ambulances. These field and station hospitals could
handle significant numbers of ill and injured animals. As equine ambulances,
horse trailers were first introduced on the western front. The German Army
entered World War I without military horse hospitals. Due to the huge losses of
horses and prevailing infectious diseases, the German War Ministry decided to
divert resources into a system of horse hospitals in 1915. This system grew to
478 hospitals in which almost 1.4 million horses were treated. In the autumn of
1914, the veterinary school of Vienna was involved in establishing three
permanent military equine hospitals near that city. Most other countries and
particularly Britain, Italy, and Switzerland had organized a system of field
animal hospitals much earlier. For instance, the British Army Veterinary Corps
(BAVC), which was established in 1906, established mobile field veterinary
hospitals, available at every cavalry and infantry division, to recover horses
from injuries, diseases, and shell shock, so that they could be sent back to the
front as soon as possible. In total, 18 BAVC hospitals treated more than
725,000 horses during the war, of which 530,000 were healed. A typical
veterinary hospital in France could take 2,000 patients. In Egypt there were
also separate hospitals for camels, which were used along with horses in
desert battles.
Private organizations, especially animal welfare groups and charities, also
contributed to the network of animal hospitals during this war. These advo
cates for humane treatment of animals linked patriotism to animal welfare:
they enlisted public support to “Help the Horse to Save the Soldier” while
popularizing the idea that all horses deserved better lives. At Geneva, the
countries at war inaugurated the “Purple Cross Service” whose aim was caring

for wounded army horses. In the United States the “American Red Star
Relief,” in partnership with the U.S. War Department, played the same role
for military horses. In the UK, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals (RSPCA) asserted that it had saved thousands of horses, worth
almost twenty million pounds. Another British organization with the long
Victorian name “Our Dumb Friends League operating under the sign of the
Blue Cross” became simply the “Blue Cross” in 1950. The Blue Cross symbol
corresponded to the Red Cross, used for human medical relief, thus linking the
well-being of soldiers to that of their animals. For fund-raising, the Blue Cross
used one of the most famous images of the war, entitled “Good-bye Old Man”:
a soldier comforted his dying horse in battle as shells exploded around them.
The Blue Cross Fund established both horse and dog hospitals near the front
lines in France and Italy. This organization employed its own veterinarians,
which treated more than 50,000 horses in France alone. (The name Blue Cross
is still used today, although the society’s services have been extended to other
animal species as well.)
The need for veterinarians to care for the animals in these hospitals
expanded the profession’s activities dramatically. The German War Ministry
initially assigned 766 veterinary officers to its first horse hospitals. However,
this number grew to 5,354 army veterinarians - almost 75 percent of all
veterinarians in Germany. Diverting this many veterinarians away from the
home front demonstrates the importance of these horses to the German gov
ernment and the war effort. This was not unique to Germany. The Italian Army
Veterinary Corps began the war with 219 veterinarians in May 1915, but at the
end of the war this figure had grown more than ten times to 2,819. The
Veterinary Service of the French Army counted 552 veterinarians in 1914;
but during the war this figure grew to about 3,000, of which 134 died. The
BAVC had learned some lessons from the disastrous Boer War. Better trained
and equipped, the BAVC vets tried to improve the care for war animals (and
they were joined by civilian veterinarians with broader experience). In August
1914, the BAVC started the war with 164 veterinary officers. During the war, a
further 1,356 were commissioned from among civilian vets, and by
1918 almost half of the veterinarians in the UK were serving in the Army.
For European veterinarians, World War I was the unifying experience of that
generation.
The Global Animal Economy

Like previous wars, World War I caused dramatic translocations of animals,
fodder, and animal products. The worldwide supply of freshly recruited horses
and animal fodder (grass, oats, hay, and straw) proved decisive for warfare,
and veterinarians played important roles in this global economy. They

inspected animals at ports, ran remount stations, provided medical and surgical
care, and advised on daily rationing of various types and sizes of horses and
mules. One important factor in the German defeat was its shortage of horses,
due to the blockade by the Allied Forces that made it impossible to import
enough animals. To provision the armies, the combatant governments pur
chased animals from remote locations thousands of kilometers from the battle
fields. Moving these supplies across oceans and continents required vast
expenditures on ships and rail transport, even from nations not officially
involved in the war.
Huge armies required meat and other food products, and cattle and other
food-producing animals traveling long distances, then confined close together
in high numbers, sparked fresh epizootics. In Europe, rinderpest and conta
gious bovine pleuropneumonia reappeared and caused outbreaks in several
places. Newly established in Poland after the Balkan Wars, rinderpest wiped
out most of the cattle there in a huge outbreak after the war ended. Rinderpest
surged in many other parts of the world during the war years. In Palestine,
outbreaks occurred in 1913 and 1915, imported by animals from Damascus
and Turkey. In Southeast Asia, the disease circulated from China through
Vietnam and Hong Kong to the Philippine islands, causing epizootics between
1915 and 1920. This was an ongoing problem for the Philippines, which
needed draft animals for the rice fields; the U.S. invasion had brought the
disease in 1900 and cattle populations were just recovering when the wartime
outbreaks began. Diseases traveled with horses, also. “Shipping fever”
(pleuropneumonia) plagued animals confined for weeks on ships, spreading
rapidly once the sick horses landed. Surra (equine trypanosomiasis) was
endemic in Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam in equines. Once again, the
Philippines suffered when the Americans brought surra-infected horses to the
islands. Within a decade, surra killed up to 80 percent of the nation’s horses,
ponies, and mules, crippling transportation. However, by that time the
Americans were preoccupied with the horse economy back home.
When the war broke out, the United States possessed 27 million horses,
donkeys, and mules, while the number of vets (most caring for horses) had
reached 8,163. North America, although officially neutral at this point, sold
and shipped half a million horses to Europe by March 1915. By the time the
United States entered the war, it had already supplied over 1 million animals
(including 350,000 mules) worth about $200 million to the Allies. After
entering the war in April 1917, the U.S. Army set up a remount system in
France with 17 depots where about 200,000 horses and mules brought in from
the United States, Britain, France, and Spain were received and maintained.
The U.S. Army had one horse for every three soldiers. A huge market for U.S.
and Canadian farmers had developed, but buyers from the European and U.S.
armies were critical. They inspected the animals and carefully selected the

most fit. Horses were rejected for war service if they had lung problems,
lameness, or infectious diseases like farcy, glanders, melanosis, and mange.
Veterinarians were supposed to issue the official certificates of health, but a
thriving “black market” also existed for horses. U.S. sellers dumped tens of
thousands of inferior horses in Canada, destined for transportation to Britain.
Thousands were found unfit and died in veterinary hospitals before disembarking
to Europe. These animals would have been slaughtered for meat in Europe, but
Americans had a cultural prejudice against eating horse meat. Nonetheless, the
demand for horses seemed unlimited, and the price for a healthy American horse
almost doubled. Farm owners in the middle of North America increased horse
breeding and production, hoping to make money on the wartime horse economy.
The magnitude of the global equine economy is clearly shown by the final
balance sheet at the end of the war. Britain entered the war with 25,000 horses.
By August 1917, the British Army counted 591,000 horses, 213,000 mules,
47,000 camels, and 11,000 oxen. It is estimated that the British, French,
German, and Austrian-Hungarian armies together had about 3 million horses
at the battle fields. The British Army used about 1.2 million horses (468,000
horses purchased in the UK, 136,000 in Australia, and 429,000 in North
America) and mules during the war, of which 484,000 sadly died in battle.
During campaigns in East Africa, the British Army lost about 31,000 horses,
33,000 mules, and 32,000 donkeys. Most of these animals died of diseases,
especially African horse sickness (caused by a virus spread by insects). Due to
the lessons learned during the Boer and Balkan wars, horses were better trained
and acclimatized before shipment to the battlefields in France and Belgium.
Veterinary care had improved so that fewer horses died from disease and
starvation. Nevertheless, it is estimated that about 1.5 million horses of the
combined British and French perished during World War I. Half of the French
Army’s horses died (over 1 million); the German Army lost about 1 million
horses. More animals died due to the harsh circumstances, such as lack of
fodder, than the actual number fallen in battle. Another sad result was that after
the war thousands of horses did not return home but were slaughtered instead.
Transporting them was too difficult and expensive, and governments feared the
horses could spread diseases.
Thousands of camels were used in warfare, fulfilling the role of cavalry and
carrying heavy loads in Palestine, the Jordan Valley, the Sinai Peninsula,
Egypt, and northern Africa. Camels were also expensive, worth about
10 Turkish gold pounds per animal. These robust animals are better adjusted
to the desert climate than horses and mules. For instance, they can close their
nostrils during sandstorms, and they can survive without water for a week.
However, camels have specific needs and care. They are sensitive to cold and
suffer fungal infections when their hooves get wet. When they must eat fodder
from the ground instead from a bucket or manger, they swallow a lot of sand,
causing colic. Throughout World War I camel-mounted troops were used in

the desert campaigns, such as by the Imperial Camel Corps in Egypt with a
frontline strength of almost 4,000 camels. This corps was supported by a
Camel Remount Depot and a Camel Veterinary Hospital. As with horses and
cattle, however, diseases were a major problem for camels in the war. Surra
(trypanosomiasis), with high mortality in camels, traveled with these animals
in Egypt and Northern Africa. Tick-borne anemias and viral diseases also
plagued camels exposed to ticks, especially in desert and steppe environments
new to them. Keeping these animals alive and well depended on the expertise
of camel keepers from India as well as 42 British-trained veterinarians in the
Mobile Veterinary Section of the Imperial Camel Corps. The French Army
also created a special compagnie mehariste that cared for the Mehari camels
used in northern Africa. On the opposing side, camels were more familiar, but
there were fewer trained veterinarians to provide medical and surgical care.
Only about 250 formally trained veterinarians existed in the whole Ottoman
empire in 1914, and the army did not possess enough medications and
instruments. Injured or starving animals usually died, contributing to the high
morbidity and mortality and shortage of draft animals at the end of the war.
The Dogs of War

During World War I, dogs performed a variety of tasks. The use of dogs as
military weapons dates from antiquity. The Spaniards used mastiffs and
greyhounds to attack Indigenous people when they conquered the Americas.
Napoleon may also have used fighting dogs. The modern use of war dogs first
started in Germany. The world’s first military war dog school was opened at
Lechernich near Berlin in 1884. Military dog schools were established in many
European countries, including Germany, France, Austria, Italy, Belgium,
Russia, Bulgaria, Sweden, and the Netherlands, from 1870 onward. Ghent in
Belgium became the early center for training police dogs and had also estab
lished war dog schools. Draught dogs pulling milk carts were quite common in
that country. By 1914 draught dogs - particularly huge Great Pyrenees dogs -
were being used to haul machine guns. Britain and the United States began to
recognize the value of highly trained war dogs during World War I. In war dog
schools, thousands of dogs - preferably purebred German and Belgian
Shepherd dogs, Airedale terriers, mastiffs, Labrador retrievers, boxers, and
Scottish collies - learned to work as a messenger, sentry, scout, patrol, or
ambulance (Red Cross) dog, after which they were sent to the front. They also
laid down telephone wires, detected mines, forwarded carrier pigeons, and
conveyed provisions and munitions. In addition, small dogs (and cats) were
important to catch the huge number of rats that lived in the trenches, eating
food, spreading disease, and keeping soldiers awake.
It is estimated that in total about 75,000 military dogs were employed at the
battlefields of World War I (Fig. 5.4). Germany alone used 30,000 dogs, of

Figure 5.4 French soldier handling a war dog, both with gas masks, after the
German Army started using poisonous gas in 1917.
Source: Le Miroir 7 (1917) No. 183, May 27, cover.

which 7,000 died in service. France too employed many dogs, of which about
8,000 served as sled dogs in the mountain areas. More than 4,000 wounded
German soldiers and 2,000 French soldiers were saved by Red Cross dogs
(Sanitatshunden in German and chiens sanitaires in French). Strict guidelines
for the use, feeding, and care of war dogs were drawn up. In the kennels
attached to veterinary hospitals, veterinarians performed regular inspections to
avoid the spread of contagious diseases among dogs. There they also treated
sick or wounded dogs that returned from the front. Veterinarians working for
the Blue Cross treated over 10,000 dogs in the charity’s French hospitals
during World War I. Not all this care benefited the animals, however.
Veterinarians also performed surgery to cut the vocal cords of dogs, mules,
and horses, so that these animals could not make noise to expose the positions
of their troops. Vets also cropped dogs’ ears and removed part of the tail,
practices that continue for some breeds today.
War circumstances strongly affected human-animal relationships. On the
one hand, millions of animals were sacrificed under gruesome circumstances.
On the other hand, many soldiers found comfort in the companionship of
animals, and animal welfare groups linked their cause to patriotism. To
commemorate the many animals that had died, various memorials were erected
worldwide. Novels, poems, movies, plays, and documentaries have also fea
tured the tragic fates of animals in World War I. A few stories were more
positive: some war animals were decorated for their efforts and courage, by
which many soldiers were saved. For instance, the French Army lauded
message-carrying pigeons who had saved many lives by transferring crucial
intelligence. The most famous World War I dog was Rin Tin Tin, a young
German Shepherd with shellshock found by an American trooper. He took this
“prisoner-of-war dog” to the United States, where it played the main role in
twenty-six popular films. Descendants of Rin Tin Tin were used in a training
school for dogs destined for the U.S. Army in World War II. Although military
veterinarians mostly cared for horses, injured dogs also were patients at
military veterinary hospitals. The U.S. veterinary profession benefitted at home
from the good publicity.
Problems with Veterinary War Efforts

World War I amplified some of the problems facing the veterinary profession
at this time. Despite the hard work of military veterinarians, the world’s
domestic animal population plummeted during the war years. The profession
was outmatched by the overwhelming need for animal care. Along with
healing wounded and infected war animals, army veterinarians had to inspect
food destined for the military, train more veterinarians, conduct research, and
support agriculture. Twenty percent of the veterinarians in the U.S. Army were

primarily food inspectors. Veterinary food inspectors worked in special army

slaughterhouses and inspected canned food supplied by factories. In their
home countries, lecturers and students in veterinary schools were also involved
in activities that supported the war efforts, such as the development and
production of anti-pyogenic serum at the veterinary school in Turin. But in
many schools, education and research were severely disrupted because so
many teachers and students were enlisted into the military. Agricultural pro
duction declined due to outbreaks of livestock diseases and because so many
horses served in armies. Veterinary practice also encountered problems due to
shortages of (imported) drugs, instruments, and bandages. There were simply
too few veterinarians to do the necessary work, and they lacked the resources
they needed.
Shortages of formally trained veterinarians and veterinary supplies meant
that animal health care at home depended even more on traditional and local
expertise. Farmers and livestock raisers reverted to home remedies and experi
enced (albeit unlicensed) animal doctors. The problems they addressed
included not only the usual injuries, illnesses, and difficult births, but also
the issue of diseases spread by the global animal economy. This was especially
true in areas around the world colonized by Europeans. Unfortunately, modern
veterinary regimes had worked to destroy traditional livestock-raising practices
and folk animal healing. For example, one effect of the “modernization” of
animal breeding and veterinary medicine was the loss of breeds adapted to
local (in some cases, harsh) conditions and the disempowerment of the people
who knew how to keep them alive and well. This effect was painfully obvious
in much of the vast African continent and in Southeast and South Asia.
Imported European animals often did not survive well in their new environ
ments. They imported diseases that killed native animals, causing tragic
famines and mass deaths. As historian Lotte Hughes has argued, to
Indigenous peoples these imported diseases (rinderpest, most notably) repre
sented a type of “infection by colonialism” that destroyed their cultures.
Colonial regimes, which could have adopted local knowledge and encour
aged training of local people to increase the veterinary workforce, usually
failed to do so despite the need for more veterinary professionals. The list of
“native” people in colonial areas who acquired a formal veterinary education
during this period was short. One of these was Charles de Boissiere
(1866-1949), a native of Trinidad and Tobago who served as the
Government Veterinary Surgeon there during World War I; another was the
South African Jotello Festiri Soga (Chapter 4). Veterinary schools were estab
lished in India, where members of the Goan ethnic group predominated as
students, and in Burma and Java; but numbers remained small. More common
was educating “para-veterinarians,” or assistants recruited from the local
population, which was also done in India and several other areas. In the

process, the “modern” veterinary regime often failed to incorporate crucial

local knowledge about animal health. For example, Dutch veterinarians
working in Java had never seen water buffaloes and knew nothing about these
animals’ husbandry or diseases. Water buffaloes were the key draft animals in
Java, yet veterinary officials and instructors ignored them. Characteristic of
colonial powers’ prejudices against Indigenous expertise, these were lost
opportunities to gain knowledge and improve veterinary services.
Modern veterinary medicine’s basis in the biomedical sciences was its great
strength, but science also had a dark side: research on biological and chemical
warfare agents. This type of warfare in various forms had existed since
antiquity, but its use increased in World War I. The French Army fired teargas
at German troops. German chemist and Nobel Prize-winner Fritz Haber
performed research on chlorine gas, which was first used on a large scale by
the German Army in April 1915. Also, the French, including chemist and
Nobel Prize-winner Victor Grignard, studied poisonous gases intensively.
Later in the war, chemical weapons like phosgene and mustard gas grenades
were used by both armies. These poisonous gases caused immense human and
animal suffering, although poisoning of horses was less frequent because their
noses were positioned higher than soldiers in the trenches. Gas masks for
soldiers, horses, and dogs were developed to protect against such attacks. As
for biological weapons, German biomedical scientists, including veterinarians,
became involved in developing microorganisms (plague, cholera, anthrax,
glanders) that could infect enemy humans and animals. For instance, from
1915 onward German agents secretly inoculated shipments of horses and cattle
in American harbors with disease-producing bacteria. These activities were
part of an international network of German operatives who attempted to use
anthrax spores and the causative bacteria of glanders to sabotage animal
populations in France, Argentina, Mesopotamia, Romania, and Norway.
These German sabotage campaigns never seriously affected the supply of
military livestock and horses. However, they accelerated scientific research
in several nations, which developed biological weapons that would be used
later during World War.
After the War: Veterinary Internationalism

After World War I ended, the global map was redrawn in Europe, where nine
new independent nations were established. Veterinary schools were estab
lished in these nations: Brno, Czechoslovakia (1918); Riga, Latvia (1919);
Zagreb, Yugoslavia (1919); and Sofia, Bulgaria (1923). The modern Turkish
Republic, with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk at its head, was founded in 1923 from
the former Ottoman Empire. A new University at Ankara began veterinary
instruction at its Higher Institute of Agriculture in 1933 (joining the older

school in Istanbul). Uprisings, economic crises, and the aftermath of “war

imperialism” began to undermine colonial regimes around the world. The
diversion of the world’s animal economy to providing war animals meant that
agriculture suffered. The former Ottoman empire, for example, lost about half
of its draft animals during the war, leading to severe shortages of horses,
camels, and oxen for agriculture. This problem created hunger and tremendous
resentment and probably contributed to the end of the empire. Wars and
revolutions continued to affect livestock production significantly. For instance,
in 1914, the bloodiest year of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), 1.5
million people died. This led to abandoned farms, destroyed infrastructure,
and a loss of half the nation’s cattle, bringing livestock numbers back to the
level of 1880. It took 30 years to recover production at the 1914 level. The
Russian Civil War (1917-1920) destroyed the rural economy and led to a huge
loss of livestock and horses, mainly by spreading infectious diseases. The same
happened during the Turkish War of Independence (1920-1922) and the
Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). These conflicts often disrupted the veterinary
infrastructure and caused outbreaks of livestock diseases.
Fears of a rinderpest pandemic led nations to cooperate on international
control strategies after the war ended. Rinderpest was again spreading in
Europe, as the Bolshevik armies and their infected cattle crossed the
Caucasus, entering the Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania in 1917, and invading
Poland in 1920. Due to international veterinary efforts, particularly from
Denmark and France, that epidemic was finally eliminated in 1923. (Since
then, Europe has been free of epidemic rinderpest, except for an outbreak in
eastern Turkey in 1991 that was contained by the Turkish government.) In
1920, rinderpest had also traveled in cattle and wild animals exported from
endemic areas in India and Somalia to nations such as Belgium and Brazil.
These outbreaks triggered the first International Conference of Epizootic
Diseases of Domestic Animals (Paris, 1921), which included representatives
of 43 countries. The 1921 conference, with French veterinarian Emmanuel
Leclainche (1861-1953) as chairman, called for an international organization
to coordinate campaigns against infectious animal diseases. With Leclainche
as its first director, the Office International des Epizooties (OIE) [World
Organization for Animal Health] was established in Paris in 1924. Since then,
the OIE has remained the world’s leading organization responsible for collec
tion and dissemination of knowledge on epizootic diseases and their control.
This solidarity was typical for the post-World War I era with the rise of a
series of new international governmental and non-governmental agencies, with
the League of Nations (LoN) at the center. As a result of the Versailles peace
treaty, this organization was established in 1920 with the task of resolving
international conflicts before they could lead to warfare. The 1925 Geneva
Protocol banning chemical and biological weapons was a result of the

League’s efforts. In 1927, the LoN appointed an expert group of veterinarians

whose task was designing regulations and measures to facilitate international
traffic of animals and animal products; coordinating campaigns against conta
gious diseases (including inspection and disease-free certification); and guar
anteeing the safety and quality animal-origin foods in international trade. Their
conventions, codes, and standards were adopted by 15 countries. Later, their
work formed the basis for international veterinary legal regulations of the
European Union, the United Nations, and the World Trade Organization.
Conditions in the 1920s and 30s reflected the dramatic changes accelerated
by the war. Postwar agricultural economic depression led to cutbacks in
government-sponsored veterinary expenditures in Europe and the UK. Horse
prices, which had increased during the war, plummeted, and numbers of
animals continued to decrease as war losses were not replaced. In the United
States, equine-oriented veterinarians watched anxiously as the horse economy
collapsed due to the ascent of motorized transportation. Most private, equine-
oriented veterinary schools were forced to close, and numbers of vets declined
by the end of the 1920s. Most veterinarians made a modest living, treating all
species of animals in small private businesses. Around the world, veterinarians
and animal healers directly affected by the war worked hard to restore live
stock and control diseases. Several nations in the Global South successfully
developed their home industries, raising animals for meat export markets. By
the end of the 1920s, for example, Argentina was the world’s biggest beef
exporter, supplying 61 percent of the global total, while New Zealand and
Australia took over as the world’s top mutton exporters at 45 percent.
Despite the difficult conditions, those conducting research made some
important advances. For example, Filipino veterinarians developed a success
ful rinderpest vaccine in 1934 that could be easily deployed in their country: it
was a dried formulation that did not require refrigeration, and each animal
needed only one injection to induce acceptable immunity. During World War
I, German researchers had created a synthetic drug, “suramin,” to be used
against human trypanosomiasis or “sleeping sickness.” Veterinarians in
Northern Africa and India tested and adapted suramin after it became more
widely available in the 1920s, to treat surra (trypanosomiasis in horses and
camels). These discoveries (and many others) helped with the slow process of
restoring livestock herds after the war.
Large-scale campaigns to control animal diseases, carried out by govern
ments and non-governmental organizations, also helped to increase numbers of
healthy animals. The campaign to eradicate hog cholera (classical swine fever)
using veterinary vaccination and slaughter of infected animals occupied many
veterinarians in the midwestern United States. Bovine tuberculosis (bTB) and
brucellosis, the two milk-borne zoonoses, are also good examples. Beginning
in 1917, the U.S. Bureau of Animal Industry coordinated a bTB control

campaign that employed large numbers of veterinarians. Over time, this

program’s goals became more ambitious: from control, it became an “eradica
tion” program aiming to wipe out bTB (deemed a success when it ended in
1940). The sugar-growing corporations of Trinidad and Tobago hired veterin
arians to control bTB in the water buffaloes that were essential draft and food
animals. The program included licensing milk vendors, applying tuberculin
testing, and slaughtering or isolating infected cows. Between 1920 and 1950,
the infection rate in water buffaloes dropped from about 40 percent down to
less than 10 percent. Campaigns in several European countries, still recovering
from wartime devastation, were planned and started during the 1920s and
1930s. The British government began its bTB eradication program, which
continued until 1960.
For brucellosis, the Scandinavian countries’ governments sponsored the first
control and eradication campaigns. Norway was the first nation to eradicate the
disease, followed by Sweden. Denmark began its program in 1937, with
national legislation and a tax on meat and cattle exports to pay for the cost.
The United States estimated that the dairy and beef cattle industries suffered
$125 million loss in productivity in one year alone, 1934. However, the U.S.
Department of Agriculture’s campaign to control brucellosis did not start until
the 1950s, after the Bureau of Animal Industry had been dissolved and its
veterinarians reassigned. In the 1970s, brucellosis became the target of a global
eradication campaign. However, bTB and brucellosis are still problems in
many parts of the developing world today.
During the 1930s, the global economic disaster (the Great Depression)
challenged hard-won gains in animal health and disease control. In the
United States, many newly graduated veterinarians expecting to work with
livestock could not find employment. Some began working in companion
animal clinics in cities; some found work at universities or in industries; and
others left veterinary medicine. Governments could not afford to hire veterin
arians, conduct large-scale anti-disease campaigns, or compensate farmers for
mandatory slaughter of infected animals. In the Philippines, for example, horse
owners whose animals tested positive for glanders had been compensated for
the animal’s value. Once this compensation program ended in 1932, horse
owners refused to test their animals, and glanders incidence increased.
Desperate to prevent costly disease outbreaks in cattle, the Philippines stopped
importing live animals. Another problem was funding veterinary education.
New schools were especially vulnerable when the government withdrew
funding since students could not afford high tuition fees. In Burma, for
example, a veterinary school built at Insein in 1925 for Indigenous Burmese
students and assistants closed between 1929 and 1933.
Despite the financial issues, several new veterinary schools were founded
during the 1930s. In Tehran, Iran, the Higher School of Stockbreeding was

World War II 245
converted to a Veterinary Faculty in 1932; and in Norway, the Norwegian

School of Veterinary Sciences (Oslo) began taking students in 1934 (eventu
ally including some from Finland, Iceland, and other countries). In Kabul,
Afghanistan, veterinary sciences have been taught since 1932, while the
British began veterinary instruction in Khartoum (Sudan) in 1938. In Central
and South America, a trio of schools were established in the 1930s: Manabi'
Province and Quito, Ecuador (1931); Maracay, Venezuela (1938); and Santa
Cruz, Bolivia (1940). The government of Venezuela hired experts from Chile,
Uruguay, Argentina, North America, and elsewhere to design the curricula and
national programs for veterinary hygiene; the school was named Escuela de
Expertos Agropecuarios y Practicos en Sanidad Animal. (Since the American
veterinary leader Daniel Elmer Salmon guided the Uruguayan school’s
founding, North American models of education influenced the Uruguayan
and Venezuelan professions.)
World War II
Despite what many people had hoped, World War I was not “the war to end all
wars.” At the war’s end, the Allies levied severe penalties on Germany,
angering the hungry and impoverished population. The Great Depression,
failing diplomacy and appeasement within the League of Nations, and the rise
of fascism and militarism in Germany, Italy, and Japan also contributed to the
outbreak of another global war. Militarism, nationalism, and racism fed each
other in East Asia following World War I. The situation was inflamed by
European nations’ poor treatment of their Asian allies. China, one of the winning
Allies, was denied the right to its own (formerly German-occupied) territory; and
the treaty ending the war excluded a “racial equality” clause requested by Japan
(also an Allied nation). In 1931, nationalist Japanese forces invaded Manchuria,
the northeastern provinces of China. This incident began the Pacific War
(1931-1945), in which Japan gained vast agricultural lands in northern China.
Japanese veterinarians and agricultural officials justified the invasion based on
the idea that they were bringing “modernity” to “backward” Manchuria (a
justification also used earlier in the annexation of Korea). Manchuria quickly
became a testing ground for veterinary scientific colonialism: establishing
breeding farms and laboratories, the Japanese developed new hybrid breeds of
livestock and conducted research on diseases such as glanders and anthrax in
wild and domesticated animals. These agricultural activities assisted Japanese
settlement in Manchuria, and their success encouraged the Japanese government
to consider expanding its control over other Asian nations.
By 1940, Japan had joined the Axis Powers - Germany (now under the
National Socialist government, or Nazis) and Italy - with a tripartite

agreement. Italy’s invasion and annexation of Albania in 1939 had triggered a

series of military conflicts, drawing several nations into battles in southern and
central Europe. The conflicts in Europe, the Pacific, and elsewhere combined
into the twentieth century’s second global-scale war, World War II
(1939-1945). Again, animals played crucial roles in this global conflagration,
and veterinarians worked in both military and civilian capacities to safeguard
food supplies and keep war animals healthy.
Animal Warriors in World War II

After World War I, countries reacted differently to the question about mech
anization of their armies. In some countries, national horse breeding programs
with government sponsorship continued their activities at a peacetime level
because equines had proven to be so important. In the USSR for instance,
cavalry units were not reduced. In other countries more emphasis was placed
on mechanization - for instance, in Britain, where after a rapid demobilization
the Army Veterinary School reduced in size and finally closed in 1938. A year
later the British Army was fully motorized. The U.S. Army only had about
50,000 military horses in 1941, when that nation entered the war; this was
about 1 horse for every 134 soldiers (as compared to 1 horse for every
3 soldiers during World War I). In Germany, the Nazi regime started to
mechanize the Wehrmacht as part of war preparation in the mid-1930s. The
images of the successful Blitzkrieg in which Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands,
Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, and France were defeated, featured motor
ized tanks, armored vehicles, and airplanes. Most of the defeated armies still
had cavalry divisions - for instance, Poland, where 200,000 mounted troopers
were powerless against German infantry divisions with tanks and modern
machine guns. The last of these futile cavalry battles took place near
Moscow in 1941, when 2,000 mounted troopers of a Red Army cavalry
division with drawn swords rode into an artillery barrage of the German
infantry. All men and horses of the Mongol cavalry were tragically killed,
with no casualties to the Nazis. The era of frontal cavalry warfare had ended,
but horses continued to be used for other purposes. The “modernization”
propaganda of this era effectively hid the ongoing participation of animals in
the war, although at much reduced levels compared with World War I.
German (Nazi) propaganda was designed to intimidate its enemies, and it
featured motorized tanks, airplanes, and lethal machine guns. These technolo
gies altered warfare forever. However, as Richard DiNardo and Austin Bay
have shown, this image of mechanized warfare that did not involve any
animals is incorrect. Surprisingly, the basic means of transport in the
German Army was still horse drawn, with about half the German Army still
relying on horses to move supplies, artillery, and troops. Next to

World War II 247
mechanization, the Wehrmacht had quietly maintained remount stations and

had mobilized many horses after the rapid expansion of the army began in
1935. As the war unfolded, the German Army confiscated all horses in the
conquered territories (such as Czechoslovakia and Poland); by 1939, the
German Army included 590,000 horses. After the campaign of May 1940, in
which about 53,000 horses were used, heavier breeds of horses were also
confiscated from the Netherlands, Belgium, and Normandy (France). These
horses were transported to the east for hauling artillery during the invasion of
the Soviet Union in June 1941. By that time, the Wehrmacht had sent more
than 625,000 horses to the eastern front. This number of animals was about
30 percent of the horses used during World War I, and the army had to
maintain veterinary forces to care for them.
After a rapid territorial gain in 1941, the German tanks and armored vehicles
got stuck in the autumn mud and snow in the USSR, a country with an
immense area and limited paved roads. The Soviets defended their territory
using scorched earth tactics, destroying roads, bridges, and railways. Horses
thus remained crucial in maintaining army supply lines over huge distances.
Shortages of drinking water, fodder (and cotton feed bags), and medications,
as well as the harsh winter of 1940-1941, devastated the Germans’ horses.
Almost 180,000 animals died or were incapacitated by outbreaks of equine
pneumonia, influenza, glanders, and mange. In army veterinary hospitals
designed to treat 500 horses at a time, veterinarians struggled to care for
1,000 to 3,000 patients. The German Army counted about 700 veterinary
officers in 1939. By 1945, this number increased to 5,650, which was more
than half of the total number of veterinarians in Germany at the time. As a rule,
each army veterinarian cared for 300, later 450, animals, of which 70 to 80
percent were cured - a remarkable record. These vets also ran mobile research
units for food and feed inspection, as well as for x-ray and biomedical
analyses. Similar to World War I, the major cause of death was not injuries;
most horses died of exhaustion, lack of water and (bad) fodder, colic,
and scabies.
The German Army used a total of 2.75 million horses and mules during
World War II, of which 1.2 million were requisitioned from Germany and the
occupied countries. The German reliance on horses had a deep impact on
European agriculture. Particularly in countries where most horses were confis
cated for the army, agricultural output decreased by 20 to 40 percent. By
February 1945, 1.2 million horses remained in the German Army. The devas
tation of animal populations in the USSR was even more severe. The horse
population in the Soviet Union dropped from 21 to 7.8 million between
1940 and 1943, despite the Soviet Army’s best efforts to keep them alive.
A visitor to the Soviet veterinary hospitals was impressed by their modern
equipment and veterinary practices. The Cossack warriors of the Soviet

cavalry played a significant role in the defeat of the German invasion by

attacking and harassing the Germans behind enemy lines. To support the
Cossacks, veterinary equipment and drugs were sent to Russia from Britain.
The other Allied forces also depended on horses and mules as draught and
pack animals while moving through terrain too rough or muddy for trucks. The
Greek Army used more than 200,000 mules in its battle against the Italian
invaders in 1941. The British Royal Army Veterinary Corps (RAVC), which
increased in numbers from 85 to 519 veterinary officers between 1940 and
1945, had to take care of 6,500 military horses, 10,000 mules, and 1,700
camels in 1942 alone. The RAVC was also responsible for the procurement
and health of war dogs. The British Army used airlifted pack horses and mules
as essential means of transport, particularly in Palestine, Syria, Greece, Eritrea,
Italy, and Burma. In 1943, the British began jungle warfare against the
Japanese in Burma. With no good place to land airplanes, the army dropped
pack animals and dogs by parachute from the airplanes. The vocal cords of
these animals had previously been removed under anesthesia, so that they
would not reveal their positions to the Japanese. During this campaign the
British Army also used 1,600 elephants, captured from the Japanese Army, for
transport and to clear trees and shrubs that prevented the army’s movements.
Bullocks were used as pack animals and as “meat on the hoof.” Unfortunately,
animals suffering from severe battle wounds could not be evacuated and,
instead of receiving treatment, had to be shot. The Japanese also used horses,
donkeys, and mules on a large scale.
As they had during World War I, dogs continued to play various important
roles on the battlefield. They were sent first into caves and tunnels created by
the enemy; carried messages; and took supplies to isolated troops. Almost ten
times more dogs participated in World War II than in the World War I. Most
countries had large military dog programs. The Red Army was quite successful
in training dogs to find explosive mines before soldiers or vehicles could
detonate them. In 1943 alone, Russian mine-detection dogs found 529,000
German mines. The dog “Zhucha” became the champion by pinpointing 2,000
mines in 18 days. As a living “anti-tank weapons,” dogs in the Red Army were
also trained to destroy German armored vehicles and tanks by carrying and
igniting bombs under them (a suicide mission for the dog).
Unexploded mines and bombs were only one problem for the lands occu
pied by the armies. Numbers of livestock decreased considerably due to
requisitions, strict rationing, a loss of export markets, the import blockade
for animal feed and disease, and starvation. Farmers shifted from livestock to
producing grains for hungry human populations. Disease outbreaks increased
when armies moved through the land with huge numbers of war animals.
Under war or occupation circumstances, veterinarians had difficulty maintain
ing effective control measures against diseases such as bovine tuberculosis.

World War II 249
For all countries involved, veterinary practice back at home became more and
more difficult during the war due to shortages of veterinarians, supplies of fuel,
equipment, disinfectants, and drugs, since the armies used up most of the
veterinary resources.
Food Inspection in Wartime

Armies required huge food supplies, and given the scarcity of animals in war-
torn areas, the military had to purchase, store, distribute, and transport provi
sions for its soldiers. Complex supply chains sustained the armies of both
sides, the Allies and Axis powers. Veterinarians were at the forefront of
maintaining these supplies, especially for meat, milk, eggs, and canned foods.
In the U.S. Army, 90 percent of the army vets were primarily food inspectors
(compared to 20 percent during World War I). They inspected enormous
amounts of food in both civilian and military settings, including 142 billion
pounds of meat and milk products, between 1940 and 1945. The United States
ran 11 laboratories domestically and 23 abroad (from Iceland to Morocco to
the Philippines) in military areas to provide bacteriological and chemical
testing of food supplies. By August 1945, the U.S. Army Veterinary Service
included over 2,000 officers and about 8,000 enlisted soldiers working as
technicians. In the field, they worked alongside bacteriologists, physicians,
and technicians and their duties included epidemiological studies (human and
animal diseases); inspections of animals and microscopic inspections of food;
and the development, manufacture, and standardization of sera and other
biological treatments. A few veterinarians managed to conduct bacteriological,
pathological, or epidemiological research along with their duties.
War circumstances showed two very different faces of human-animal
relationships. On the one hand, hundreds of thousands of horses, donkeys,
and mules were used and sacrificed on the battlefield. Livestock were killed to
feed hungry armies and were targeted with biological weapons or animal
diseases. (Horses were also killed for their meat.) Tens of thousands of dogs
served and died in the combating armies, often killed by mines or explosives.
On mainland Europe, starving people killed and ate dogs (and cats). On the
other hand, however, during the bombing of London in 1940, Blue Cross
volunteers tried to rescue horses, dogs, and cats from the ruins alongside Red
Cross personnel trying to save injured people. Soldiers adopted pet animals.
One nation, Germany, even prioritized animal welfare (as we will see). Amid
these events, veterinarians tried to keep war horses and dogs healthy; worked
to prevent livestock diseases; and attempted to maintain the safety of the food
supply. Veterinarians used their scientific knowledge to increase animal health
and public health. However, we must also understand the ways in which
scientific knowledge could be used against humans and animals. World War

II stimulated the dramatic growth of state-sponsored programs to develop what

one physician called “public health in reverse”: biological weapons.
Biological Warfare: The Dark Side of the Biomedical Sciences

The civilian populations of war-torn nations suffered terribly under the “Total
Warfare Doctrine” common to both sides during World War II. The goal of
this doctrine was to destroy the socioeconomic infrastructure of the enemy:
cities, factories, stations, railways, roads, bridges, and even farms and homes.
In World War II, an estimated 20 million soldiers died. But almost twice that
number of civilians, 38 million, died from bombing, disease, starvation,
massacres, and genocide. World War II involved the whole population of
warring nations in Asia, Europe, and Africa, and any weapon could be used
against civilians. Although microbiological knowledge was a crucial tool for
improving human and animal health, it had a dark side. Biological toxins or
infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, insects, and fungi could be used to
deliberately incapacitate or kill humans, animals, and plants. Biological
weapons (BW) offered opportunities to infect water and food as well as the
human and animal population of the enemy.
After World War I, military authorities in several countries had continued or
initiated programs for the development of BW on a large scale. These pro
grams existed because nations feared that their enemies were developing BW.
All these nations’ governments had signed the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which
forbade the use of chemical and biological weapons. But the Geneva Protocol
had a major flaw: it allowed nations to defend themselves if BW was used
against them. Fearing that enemies would deploy these weapons, several
nations secretly developed their own BW to use in retaliation if necessary.
Next to plague, anthrax, and glanders, the rinderpest virus was categorized as a
potential weapon of mass destruction. For instance, Britain included this virus
in its secret BW program during World War II. The United States and Canada,
Britain’s allies, worked on a rinderpest vaccine. The British also manufactured
cattle feed containing anthrax spores and tested aerosolized anthrax on sheep
isolated on an island. During World War II, BW programs grew much larger in
Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the
United States. All of these BW programs depended on the expertise of
veterinarians, microbiologists, chemists, physicians, and other scientists.
Of the nations with BW programs, only Japan used these weapons on a large
scale. The people and animals of Japanese-occupied territories, especially in
Manchuria, suffered as these weapons were developed and tested in secret
facilities there. The Imperial Japanese Army used biological (and chemical)
weapons against Chinese soldiers and civilians, killing probably tens of thou
sands. For example, in 1940, the Japanese Air Force released ceramic bombs

World War II 251
full of fleas carrying bubonic plague over the city of Ningbo. The extent of
Japanese biological warfare, and the widespread participation of Japanese
scientists in it, has only become known since the war ended. Other isolated
BW attacks occurred: the Soviet Red Army probably infected rats with
tularemia (rabbit fever) and released them behind German lines during the
siege of Stalingrad. At least 50,000 German soldiers became ill with fever,
headache, swollen lymph nodes, and fatigue. The practical problem with BW
was the potential for infection beyond the enemy, either back into the home
army or the civilian population, and this fact probably deterred wider use of
these terrible weapons. However, for scientists (including veterinarians), the
bigger problems with BW were moral and ethical ones.
Moral and Ethical Problems for Wartime Scientists

Despite the many benefits of scientific research, biological warfare programs
were a grim example of how scientists could lose their ethical beliefs under
political pressure. The dark side of science included not only the BW pro
grams, but the twisting of scientific ideas into lethal political ideologies. Many
German scientists and intellectuals believed the pseudo-scientific racial ideol
ogy of the German National Socialist Party (Nazi Party). Based on an earlier
British and American perversion of Darwinian ideas, the Nazi racial ideology
divided people into a hierarchy of imaginary “races” similar to ideas about
animals belonging to inferior or superior species. According to Nazi racial
ideology, certain groups of people, including the “Aryan” leaders of Nazi
Germany and their followers, were deemed the “superior men”
(Ubermenschen). Jews, the ethnic Roma and Slavic peoples, people of
African or Indian descent, homosexuals, and the mentally ill were considered
“inferior men” (Untermenschen). This fanatic and racist doctrine dehumanized
many people. The ultimate result was the Holocaust (Shoah), the German
government’s carefully planned and deliberate genocide of six million Jews,
Roma, and other peoples during World War II.
This Nazi doctrine of dehumanization reframed the meaning of “animal”
and “human.” It also depended in part on changes in human-animal relation
ships. Animal welfare became an important component of Nazi propaganda,
while Nazi authorities stressed the fact that veterinarians should prioritize
animal protection (Fig. 5.5). Under the Nazis, animals were often treated much
better than the stigmatized so-called inferior humans. The Jewish procedures
of ritual slaughter and vivisection of animals for scientific research were
forbidden. Instead, people belonging to the so-called inferior groups were used
as laboratory animals in horrible medical experiments conducted in German-
run concentration camps. These crimes against humanity did not only occur in
German-occupied territories. Racist ideologies also flourished within the

Figure 5.5 The animal world salutes Hermann Goring. Cartoon in

Kladeradatsch, September 3, 1933.
Japanese Imperial government and its army. While occupying parts of China,
Korea, and Southeast Asian countries, the Japanese Army targeted and killed
millions. Cruel experiments on humans were also conducted by Japanese
Army scientists, using people considered to be members of “inferior races.”

World War II 253
Some of this research was even published after the war. (The authors claimed
the experimental subjects were monkeys, but the evidence is clear that humans
were subjected to experiments.) In the infamous Unit 731 in Manchuria,
horrific biological weapons tests were conducted on prisoners of war and
captured local people as well as on animals. It is important to recognize that
these activities were not the work of a few depraved individual scientists. On
the contrary, a tour of duty in Manchuria was part of the training and work of
large numbers of Japanese scientists (including physicians and veterinarians)
between the late 1930s and 1945.
History shows that biomedical researchers, including veterinarians, have
played an important role in the development of biological (and chemical)
weapons. It is difficult to understand how veterinarians, physicians, and
scientists could have participated in such horrible activities. They had lost
their moral compass due to nationalism, patriotism, or certain political or
ideological agendas. In addition, some found their justification and motives
in scientific prestige, employment, increased resources, and safety during
wartime. The military leader of Unit 731 urged Japanese scientists to partici
pate in experiments with biological weapons (on humans as well as animals)
for the scientific thrill and unique opportunities to conduct research that was
usually prohibited. Not only voluntarily, but often under terror and pressure,
scientists were forced to engage in this kind of research. Often, they or their
families were threatened with imprisonment or death. For example, some
scientists who tried to refuse a tour of duty in Unit 731 were threatened with
execution. For any or all these reasons, some scientists who were educated to
honor and protect the lives of humans justified the use of their knowledge for
the explicit goal of injuring or killing civilians en masse. Others collaborated
with brutal regimes and occupying armies. Faced with the moral dilemma of
using or abusing their professional knowledge, they made choices that we view
with horror today. How could this have happened? To understand their
choices, we must consider the words, actions, and contexts of historical people.
Professional Accountability: Facing Our Past, Working for a

Just Society
Like other scientists, veterinarians always work within a societal context,
differing from time and place. Particularly during wartime, terror, or under
totalitarian, racist, and intolerant regimes such as that of the Nazis, working
conditions could be extremely difficult and dangerous. As we have seen above,
these circumstances existed during both world wars. Similar to the majority of
the population, most veterinarians followed a strategy of survival and quietly
continued their local work. However, veterinarians in public service and
leadership positions found themselves faced with the moral dilemma of

whether to resist or to collaborate with a brutal regime such as the Nazis. This
meant that many cooperated to some extent to prevent worse things from
happening. Others were forced, or chose voluntarily, to engage with acts of
war varying from supporting war activities, actively joining the military, or
even developing weapons of mass destruction. As one U.S. veterinarian who
helped develop BW later remembered, Americans expected to be attacked at
any time and many felt desperate to help. Patriotism (saving the nation) and
fear were powerful forces during times of war.
Sociological and psychological research has shown that after a war, most
people want to forget the tragedies and losses they suffered and instead focus
on recovery and return to normal life as soon as possible. Only later - often
decades later - will most people reflect on their behavior during wartime. This
also happened within veterinary medicine, where the behavior of the profes
sion as a whole (and certain individual veterinarians in particular) was only
examined in Germany 50 years after the war ended. In the 1980s, members of
the History Section of the German Veterinary Medical Association had the
courage to reflect on the behavior of their profession under Nazi rule in the
period 1933-1945. They acknowledged the fact that more than 57 percent of
German veterinarians were members of the Nazi party - the highest percentage
of all academic professions. The inquiry included the activities of veterinarians
in the nations occupied by the German Army as well as vets at home. By
openly discussing how veterinarians contributed to the terrible events of World
War II in multiple places, it was possible to make meaningful comparisons
from different points of view and account for veterinarians’ offenses. In
Austria, this self-examination has recently begun. Like Germany, most veter
inarians collaborated with wartime aggression; for example, 65 percent of the
professors at the Vienna veterinary school belonged to the nationalist political
party working with the Nazis. In other Axis countries this topic is still taboo
and not discussed openly.
On the other side, countries belonging to the Allied coalition saw them
selves as on the morally correct side of the war. Therefore, the veterinary
profession in these countries mostly discussed the merits of veterinary heroes.
Only much later did their veterinary histories critically evaluate the activities of
veterinarians. There were questions about which veterinarians in the army,
administration, education, and practice had collaborated with the enemy, and
which were resistant. Historians wrote about the tragic fates of Jewish veterin
arians in Germany and in the Nazi-occupied countries. Finally, despite taking a
professional oath to guard animal health, some Allied veterinarians had par
ticipated in developing biological weapons deadly to both humans and
animals. No matter which side veterinarians found themselves on during
World War II, they had to make many difficult decisions - decisions that
might haunt them later.

Veterinarians in the New World Order, 1945-1960 255
As a veterinary student or veterinarian, you might wonder why you should

know about these histories of the profession under totalitarian regimes. Isn’t
that something of the past and not relevant in modern society? Unfortunately,
this is not the case. Similar regimes still exist today. Many people still suffer
from inequality, discrimination, racism, and suppression based on political,
socioeconomic, or religious doctrines. Therefore, it is important to become
aware of the fact that circumstances similar to both world wars still exist or
might recur. Moreover, even in peacetime, as medical professionals, veterinar
ians must make difficult ethical decisions, such as whether to euthanize a
patient. These daily ethical decisions may seem to have nothing to do with
war, but we are shaped by our behavior. It is easy to state that one would never
have cooperated with suppressive Nazi, communist, or apartheid regimes. But
it is difficult to imagine daily life and work under such circumstances. Each of
us must think hard about this question: “What would I have done in this
difficult situation?” For instance, how would you have reacted if the authorities
banned Jewish or Black students and professors from universities, or from the
veterinary profession? Unfortunately, some of us may have to face difficult
questions like this someday.
Each of us plays a role in ensuring a just and ethical society, as well as
working for the improvement of animal health. As educated and trained
professionals, veterinarians have leadership responsibilities during peaceful
times and during crises such as pandemics, economic recessions, food short
ages, or conflicts. Studying the events of the two world wars bring this fact into
sharp focus, and they help to guide us as we face similar challenges today.
Professional accountability to society played and still plays an essential role
within the veterinary profession. Therefore, we believe that veterinary educa
tion must include how the ethical, cultural, and political context shapes
veterinarians’ activities. This is one of the major lessons to be learned from
history - and from this book.
Veterinarians in the New World Order, 1945-1960

After the defeat of the Axis powers (Nazi Germany, Italy, and Japan), a new
political order developed that divided the world into communist (led by the
USSR) and capitalist (led by the United States) blocs. Tensions between the
two blocs led not only to the so-called Cold War but also to armed conflicts
in nations such as Korea and Vietnam. The postwar period also witnessed
decolonization conflicts and the subsequent independence of numerous
new nations, including the former battlefields of Eritrea and parts of
Libya in eastern and northern Africa. Major concerns of governments
worldwide included postwar recovery and feeding the human and animal
populations. Veterinarians had to find their way against this changing

background. Those who had served abroad with the military had new
insights into the global animal economy, animal diseases, and laboratory
procedures.
This was true in terms of veterinary education and knowledge exchange,
also. In Germany, world veterinary literature had almost ceased due to Nazi
policies and the difficulties of wartime circulation. When the Allied armies
arrived, they found German veterinarians to be very interested in foreign
research developments; the school at Hannover, although damaged, began
functioning again. For the first couple of years, students were required to help
with the labor of rebuilding the German veterinary schools. Textbooks and
journals imported from the Allied nations helped to restock veterinary
libraries. On the Soviet side, veterinary education in Czechoslovakia,
Poland, Hungary, the Baltic countries, Romania, and other occupied coun
tries was reorganized according to the Soviet educational model. New
schools were rapidly established as well. For example, “Veterinary
Sciences” was one of three faculties comprising the first university in
Mongolia, established at Ulaanbaatar in 1942. By the mid-1950s, about
50 veterinarians graduated from this school each year. With Soviet support
and oversight, the Mongolian government established 24 large and
480 smaller veterinary clinics/hospitals around the country by 1947, with
national laboratories and scientific research institutes soon after that.
Controlled by Soviet-style Five-Year Plans, animal breeding and disease
prevention were crucial to making Mongolia a productive, “modern” nation
because animal products were a major source of wealth.
Recognizing the declining role of horsepower, veterinarians continued to
shift away from equine medicine, and many explored new niches. The role of
horses and mules in the armies quickly decreased due to further mechanization.
The same happened in agriculture. In the United States, the change from
horsepower to tractors was stimulated during the war. Farmers got higher
prices for their products, while tractor manufacturers were encouraged to
increase their production as part of the war-related rapid industrialization.
Generally, tractor power overtook horsepower on American farms around
1945. Elsewhere around the world, this transition took place later as part of
the postwar recovery process. Instead of equine medicine, veterinarians found
more employment in increasing animal production, veterinary public health,
and the food supply to support an economy that initially was characterized by
scarcity. They worked in eradication schemes to control livestock diseases and
those that also infected humans, such as bovine tuberculosis and brucellosis. In
their clinics, veterinarians began using new therapies, drugs, tools, and animal
husbandry technologies (herd health and preventive medicine), while more and
more pet animals became new patients, particularly when prosperity started to
grow again in the 1950s.

Postwar Recovery: International Organizations

Besides the human tragedy and casualties of the war, a considerable part of the
agricultural and industrial infrastructure had been destroyed in several African,
Asian, and European nations. In Europe, postwar governments concentrated
on denazification (removing all Nazi collaborators) and reconstruction.
Denazification included purging collaborators from all veterinary institutes
(both professors and students) and veterinarians in private and public services.
This process divided the veterinary profession, and it took decades before
relations between colleagues were restored again. The USSR faced vast chal
lenges in recovering its livestock and agricultural economy, especially in the
former battlefields of Ukraine, the Baltics, and the trans-Caucasus region. In
Eastern Europe and Asia, the Soviet Army had liberated nations from German,
Italian, and Japanese occupation but then set up Soviet-allied governments
after the war. Veterinarians in these satellite states were confronted with the
growing political and socioeconomic influence of the USSR. The authoritarian
Soviet-controlled regimes regulated veterinary education and veterinary prac
tice along socialist lines. The U.S. Army occupied Japan and other areas in
Asia, and it took over the registration and regulation of veterinarians.
Reconstruction in war-torn nations, from China to Europe to Eritrea, included
emergency efforts to rebuild livestock production. Standards of living were
low, and the food supply was insecure and scarce; in Europe, food rationing
lasted through the 1940s. Many countries could no longer afford to pay for the
necessary imports of such things as raw materials, foods, capital goods, and
machines from their gold reserve and export income. Imports and rationing of
animal feed hindered animal production, and veterinarians struggled to sur
vive. A total economic collapse was feared.
In response to these problems, some vets from the less-affected nations
(such as the United States) joined the international organizations working to
rebuild war-torn nations’ economies and infrastructure. The United Nations
Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) coordinated the shipments
of cattle and other livestock from the United States to suffering nations, and it
hired veterinarians to accompany these animals and keep them healthy on
ocean voyages. These animals were to help reestablish livestock breeding and
increase the local food supply. American veterinarian Martin Kaplan
(1915-2004) joined UNRRA and was assigned to the problems of livestock
production in Greece. Kaplan transported donated American cattle and pur
chased Arabian stallions for horse breeding; helped restart laboratories to
manufacture vaccines; and worked with Greek veterinarians to rebuild their
practices. Kaplan next joined the international Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO), doing similar work in several European countries, par
ticularly in Poland. These veterinarians brought new techniques and

pharmaceuticals, including sulfonamides to treat infections. Sulfas and other

recently discovered antimicrobials promised to revolutionize the treatment of
animal infections, but they were scarce and too expensive to use in many
places around the world.
In 1947, the American secretary of state George Marshall (1880-1959)
announced a plan for extended economic aid to all European countries. This
“Marshall Plan” was launched to restore the economy by removing essential
shortages and promoting international economic cooperation. Another motive
behind the plan was the hope that economic reconstruction of Europe would
prevent the spread of communism due to hunger and distress. In the period
1948-1952, the Organization for European Economic Cooperation divided
$14.6 billion of Marshall aid among 17 countries. Apart from infrastructure
recovery, rebuilding industry, and research programs, modernization of agri
culture and livestock production was financed. Much emphasis was placed on
restoring and increasing animal production under increasing pressure from
rapid postwar population growth. This brought about some fundamental
changes in veterinary medicine. Due to imports of animal feed, crop seeds,
fertilizers, tractors, milking machines, and other machinery, Marshall Plan aid
enabled the growth of livestock numbers and animal production. Rationing
measures on most consumption and production goods as well as animal feed
were removed by 1950 in Europe. International cooperation stimulated eco
nomic recovery by trade liberalization within the European Economic
Community framework from 1957 onward.
The other crucial international agencies coordinating the recovery of animal
economies were the FAO and the World Health Organization (WHO). As
historian Michael Bresalier has argued, the FAO and the WHO began cooper
ating after the war to use agricultural development to increase global food
production. In 1946, the FAO conducted their first World Food Survey. The
Survey counted food-producing animals in nations such as India and assessed
livestock levels of health and fertility. The Survey found that parasitism,
disease, poor nutrition, and other problems plagued the world’s cattle, sheep,
goats, and other milk and meat producers. FAO/WHO officials decided to
encourage consumers to ingest more milk products and eat more meat, which
would also increase farmers’ income. Experts, including veterinarians, worked
around the world to impose modern (largely U.S. and European) breeding,
feeding, and disease prevention practices designed to make livestock more
productive. While overall food production did increase after World War II,
these “development” strategies unfortunately required local farmers to aban
don their own knowledge and practices. This change meant the loss of local
expertise, the conversion of the world’s populations to eating higher on the
food chain, and, in some places, damage to environments. Farmers’ relation
ships to their animals often changed, also, due to the greater degree of state

intervention in agriculture. Without doubt, farmers had their own ideas about
how much of the new development regime they would accept; but the postwar
economic reality pushed them to participate.
Veterinarians, who had already moved away from horse medicine to focus
on cattle and other livestock, enthusiastically embraced the FAO/WHO live
stock programs. Martin Kaplan became a leader in these efforts, joining the
WHO in 1949 and establishing a special Veterinary Section within the
Division of Communicable Diseases. In the United States, veterinarian
James H. Steele (1913-2013) had proposed a Veterinary Public Health
Division of the U.S. Public Health Service in 1945, which he led from the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for many years. In this way,
veterinary disease problems were attacked alongside diseases of human popu
lations, and veterinarians were employed to do this work. In many countries,
governments supported animal production by establishing and financing sev
eral institutes, programs, and knowledge transfer. Research was carried out on
animal feeds, new intensive livestock production systems particularly for
poultry and pigs, breeding, artificial insemination, blood-typing, and vaccin
ation. By labor-saving mechanization and an increase in scale, animal hus
bandry was rationalized. Veterinarians played important roles in scientific
research of modern livestock production systems. The increase in scale and
the concentration of large groups of production animals that went hand in hand
with industrialized intensive livestock farming (factory farming) involved a
higher risk of outbreaks of animal diseases. Consequently, the postwar rise of
herd-health management brought about a shift from a curative to a preventive
approach for veterinary practitioners.
Herd Health, Maximizing Production, and

Encouraging Consumption
As historians have demonstrated, plans implemented in the aftermath of the
war were the basis for regimes of agricultural development deployed around
the world during the next half century. The “right” way to feed the world was
the modern, technocratic way, based on government-controlled regimes of
imported experts. International organizations and Soviet- and U.S.-controlled
occupation governments decided that the global food crisis could only be
solved by increasing the amounts of calories and (especially) protein per
person. One direct way to accomplish this goal was to urge people to eat more
animal products. Veterinarians would play a key role in this shift by breeding
highly productive animals, overseeing animal husbandry, controlling animal
diseases, and overseeing production of foods like milk, butter, cheese, ghee,
meats, and eggs. Many of these roles fell under the rubrics of “herd health” and
“preventive medicine,” which emphasized working with large numbers of

animals and making decisions based strictly on economic value. This orienta
tion replaced the clinical care of individual animals, and it also linked veterin
ary medicine to human medicine and public health.
The goals of herd health are to raise large numbers of animals cheaply, in
less space, and quickly. The herd became a “production unit,” managed by
veterinary advisors. Veterinarians in the United States and other areas saw the
intensification of animal agriculture as an opportunity, beginning with the
poultry industry. Raised indoors in very high densities, rather than outdoors
in small flocks, in the United States poultry went from an expensive rarity to a
cheap source of protein in the 1940s and 1950s. Around the world, veterinar
ians helped restructure animal economies for intense production, even in
places where people had not previously consumed large amounts of meat.
The U.S. occupation governments in Japan (1945-1951) and Korea
(1945-1948) are good examples. Official reports at the end of the war noted
that the Japanese did not eat much meat, had a very small livestock industry,
and lacked the pastureland necessary to develop large herds. Horses and
bovines were draft animals, not primarily sources of meat; meat animals were
ducks and other poultry and swine. Before the war’s devastation, Japan had a
well-functioning veterinary disease control regime. U.S. veterinary forces
worked alongside Japanese veterinarians to restore disease control, import
fodder and grains, use more intensive breeding operations, prevent animal
diseases from being imported, and, most importantly, to dramatically increase
production of meat, milk, and eggs. They standardized food inspection, pas
teurization, and refrigeration according to U.S. models.
In South Korea, the removal of Japanese personnel at the end of the war left
few graduate veterinarians to administer national-level food production and
inspection. U.S. Army officers took control of veterinary education at Seoul
National University, where they trained Korean veterinary students according
to the U.S. model. The Korean population had traditionally used poultry, dogs,
and other smaller animals for meat; but the 35-year Japanese occupation had
completely wiped out the dog population and the two major poultry farms.
Vaccinating large numbers of cattle against rinderpest and battling outbreaks
of diseases such as anthrax and rabies were the first animal disease problems
confronted by the U.S. veterinarians. Next, the Americans replaced older
regulations and laws. Since about 15 percent of the cattle tested positive for
bovine tuberculosis, they began a tuberculosis control program modeled
on that of the United States. Stimulating dairy production was another major
goal, despite the fact that the Korean people traditionally did not consume
much dairy.
Around the world, experts from the FAO, WHO, and other organizations
targeted protein-calorie malnutrition by focusing on the production of foods
that were highly digestible and contained larger amounts of high-quality

proteins needed by human bodies. Most U.S. and European physicians, nutri
tionists, and veterinarians agreed that foods of animal origin supplied the
highest-quality protein per unit of weight, and that incorporating animal
protein into a person’s diet increased the conversion of plant foods into
nutrients for growth. By supplying the animals, the livestock industry was
essential to this program. Postwar veterinarians contributed to the drive for
increasing meat and milk consumption by increasing livestock production and
by battling animal and zoonotic diseases.
Increasingly, these activities changed the bodies of the animals themselves
through breeding programs, new feeding regimens, and specialized housing.
Chickens, turkeys, and ducks for meat were bred to have huge breast muscles.
Cows that produced the most milk were the foundation for dairy herds.
Scientific diets stimulated maximum growth in the shortest time, or more eggs
or milk produced per animal. Confining animals inside buildings enabled the
diet, light, and temperature to be controlled for maximal production. Crowding
animals together, however, encouraged the spread of diseases. Veterinarians,
using a herd health approach, battled disease problems both before they
occurred (preventive medicine) and during active outbreaks and epizootics.
The newly developed pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and antimicrobials promised
a new era of veterinary control.
New Tools and the “Therapeutic Revolution”

One major accomplishment of researchers in various places around the
world was the development of new drugs and vaccines, some of which were
quickly adopted internationally (see Table 5.1). For example, salvarsan
(originally developed to treat human syphilis) worked well against African
trypanosomiasis. In 1911, German Army veterinarian W. Rips proved that it
was also successful in the treatment of contagious equine pleuropneumonia
(caused by bacteria). Traditionally, veterinary education also included training
in pharmaceutical preparation. Veterinary practices maintained their own phar
macies. However, more and more (international) pharmaceutical and chemical
companies started to provide veterinarians with their products in a direct way, or
through agents. In addition, national serum and vaccine institutes developed and
distributed vaccines that were used by vets in their practice.
As more microorganisms were discovered, the search for chemical prepar
ations to treat infections by microbes intensified. German pathologist and
bacteriologist Gerhard Domagk (1895-1964) and his colleagues investigated
several potential chemotherapies against bacterial infections. In 1935, they
demonstrated in mice and rabbit experiments that sulfonamides (Prontosil)
were effective in treating blood poisoning caused by high mortal doses of
bacteria (Staphylococcus aureus and hemolytic streptococci). This discovery

was the basis for producing sulfa drugs, the first type of antibiotic with strong
antibacterial effects against several common bacteria. Veterinarians and phys
icians quickly began using sulfa drugs in their practices. For veterinarians,
figuring out the correct dosage for different species of animals and different
infections was the first concern. For example, sulfonamides attacked strepto
coccal bacteria responsible for mastitis in dairy cattle. The right dose of sulfas,
sometimes orally and sometimes infused into the affected teats, cleared up the
infection right away. To many veterinarians, sulfas seemed like miracle drugs;
but more of these “magic bullets” were to come.
The development of antimicrobials was a collaborative international effort,
and penicillin is an excellent example. English physician Alexander Fleming
(1891-1955) had published an article in 1928 in which he described his
(coincidental) observation that a species of fungi, Penicillium, had a bacteri
cidal effect. Initially, neither Fleming nor the medical community recognized
the potential of this discovery. However, Ernst Boris Chain (1906-1979), a
Jewish German biochemist who had moved to England in 1933, and
Australian pathologist Howard Florey (1898-1968) noticed Fleming’s discov
ery and obtained financing from the Rockefeller Foundation to develop a
pharmaceutical from Fleming’s fungus. Chain and Florey worked at the
University of Oxford (UK) and there they elucidated the chemical structure
and therapeutic efficacy of a compound they called “penicillin.” Initially,
however, penicillin could only be produced in small amounts at great expense.
Recognizing its potential, scientists at British and American universities and
pharmaceutical companies cooperated to produce penicillin on a large scale by
the end of World War II, saving the lives of many soldiers on the battlefields.
Physicians quickly tested penicillin on any infection they thought might
respond to it: pneumonia, urinary tract infections, sepsis, and many others.
The increasing availability of antimicrobials changed veterinary practice,
although these changes often happened slowly. In the United States immedi
ately after the war ended, large commercial laboratories such as Lederle
Laboratories, Park-Davis, and Merck began manufacturing forms of
penicillin that would be useful to veterinarians. Industrial production of peni
cillin by pharmaceutical companies increased from a few milligrams in 1940 to
almost 200 tons in 1953. Penicillin-G, the dried crystalline form, had the
advantage of not needing refrigeration. It could be made up in doses for any
size of animal (although dosing horses, cattle, and other large animals was very
expensive at first). Penicillin-G was also shipped around the world. The
companies advertised their new products, and veterinary journals published
articles instructing veterinarians how to use these medications in their prac
tices. These articles advised veterinarians that simply treating an animal, based
on one’s experience, was not sufficient. Different antimicrobials attacked
different species or groups (Gram positive or Gram negative) of bacteria,

and veterinary practitioners were instructed to always microscopically examine

and stain samples from sick animals before treating them. Common problems
such as mastitis or infected wounds would then yield to the proper antimicro
bial treatment. This “therapeutic revolution” not only changed veterinarians’
usual procedures; it also raised their expectations for their ability to treat sick
animals successfully. Animal owners’ expectations for their veterinarian
increased, also; the late 1940s and 1950s were a new era for veterinary
medicine.
The increase in animal production and lowering production costs during a
period of global reconstruction and food scarcity were the main reasons for the
widespread adoption of antibiotics in veterinary medicine in the 1950s-1960s.
Biochemists accidentally discovered that these antimicrobials also increased
the growth rate of young livestock when added as supplement to animal feed,
particularly for pigs and poultry. Antibiotics were also used as a food preser
vative. In 1962, 14,000 tons of penicillin was produced in the United States,
and about 46 percent of this amount was used in agriculture. Besides penicillin,
350 other antimicrobials had been isolated by 1957, including bacitracin
(1945); chloramphenicol and streptomycin (1947); chlortetracycline (1948);
and oxytetracycline (1949) . Many of these antimicrobials were used as feed
supplements and as preventive medicines against infectious diseases and
parasites that plagued animals crowded together. Production statistics rose
dramatically: cows produced more milk, hens produced more eggs, and meat
animals grew faster (so they could be slaughtered at younger ages). These were
tremendous economic benefits to the animal feed industry (and, by extension,
to their consulting veterinarians).
However, the use of antibiotics in animal production, particularly as growth
promoters, was not undisputed. By 1950, scientists already warned that
microbes evolved resistance to antimicrobials. New antimicrobials had to be
developed, but scientists feared that microbial evolution would happen faster.
The use of these antimicrobials as growth promoters was especially dangerous,
since low levels of these chemicals in animals’ bodies and environments
encouraged the development of resistant strains of pathogenic microbes.
Physicians used the same drugs to treat infections in their patients, and they
worried that the widespread use of these drugs could leave residues in food of
animal origin. Then drug-resistant strains of microbes would affect human
patients. Within about forty years, they were proven correct as antibiotic
resistance has increased steadily in human populations. Veterinarians noted
that part of the problem was a lack of regulation: in some places, farmers could
obtain and administer these drugs without a veterinary prescription.
Despite these problems, the new antimicrobials, anthelmintics (parasite
killers), and vaccines available after the war revolutionized veterinary practice.
Veterinarians could now effectively treat individual patients with pneumonia

or other serious infections with simple injections or oral medications.

Chemoprophylaxis as a routine whole-herd treatment made even more impact.
Internal parasite infections, from the amoebas to the roundworms, could
severely affect or even kill young animals. External parasites, including mites
and fleas, were also serious problems. The development of new chemicals for
prevention of parasite infections promised to improve animal health dramatic
ally: hexachloroethane against liver flukes, and the benzimidazoles against
trichinosis, tapeworms, whipworms, roundworms, and protozoans Giardia,
Coccidia, and Cryptosporidium. Chemical companies developed liquid dips
and dry powders to apply externally, to repel or kill insects including mites,
ticks, fleas, and flies. Formerly life-threatening infections could now be rou
tinely controlled. Finally, new vaccines were being developed that enabled
disease control campaigns to become disease eradication campaigns.
From Control to Eradication: Battling Animal Diseases

In various countries, organized campaigns against contagious livestock dis
eases had started already before the war, often on a local level. But by the
1950s these campaigns were carried out by well-organized, nationwide pro
grams whose goals were increasing from control (allowing low levels of the
disease) to complete eradication (no disease). Along with vaccines and pharma
ceuticals, diagnostic tests for animal diseases were developed and improved.
Farmers were compensated for losses they suffered by being forced to slaughter
their animals that tested positively. Millions of animals were tested, and thou
sands were slaughtered. Apart from bovine tuberculosis, organized eradication
campaigns against brucellosis, foot and mouth disease, warble fly, swine fever,
Salmonella pullorum, and Newcastle disease were quite successful in many
areas. Sometimes, cull-and-slaughter strategies were applied; in other cases,
newly developed vaccines were used, for instance in the case of foot and mouth
disease. Two important facts are illustrated by these early eradication campaigns:
(1) moving from “control” to “eradication” required a combination of tech
niques, including an effective, safe, and widely available vaccine; (2) however,
if the vaccine was a modified live formulation, the problem was that diagnostic
tests could not distinguish between infected animals and vaccinated animals.
Having a vaccine did not guarantee eradication.
Nonetheless, vaccines were crucial tools, and they were developed by
scientists working around the world. Researchers working in African and
Asian institutes contributed to the evolution of a colonial scientific culture,
thereby extending the growing international veterinary scientific community.
For example, French veterinarians working in Algeria created an early suc
cessful sheep pox vaccine in 1911. Historian Karen Brown has shown that
during this period the nature of research at the Onderstepoort Veterinary

Institute, near Pretoria, South Africa, exceeded just progress in biomedical

procedures, because diseases were studied in the context of the local ecological
factors (weather, soil, and nutrition). This was also the case with research in
the Veterinary Institute in Buitenzorg in Java, Indonesia. In South Africa, the
etiologies of diseases such as lamsiekte (botulism), geeldikkop, and African
horse sickness were revealed; in Indonesia this was the case with surra,
dourine, and Newcastle disease. Based on this scientific and veterinary know
ledge, governments imposed regulations and designed control and eradication
programs. The successful eradication and control of various diseases increased
the prestige, institutionalization, and legitimacy of the veterinary sciences.
The development of intensive livestock production and the organized cam
paigns against animal diseases also changed daily work for practitioners and
the function of veterinarians active in research and management in the 1950s.
The campaigns brought along a lot of diagnostic and preventive work for
practitioners, as well as the introduction of antibiotics and new types of
veterinary drugs like sulfonamides. In addition, veterinarians played an active
role in information campaigns for farmers, assisting veterinary services with
the development of all kinds of publications, films, and propaganda. These
activities resulted in more employment of veterinarians in private practices, the
pharmaceutical industry, as well as in government services and animal health
services, sometimes for decades. Avian influenza (or true fowl plague), spread
from northern Italy around the world, represented a big challenge for veterin
ary medicine. This highly contagious and acute viral disease is virulent for all
bird species and has led to huge losses of poultry worldwide. Effective
vaccines were developed, but stamping-out and carcass destruction have
remained the most important control strategies. Large numbers of veterinarians
worked on campaigns against these diseases.
Another good example is rinderpest, the world’s cattle killer. After the huge
outbreak of rinderpest in Europe in the 1860s, this disease was kept under
control there by stamping-out and trade policy measures. However, this policy
failed during the Balkan War and World War I and its aftermath. After
1924 the Office International des Epizooties (OIE) guidelines were followed
in many countries, and by 1930 eastern Turkey was the only region in Europe
where rinderpest was still endemic; but the disease reappeared periodically
around the world. In 1950, the Inter-African Bureau of Epizootic Diseases was
founded with a directorial plan to eliminate rinderpest from Africa. Working in
the Muguga Laboratory of the East African Veterinary Research Organization
(Kenya), veterinarian Walter Plowright (1923-2010) and R.D. Ferris
developed a new rinderpest vaccine from bovine kidney cells in 1957. This
tissue-culture rinderpest vaccine was stable, safe, and cheap to produce. Along
with restrictions on moving cattle and slaughtering infected animals, the
vaccine greatly accelerated rinderpest control in African endemic areas.

The other cattle disease that became the subject of targeted eradication was
foot and mouth disease (FMD). Despite the low mortality (2 to 5 percent),
FMD represented the most severe animal plague after the rinderpest. For
instance, more than 7 million animals were infected in Germany between
1889 and 1894, leading to economic losses due to loss of weight and meat
and milk production. A major epizootic spread at the end of the war in South
America, especially in Brazil; and war disruptions caused outbreaks in many
other places also. The DDR (East Germany) was the first country in the world
to introduce an annual vaccination against FMD in 1950. In the same period,
Dutch veterinarian Herman Salomon Frenkel (1891-1968), director of the
State Veterinary Research Institute, had developed an effective vaccine, pro
duced on a large-scale in vitro virus cultivation. This vaccine was not only
used in European countries but also by the USDA during anti-FMD campaigns
in Mexico, 1946-1954, to stop the spread of the South American epizootic.
However, as we will discuss in Chapter 6, this live-virus vaccine created a
problem for control and eradication programs. The problem is that diagnostic
tests cannot differentiate a vaccinated animal from an infected one, due to the
action of the live virus vaccine on the animal’s immune system. Fearing the
spread of infection, officials might order the slaughter of a vaccinated animal
that tested positive. This problem could lead to bans on moving or exporting
animals, and huge economic losses for the livestock industry.
Classical swine fever (also known as “hog cholera”), another major epizo
otic disease, also illustrates this problem with eradication strategies that
include both testing and live virus vaccines. Both acute and chronic forms of
this notifiable viral disease occur. The virulence may vary from severe, with a
high mortality, to mild or even subclinical. Sources of infection are living pigs
and raw pig products. Effective preventives became available with work
conducted in the United States by chemist and physician Marion Dorset
(1872-1935) and other researchers. Between 1903 and 1906, Dorset and
colleagues determined that swine fever was caused by a filterable virus and
developed a “hyperimmunization” technique that protected non-immune pigs.
However, between 1914 and 1924, outbreaks of swine fever still cost
American farmers $415 million. In 1934, Dorset developed a vaccine with
90 percent effectiveness; but this was a modified live virus vaccine. Along
with this vaccine, cull-and-slaughter remained an important eradication strat
egy throughout the twentieth century. By 1970, the U.S. government pro
hibited the vaccine due to fears of infection and positive testing, and finally the
disease was eradicated by destroying every animal that tested positive and
strictly regulating imports. Because of its potential economic damage, swine
fever was (and still is) a feared disease in countries with a high pig production.
For example, during an outbreak in 1961 in the Netherlands more than 320,000
animals were killed to prevent the disease from spreading. By 1990, the

combination of culling and prophylactic mass vaccination had almost eradi

cated the disease in Europe, but the European Union banned the use of the
vaccine unless in an emergency. The reasoning was that animals that tested
positive could not be moved or exported to other countries - and vaccinated
animals tested positive. Ironically, the very scientific development that enabled
disease control also potentially threatened the livestock economy.
Finally, some diseases still resist scientists’ efforts to develop effective
vaccines against them. African swine fever is an infectious viral disease in
domestic and wild swine, which primarily originated in sub-Saharan Africa. It
was first described in Kenya in 1910. The clinical symptoms are very similar to
those of classical swine fever, while infection occurs directly or indirectly by
contaminated feed or certain ticks. During the twentieth century, African swine
fever spread to Latin America and Eastern Europe. African swine fever control
relies on slaughtering infected and exposed animals alone. There is no effect
ive vaccine against this disease, despite efforts over decades to develop one. It
continues to plague swine production today: it appeared in China in the
summer of 2018 and spread through Southeast Asia, where it has caused meat
shortages.
During the mid-twentieth century, many contagious animal diseases were
eradicated or controlled by government-sponsored campaigns using culling
plus prophylactic measures. These successes owed a great deal to scientific
research and discoveries in laboratories of veterinary schools and of public or
private pharmaceutical, biomedical, and veterinary institutes worldwide. This
interdisciplinary research would increase animal health and thereby the pro
duction of livestock and food of animal origin. But some disease eradication
campaigns have failed. In some parts of the world, bovine tuberculosis stub
bornly persists. Both sheep and goat poxes were successfully controlled in
most European countries by attenuated vaccines, but remained endemic in
many African, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries. Why could the same
disease be controlled in one place, but continue to kill animals in others?
Obviously, control and eradication strategies and success have differed from
one place to another. But another important reason that eradication campaigns
failed was that many diseases of domestic animals (and humans) were closely
related or identical to those in wild animals. If a disease is established in wild
animal populations, it is very difficult to prevent its introduction into local
domesticated animals (and even human populations). This fact became clear
with ecological studies of various diseases during the twentieth century.
Disease Ecology
Ecological approaches to disease, which developed in the early to mid-1900s,
recognized that some diseases regularly circulated between humans and wild

and domesticated animals. The source of the circulating infection was the
reservoir - the animal species in which the disease was constantly present or
“enzootic.” If a disease had a wild animal reservoir, it was very difficult or
impossible to eradicate that disease without killing every susceptible wild
animal (and vector). If the reservoir species was a wild rodent, or bat, for
example, it was simply impossible to eliminate all these animals. Other wild
animals were too valuable to exterminate, such as those species important for
tourism and hunting. Contact between wild and domestic animals, such as rats
or other rodents living in barns or stables, reintroduced the disease periodic
ally. To control these diseases, three strategies were adopted: (1) eliminating
vectors, (2) developing vaccines, and (3) creating “buffer zones” between wild
animals and humans and their domesticated animals.
The first strategy, eliminating vectors, was crucial for many diseases of the
Global South and warmer areas in temperate zones. Ticks, fleas, mosquitos,
midges, and biting flies were known to spread animal diseases since the 1890s.
The blood-borne parasites that caused anaplasmosis, babesiosis, and anemias
killed untold numbers of animals. Mosquitos and midges spread Rift Valley
fever, bluetongue, and African horse sickness. Ticks carried Texas cattle fever,
African swine fever, encephalitis, and hemorrhagic fevers. Some arbovirus
diseases, such as equine encephalitis and sleeping sickness, were also import
ant zoonoses. By the mid-1900s, scientists had begun to use the new
insecticides (such as DDT) to kill disease vectors over large territories.
Developed during World War II and used for delousing armies and refugees,
at first these insecticides seemed to be miraculously effective. They have been
crucial tools in campaigns against vector-borne diseases. However, insects
developed resistance to them over time and the chemicals often damaged the
environment, sometimes even driving species (some birds) extinct in treated
areas. Like the search for antimicrobials, the search for new insecticides
continued throughout the 1900s.
A good example of the second and third strategies is rabies. Besides dogs
and cats, this disease can also be spread by wild animals like bats, raccoons,
skunks, and foxes; almost all mammals are susceptible to the rabies virus.
People have battled rabies for centuries by reducing the numbers of stray dogs
and isolating and killing infected animals. Until dog and cat licensing and
vaccination campaigns were introduced during the twentieth century, killing
large numbers of dogs was the only effective tactic to protect humans. But
Louis Pasteur and Emile Roux developed the first prophylactic for humans,
from adult mammalian brain tissue, in the 1880s. They first tested it on
animals, so the idea of vaccinating domesticated dogs slowly took hold. The
phenol-inactivated vaccines developed by Fermi (1908) and Semple (1911)
began to be used in domestic dogs in the 1920s. By the late 1930s, chloroform
killed vaccines were being advertised and sold by pharmaceutical companies

such as Parke, Davis & Company and Sharpe & Dome in the United States.
Safe, stable, and effective vaccines were affordable enough that ordinary
veterinarians could use them.
These vaccines were a key to rabies control programs. After both world
wars, rabies epizootics in Hungary were controlled with mass vaccination
campaigns. Japan also conducted large-scale, successful anti-rabies campaigns
in the 1920s. In the district of Osaka, for example, a 1926 campaign using
military personnel included registration and rabies vaccination for dogs at
police stations. The cost of a vaccine was 50 copper coins (sen) for a large
dog and 25 sen for a small dog (Fig. 5.6). Although safe and effective vaccines
have not been easy to develop for animals, by the 1960s modern modified-live
and inactivated parenteral vaccine preparations were widely available.
Epidemiologists realized that regular vaccination of pet animals decreased
the number of human infections by providing an “immune buffer” separating
susceptible human populations from wild reservoir species like bats. Advised
by veterinarians such as Karl Friedrich Meyer (1884-1974) and Martin
Figure 5.6 “Rabies Inoculation Week” and “Military Group Activity for
Rabies Prevention Propaganda,” Osaka District, Japan, 1926.
Т
Source: Н^^ИЖЖ^^Й ^^. AE • Boffi 1Ш [History of Prevention of
Livestock Infectious Diseases of the Japanese Empire. Taisho / Showa Vol. 1] (www.dl
.ndl.go.jp/api/iiif/1903868/manifest.json) Image p. 506. Courtesy: Prof. Myung-Sun
Chun, College of Veterinary Medicine, Seoul National University, South Korea.

Kaplan, the WHO began global efforts to control rabies with buffer vaccin
ation of domesticated animals. Eliminating all the wild reservoir species
harboring rabies was impossible, they acknowledged, and vaccinating all
humans was not feasible either. By putting dog licensing and rabies vaccin
ation laws in place, public health officials and veterinarians created a barrier of
immunity in the domestic dog population and human cases dropped quickly in
the protected regions. Since the late 1970s, various oral anti-rabies vaccines
have also been tested and deployed for wildlife using baits. However, no
methods have been developed that can successfully vaccinate all wildlife.
Prophylactic vaccination in rabies-endemic areas, along with licensing of dogs
and eliminating street dogs during epizootics, remain the major anti-rabies
strategies today.
Rabies and other vaccinations became a mainstay of veterinary practice
focused on dogs and cats. As wealth grew in many areas during the 1960s
and 1970s, companion animal veterinary care also grew rapidly. Veterinarians
had always treated some pet and working dogs, and in places such as the
United States specialty urban animal hospitals for dogs and cats had existed
since the late 1800s. But these hospitals and clinics were rare in most places
until consumer culture associated with pets began developing in the mid
twentieth century.
Companion Animals: The New Veterinary Frontier

For most rural people around the world, dogs were valued as workers or were
meant for food. Besides the occasional vaccination against rabies, which was
intended to protect people as well as dogs, these animals rarely saw a veterin
arian. A small number of pets belonging to urban elites may have had a “dog
doctor,” but this was unusual. Spending money on a pet animal was a luxury
hobby. Very few people purchased food or medical care for their pet animals,
but this began to change in the early 1900s for the world’s wealthiest people.
Using the United States as a case study, we can see how this transformation
happened. By the late 1930s, a leading American veterinarian commented that
the veterinary profession was “going to the dogs” in his country. While this
transformation did not develop in the same way everywhere, we can see some
common patterns. In Europe, Britain, the United States, and other places, the
importance of companion animals in veterinary medicine increased due to
several factors: (1) increasing urbanization, wealth, and consumer culture;
(2) changing human-animal relationships; and (3) veterinarians’ need to find
new patient populations as working horses disappeared.
During the early to mid-1900s, affection for companion animals combined
with increasing wealth to create a new consumer culture devoted to pets. The
animal heroes of World War I, such as the dog Rin Tin Tin, starred in popular

stories, books, and films in the United States and Britain that were exported
around the world. Managers in meat production companies realized that they
could make money from products made especially for dogs. This also solved
the problem of what to do with offal and the bodies of horses being slaughtered
as they were replaced by mechanization: use the meat that people did not eat in
special food for pets. The dog food industry targeted owners’ sense of love and
responsibility for their “faithful friends,” and advertisements urged people to
think about their pets as “family members.” Pet food companies helped owners
believe that spending money on pets exhibited their own wealth and high
moral values. This was so important to the rising middle and upper classes that,
even during the devastating economic depression of the 1930s, pet food sales
in the United States continued to increase. Pet animals were no longer just a
luxury but were becoming almost a necessity for the modern family living in
the cities and suburbs.
Changing human-animal relationships, and the increasing sentimental value
of pets also drove this developing consumer culture. Popular animal welfare
societies, which had worked to protect horses and dogs in cities since the late
1800s, laid the foundation for the moral and sentimental importance of pet
animals. As horses began disappearing from city streets, organizations such as
the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals focused on dogs (and other
pets). They argued that cruelty to these animals led to cruelty against people, and
that it was especially important to educate children to be kind to animals. By
keeping a pet dog or cat and caring properly for it, children learned proper
behavior. This was not a new idea, but it became important to people seeking
upward mobility into the middle and upper classes. These people could demon
strate humanitarianism toward animals (and other humans) with good treatment
of their family’s pets. Instead of being valued only for economic reasons,
companion or pet animals were valuable because their owners loved them.
Pet owners increasingly sought high-quality medical care for their animals.
Any veterinarian could treat parasites or injuries, but owners looked for a “pet
doctor” who cared about the welfare of their animals and used the latest
scientific knowledge to provide specialized medical and surgical care.
Veterinarians needed to be “sympathetic scientists,” and they also needed to
learn how to interact with pet owners. Treating livestock and other large
animals required brute strength and disregarding the animal’s comfort; but
treating pets was just the opposite. The veterinary profession had traditionally
served the commercial interests of livestock owners and the public health, not
humored useless and pampered pets. Most veterinarians viewed pets as femi
nized and frivolous, and beneath the dignity of a professional man. This
changed as veterinary leaders and individual practitioners realized the eco
nomic benefits of pet practice. For those vets in urban areas, or who were not
interested in livestock, pets replaced horses as their main patient population.

Owners would spend more money on pets, also, which allowed veterinarians
to use more of the new technologies and medications in their practices. The
early companion animal veterinarians modeled their practices on those of
physicians, and their specialized animal hospitals were designed to operate
like smaller human hospitals.
However, even in the 1940s, veterinarians learned very little about dogs,
cats, and other companion animals during their education. Veterinary schools’
curricula still focused mainly on food-producing animals, although some
schools offered courses in canine medicine and surgery as early as the
1920s. The demand for pet animal treatment, the willingness of pet owners
to spend money on their animals, and the availability of new vaccines and
antimicrobials drove changes in veterinarians’ training. Anatomy courses
increasingly used dogs as the “standard” animal for training veterinary stu
dents. Anesthetic regimens and specialized techniques were developed for
smaller animals. Energetic leaders in small animal veterinary medicine and
surgery gave presentations and demonstrations of techniques for blood analy
sis, nutrition, and castration and abdominal surgeries, and many practicing
veterinarians learned in this way. By 1950, schools located in urban areas
around the world not only began to change their curriculum but also provided
treatment for large numbers of dogs and cats. These developments were
responses to the changing veterinary marketplace.
The growing influence of pharmaceutical companies in veterinary medicine
also encouraged this slow shift toward dogs, cats, and other small animals.
Scientific innovations, such as vaccines and antimicrobials, were tested on
dogs and other animals in laboratories. Early vaccine research targeted not
only the canine disease rabies but also other filterable virus diseases such as
distemper that could be models for human diseases. For example, the British
National Institute for Medical Research established a program to produce a
vaccine against canine distemper after World War I. After a great deal of work,
Patrick Laidlaw and G.W. Dunkin developed a killed-virus vaccine and
follow-up immune modulator that they field-tested in Britain. In the United
States, Pitman-Moore and Lederle Laboratories began producing this vaccine
and advertising to pet owners that their dogs needed it. Pharmaceutical com
panies partnered with the veterinary profession, ensuring that only veterinar
ians could administer the vaccine. Creating proper standards of care for pet
animals included the annual visit to the veterinarian, where a physical exam
ination, deworming, and distemper and rabies vaccinations were increasingly
expected by owners. This preventive medicine approach was endorsed by
public health authorities (worried about rabies), veterinarians (who gained
economic benefit), and pet owners (who wanted to care properly for their
pets). In the 1960s, veterinarians responded to cat owners’ desire for state-of-
the-art treatment for felines also.

Conclusions 273
The development of small animal veterinary practice drove increasing

specialization in veterinary medicine. For example, vets could specialize in
feline medicine and surgery; and they founded professional associations and
journals devoted to cats. Not only species but also particular sciences
developed as veterinary specializations: cardiology, dermatology, and others
within internal medicine; veterinary pharmacology to support the rapidly
growing demand for pharmaceuticals; and radiology and anesthesiology to
support surgery. All these specialties (and others) established their own post
graduate education standards, examinations, and specialty status such as hold
ing a diploma from the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (just
one example). Many nations began developing their own set of specialties
within veterinary medicine and surgery during the 1960s, and these specialists
became the teachers and professors in the veterinary schools. As the rise of
companion animal medicine accelerated worldwide in the second half of the
twentieth century, veterinary training and the veterinary workforce trans
formed as the profession adapted to new social conditions and responded to
new challenges in animal health.
Conclusions
From this survey of the period 1900-1960, we can conclude that:
1. Until the 1920s, horses represented the most important clientele for
veterinarians in society and agriculture as well as for the military. Most
veterinary schools’ curriculum was built around the horse as a model
animal. With high densities of horses in urban areas, city veterinarians
often specialized in horses.
2. Numbers of horses in urban areas began to decrease dramatically in the
early 1900s as they were replaced by motorized vehicles, trains, and other
modes of transporting goods and people. Although horses and donkeys
were still common in many parts of the world, there were fewer animals
overall. The reduction of urban horse numbers economically threatened
the urban veterinary profession. Private veterinary schools focusing on
horses began to close during the 1920s.
3. Numbers of horses in rural areas decreased more slowly, because the new
machines were expensive. Small farms used horses for a longer time, and
even larger farms kept a horse for particular tasks. Oxen and water
buffaloes remained important for agriculture in Asia; mules, oxen, and
cattle were still important in most African societies. Urban veterinarians
searching for employment turned to treating livestock and worked in the
food production industry; working for the government; or supporting
global trade in animals and animal products.

4. Military use of horses, mules, and oxen continued to be important through

the end of World War I (1914-1918). National armies employed many
veterinarians to manage, care for, and heal army animals used for hauling
supplies, cavalry, and hauling artillery. Modern technological warfare
during World War I required more horses and mules than any preceding
war. Moving fodder, cattle, and other food animals around the world
caused disease epizootics. Rinderpest, glanders, shipping fever, and other
diseases spread rapidly. In all nations affected by the war, veterinary
education, training, and employment shifted to support the war.
5. Major developments in the biomedical sciences, especially in immun
ology and virology, increased the tools veterinarians could use to under
stand and control animal diseases. Brucellosis and bovine tuberculosis
were two diseases targeted for veterinary control by many nations.
6. World War I accelerated the development of biomedical technologies,
including biological and chemical weapons. After the German use of these
weapons during the war, many nations began working on weaponizing the
causative agents of glanders, anthrax, and other diseases for use against
animals and humans.
7. International cooperation among veterinarians, which had begun already
during the 1800s, intensified after World War I as organizations such as
the Office International des Epizooties (OIE) [World Organization for
Animal Health] were established. Still, economic conditions were very
difficult for veterinarians and most tried to work in small-scale food
animal or livestock practices.
8. World War II (1939-1945) still used a surprisingly large number of
horses, oxen, dogs, and other animals for military purposes, mainly as
draught and pack animals. Dogs carried messages, took supplies to isol
ated troops, and located explosives. In some armies, half of the nation’s
veterinarians served in the military forces during and after the war.
9. Veterinary involvement in war and the development of biological weapons
raise important questions about the moral, ethical, and professional conse
quences of these activities. To prepare veterinarians to meet these chal
lenges and make decisions, veterinary education must include how the
ethical, cultural, and political contexts shape veterinarians’ activities.
10. After World War II ended, veterinary schools and veterinary institutions in
many parts of the world were destroyed. Food supplies were low and
agricultural production was not functioning. International veterinary
cooperation not only helped to restore the global food supply but also
emphasized highly industrialized production that did not always fit the
needs of local people. Some animals (poultry, pigs) were forced to adapt
to crowded indoor conditions due to intensive “factory farming.”
Veterinarians helped to make this type of animal production possible by

Conclusions 275
advising farmers on animal breeding and husbandry and controlling

diseases.
11. New tools, such as antimicrobials and new vaccines, made it possible to
control and even try to eradicate animal diseases. Ironically, some of these
tools actually caused problems, such as the fact that animals vaccinated
against foot and mouth and other diseases then tested positive (as if they
were infectious). Therefore, traditional methods of testing and slaughter-
and-culling remained important in disease control programs. The eco
logical understanding of animal diseases was also crucial. A disease with
a wild animal reservoir could not be eradicated; but by vaccinating
domestic animals (such as dogs against rabies), human populations could
be protected against zoonoses.
12. During these years, more veterinarians treated companion (pet) animals,
especially in urban areas. Companion animal practice grew with the
development of consumer culture in the middle and upper classes. Pet
owners expected scientifically trained veterinarians to provide the same
services for pets that their owner could expect from physicians. This
included the use of the latest technologies, vaccines, and antimicrobials.
Question/Activity: What major scientific discoveries or developments occurred

in your country or region of the world? Can you connect these scientific
developments to epizootics or outbreaks of animal diseases? How were these
scientific ideas different from the beliefs of animal owners? When did veterinary
practice for companion animals or pets develop in your nation?

6 Food, Animals, and Veterinary Care in a
Changing World, 1960-2000
Introduction
Throughout the past sixty years, veterinarians have been quite successful in
maintaining and expanding their position and role. The profession has shaped,
and been influenced by, some major transformations due to economic, polit
ical, cultural, and technological developments. These have included new
regimes of food production and the changing global economy; decolonization
and the dissolution of nation-states; changing roles for women and feminiza
tion; and the digital technologies that have spread around the world. Animal
production, food inspection and controlling infectious livestock diseases, all
shaped by increasing international cooperation, remained important veterinary
concerns in the late 1900s and early 2000s. Reemerging diseases and new
(zoonotic) diseases such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or “mad
cow disease”) in the 1980s, caused by prions, and the coronavirus diseases
SARS and COVID-19 have represented new challenges. Moreover, veterinar
ians in some areas were confronted with increasing criticism from consumers
and the general public and a great deal of media attention after massive
outbreaks of swine fever, avian influenza, and foot and mouth disease
(FMD) around the millennium year 2000.
In this chapter, we analyze the late twentieth century by focusing on selected
themes about veterinary medicine: ongoing changes in food-animal production
and consumption; animal disease outbreaks; and women in the veterinary
profession. We begin with the ongoing development of intensive animal agri
culture, or “factory farming,” characterized by dense populations of confined
livestock and poultry. How did the veterinary profession respond to the needs of
these animals? And how has the profession responded to public criticism aimed
at the practices of factory farming and food production? We also recognize that,
in many areas of the world, veterinary practice is largely in the hands of animal
owners and local healers. We sketch how these local experts provided necessary
care, knowledge, and continuity, and how the continuing problems of small
scale animal production interfaced with the expectations of the global economy.
We also consider how veterinarians have had to respond to the environmental
276

Feeding Fast-Growing World Population with Food from Animals 277
problems created by food production: infectious diseases in animals and

humans, pollution, the impacts on wild populations of animals, and the produc
tion of greenhouse gases contributing to climate change.
Repeatedly occurring food scandals, including the illegal administration of
antibiotics and growth hormones, contributed to the poor image of factory
farming and the meat industry as well as of the veterinarians involved. The
latter were seen as having been active in increasing livestock production while
ignoring the negative effects of intensive farming, and residues of antibiotics in
food, animals, humans, and the environment resulted in problems with antibi
otics resistance in humans. In the twenty-first century, veterinary authorities
would be forced to reduce the amount of antibiotics used in livestock produc
tion and companion animals (pets) significantly. By that time, critics argued
that the limits of mass production in the livestock industry had been reached.
Both the livestock industries and veterinary profession were faced by chal
lenges of concerned consumers, animal rights activists, and environmental
lobbyists, especially in Europe.
The development of veterinary public health continued to play an important
role in the professionalization process of veterinary medicine. This discipline
also changed significantly during the past half century along with techno
logical innovations in the globalizing animal production chain, which became
longer and more invisible to consumers. In countries with large-scale factory
farming, traditional meat inspection was gradually replaced by new surveil
lance strategies with (electronic) identification and traceability systems, “from
farm to fork.” Farmers and veterinarians in developing countries with fast
growing populations remained focused on providing food of animal origin for
local markets, one reason being that international trade rules made it difficult
for them to export animals and food to consumer countries.
In 1960, the parts of the world most affected by World War II were
recovering in varying degrees. We begin with the ongoing problem of feeding
the human populations of the world, to which one solution was the develop
ment of intensive animal agriculture, or “factory farming,” characterized by
dense populations of confined livestock and poultry
Feeding the Fast-Growing World Population with Food from

Healthy Animals in the 1960s and Beyond
Between 1960 and 2020, the world’s human population more than doubled. In
some areas, this coincided with an increased standard of living. Those people
with higher incomes spent more money on luxuries, including more food of
animal origin in the diet. There is a strong relationship between per capita meat
consumption and average gross domestic product (GDP). The richer people
are, the more meat they consume. Although poverty has certainly continued to

278 Food, Animals, and Veterinary Care in a Changing World, 1960-2000
affect many people around the world, in many regions, food security has
increased due to cheaper and more widely available meat, milk, yoghurt,
cheese, eggs, and other animal products. The growing demand for substantially
more food of animal origin on the global market stimulated small-scale as well
as intensive livestock production. Of course, increasing livestock production
had traditionally been an important challenge for the veterinary profession.
However, meeting this huge demand required major technological and logis
tics changes in large-scale production systems for milk, dairy, eggs, meat, and
farmed fish as well as scientific innovations in controlling diseases that
continued to plague animal production.
This increased food production came with a price, however. Confining large
numbers of animals indoors makes them vulnerable to diseases and undesired
stress behaviors because of crowded conditions, while also causing large-scale
waste disposal problems and contributing to the production of greenhouse
gases (climate change). During the twentieth century, factory farming has
made animal products cheaper and more widely available around the world,
and veterinarians have contributed greatly to these developments. But this
major transformation in food-animal production has encountered criticism
from environmentalists and animal protectionists. They have argued that it is
unethical to see animals as industrial “production units” instead of living,
sensitive creatures. The call for returning to small-scale extensive (organic)
farming, which had continued elsewhere in the world, became louder. How did
veterinarians respond to these challenges and subsequent problems?
Spectacular Growth of Animal Production

During the past 60 years world population grew from 3.0 to 7.8 billion.
Feeding this vast number of people became a priority for governments world
wide. Thanks to scientific and technological innovations, sufficient food is
produced - in principle - to feed the whole world population. Unfortunately,
due to inequality, political conflict, wars, and poverty, still not all people are
able to benefit. Let’s have a look at the amazing growth of animal production
during the past six decades. Statistics from the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO) reveal that meat production on a global scale
has more than quadrupled in the period 1961-2018 (Fig. 6.1). Meat production
increased in all regions. In Europe and North America, the output more than
doubled. However, the biggest change took place in Asia, where meat produc
tion increased 15-fold. Asia is now the most important meat-production region
in the world. Asian nations supply 42% of the world’s meat, up from only
about 12% in 1960. This huge growth was due to several factors, most
importantly for our purposes the increasing use of factory farming methods
and state support of smaller-scale livestock production farms.

Global meat production, 1961-2018 Our World

in Data
Oceania
Africa
Central America
300 million t
South America
250 million t
North
America
200 million t
Europe
150 million t
100 million t
Asia
50 million t
0t
1961 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2018
Source: UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) OurWorldInData.org/meat-production • CC BY
Figure 6.1 Global meat production (in million tons) in the period 1961-2018.
Source: FAO.
The annual production of more than 300 million tons of meat requires the
slaughter of billions of individual animals every year. For instance, in each of
the past few years an estimated 50 billion chickens were slaughtered to feed
the world. This figure even excludes male chickens and unproductive hens
killed in the egg production sector. As for pigs, almost 1.5 billion were
slaughtered to meet the growing demand for pork and processed foods like
bacon, ham, and sausages. This figure has tripled in the past half century. The
number of slaughtered cattle and buffaloes also increased, although at a lower
level than chicken and pigs. Half a billion sheep are killed annually for mutton
production, while during the 1990s the number of goats slaughtered overtook
the number of consumed cattle. The contribution of meat from geese and
guinea fowl, camels, horses, ducks, and wild game was much lower; however,
still considerable (Fig. 6.2). As for seafood, it is virtually impossible to
estimate the number of individual fish and shellfish that were caught. In
2016, not less than 150 million tons of seafood were produced for human
consumption. About half of this amount came from fisheries, while the other
half was produced on land by aquaculture. Particularly in Scandinavia and
China, large salmon, trout, and shrimp farms have been developed that send
fish products around the world.

Wild game
Duck
Horse
300 million t Camel
Geese and
guinea fowl
I— Sheep and goat
I------ Beef and buffalo
250 million t
200 million t
------ Pigmeat
150 million t
100 million t
-------Poultry
50 million t
0t
1961 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2018
Figure 6.2 Global meat production by livestock type in the period

1961-2018.
Source: FAO.
The enormous growth in the production of food of animal origin was only
made possible by an extension of livestock worldwide. The distribution of the
different kinds of livestock over the various regions of the world in the year
1961 is listed in Table 6.1. Europe and the Americas then counted many
horses, bovines, swine, and poultry, while Africa had relatively more camels
and goats. Typically, Australia and New Zealand had high numbers of sheep.
The stock numbers for bovines, buffaloes, donkeys, mules, sheep, and goats
were highest in Asia. There, the number of pigs was relatively low, but Asia -
and particularly China - rapidly became the world’s leader in the number of
pigs, chickens, and sheep in the following decades. Today, Brazil and India
possess the highest number of cattle. New Zealand counts 8 sheep per inhabit
ant, Uruguay 3.7 cows per inhabitant, and Brunei 40 chickens for every
person. Between 1970 and 2000, particularly, pigs, ducks, and poultry in
confinement industrial production accelerated. This was based on ever
growing global livestock numbers (Table 6.2). The global average stock of
chickens living at any one time is about 20 billion, which means about
3 animals per person on the earth. This huge number is followed by 1.5 billion
cows, and sheep and pigs both around 1 billion. The total number of produc
tion animals living at any one time outnumbers the number of humans 3 to 1.
According to a recent census of the world’s animals, 96% of mammals living
on the earth are either humans or domesticated animals (only 4% are wild); and
70% of all birds living on the earth are domesticated poultry. Although humans

Table 6.1. Number of livestock (in millions) in Europe, Africa, Americas, Asia,
and Australia & New Zealand in 1961. Based on Reinhard Froehner,
Kulturgeschichte der Tierheilkunde. Ein Handbuch fur Tierarzte und
Studierende. Vol 3, Geschichte des Veterinarwesens im Ausland (Konstanz:
Terra Verlag, 1968) pp. 423, 459-460, 532, 643, 656.
Europe Africa Americas Asia Australia & New Zealand Total
Horses 23 2.4 24 14 0.7 64.1

Donkeys + mules 5 11 15 19 50
Bovines 187 116 296 329 23 951
Buffaloes 0.5 1.8 93 95.3
Camels 0.3 7 3 10.3
Swine 156 0.3 139 22 2 319.3
Sheep 261 123 162 213 202 961
Goat 24 76 40 173 313
Poultry 1 348 193 860 886 21 3 308
Table 6.2. Global livestock populations in 1961, 1970, 2000, and 2010.
(Sources: Froehner 1968; FAOSTAT, February 23, 2012.)
1961 1970 2000 2010
(million)
Bovines 951 1 081 1 315 1 428
Buffaloes 95 107 164 194
Camels 10 16 22 24
Sheep 961 1 063 1 059 1 078
Goats 313 377 747 921
Pigs 319 547 899 965
Turkeys 178 449 448
Ducks 256 948 1 187
(billion)
Chickens 3.3 5.2 14.5 19.4
Total 6 8.8 20.1 25.7
Sources: Reinhard Froehner, Kulturgeschichte der Tierheilkunde. Ein Handbuch fur Tierarzte und
Studierende. Vol 3, Geschichte des Veterinarwesens im Ausland (Konstanz: Terra Verlag, 1968)
pp. 423, 459-460, 532, 643, 656. https://aboutzoos.info/images/stories/images/
Livestockpopulationsize_trend_Table.jpg; UN Food and Agricultural Organization, production
data. www.faostat.org

are only 0.1% of life on earth, we are causing the biggest changes in the
composition of the earth’s animals due to our vast production of livestock.
This fact has generated numerous problems and challenges, some of which we
will return to at the end of this chapter.
Veterinary Contributions to the Increased Food Production

The staggering increase in food production described above could not have
been possible without the contribution of agricultural and veterinary sciences.
In 1961 there were more than 161,000 veterinarians active worldwide; in
2018 there were more than half a million. Since it was a traditional area of
their professional activities, veterinarians worked hard to facilitate the enor
mous growth of food production described above. Much emphasis was put on
developing intensive livestock production systems. Governments supported
research on animal husbandry, genetics, meat, and dairy quality and optimiz
ing feed conversion. Research institutes were established in which multidisci
plinary research programs were carried out to improve production and quality.
As a result, new types of large stables were built with more attention to
hygiene, ventilation, and climate control. Further mechanization and automa
tion of feeding, milking, and drainage of manure enabled higher production
with fewer personnel. A new generation of drugs was developed, particularly
antibiotics and vaccines, to control the diseases that spread in high-density
animal populations. New reproduction practices such as artificial insemination
and caesarean sections became widespread. All these factors contributed to a
higher level of herd health.
Intensive livestock raising began with smaller animals, such as mink and
poultry; but the principles of running a successful “factory farm” were soon
being applied to pigs and even large animals such as dairy cattle. The key to
profit on these farms was treating animals almost as machines to produce eggs,
furs, meat, and milk. Overall, individual animals were far less important, but
the conditions of housing, nutrition, and sanitation were crucial. In poultry
houses, infections such as pullorum disease (an intestinal infection spread from
hens to chicks through the egg) could wipe out an entire flock of young birds at
one time. Close confinement spread coccidiosis and other infections, which
also could kill most or all the birds rapidly. Disease was the major problem
faced by intensive animal farms.
Factory farming was not possible for many species of domestic animals until
new pharmaceuticals became cheap and widely available after World War II.
Veterinary pharmaceutical companies produced sulfathiazole, sulfaguanidine,
and other effective antimicrobials. After research demonstrated that feeding
low levels of these antimicrobials prevented outbreaks of coccidiosis, they
were sold as feed additives for poultry confinement houses. By the 1950s,

these chemicals made large-scale poultry production possible both by prevent

ing disease and the (related) antibiotic growth effect. Young animals fed low
levels of antibiotics gained weight faster, matured faster, and produced more
eggs. Along with vitamins, hormones, and others, these feed additives
increased the efficiency of the “animal machine” and made more money for
the farmer/producer.
Veterinarians, who had previously ignored chickens because individual
animals were not worth the price of medical care, realized they could provide
preventive care for whole flocks. Vets were unhappy that farmers could
purchase the sulfa feed additives directly (not through the veterinarian).
However, there were other services that only vets could provide.
Veterinarians still controlled most vaccinations - and vaccines were the other
essential disease-prevention tools for large poultry houses. Newcastle disease
and other viral infections plagued poultry operations, and veterinary research
ers worked hard to find effective and cheap vaccines that could be used for
large flocks. Veterinarians also provided the diagnostic laboratory tests needed
to identify the cause of infections. The other role for veterinarians was to
inspect flocks of poultry and poultry products (eggs and meat). As poultry
production dramatically increased, so did the need for veterinary inspectors.
By the 1950s, new technologies and pharmaceuticals were also allowing big
changes in dairy production. Milking machines and modern milking houses
led to bigger herds and, eventually, to partial confinement of dairy animals.
Improved nutrition, antimicrobials, hormones, and vitamins in the feed all
contributed to faster growth and much higher milk production. By the 1960s,
many larger cities around the world regulated the quality of milk and the
conditions under which it was produced. Veterinarians were needed to create
disease prevention and control plans, to provide reproductive consultation and
services, and to inspect animals, milk, and meat. Cows in large herds were
susceptible to mastitis, uterine infections, displaced abomasum, and diseases
such as brucellosis, tuberculosis, and leptospirosis. Veterinarians vaccinated
animals against these diseases, performed surgeries, carried out pregnancy
checks, evaluated semen for artificial insemination, and treated mastitis. The
largest farms scheduled their veterinarian for regular monthly visits to carry
out most of these procedures on a schedule and provide information for
detailed records on the herd and individual animals.
Production in both cattle and pigs was further increased by feeding hor
mones as growth promoters. Antibiotics were also added to animal feed as
disease preventatives and growth promoters for meat- and dairy-producing
animals. Between 1962 and 2002, selective breeding and genetic modification
techniques were used to make pigs more economically productive: the propor
tion of muscle for the most popular cuts of meat was dramatically increased
(Fig. 6.3), and breeders selected sows who gave birth to the largest numbers of

Figure 6.3 Drawing showing the changes in the body proportions of pigs over
time due to selection, crossbreeding, and genetic modification.
Source: Modified from Hjalmar Clausen, “Svineracer og svineproduktion i et
udvidet europaeisk faellesmarked,” Nyhedstjeneste BP Olie-Kompagniet
A/S 23 (1972) 71: 1-19. Image p. 6.
piglets. By 2002, the average sow produced 50% more piglets, which on
average ate 33% less feed, produced 50% less manure, and produced 33%
more pork than did the pig of the 1960s. Genetic, hormonal, feeding, and other
modifications materially changed the bodies and production capacity of
pigs, an example of human-managed evolution. These techniques were so
successful in poultry and swine that they were quickly applied to other
livestock species as well. The modern system of large-scale livestock produc
tion has been built on these modifications to animals’ bodies, physiology, and
environments.

Veterinarians as Herd Health Experts 285
Veterinarians as Herd Health Experts

To expand their role for large-scale livestock production, veterinarians had
created a new type of practice: “herd health.” They educated themselves about
the most important management problems for chickens, pigs, and dairy cattle.
They learned to read and use new types of records and to make clinical
judgments based on what was best for the whole herd and not just an individ
ual animal. They made themselves the experts on a wide range of subclinical
diseases that could reduce animals’ productivity and owners’ profits. They
learned about the latest vaccines and procedures in newly established profes
sional journals and professional education workshops. Eventually, veterinary
schools began including instruction on caring for large-scale herds and animals
in confinement, and this type of work had become a new specialization for
some veterinarians. However, some worried that this type of work made vets
into specialist technicians rather than independent analytical experts. Anyone
could be trained to do ordinary technical work such as injections, putting vets
out of a job. The producer’s desire for profit also conflicted with the veterinar
ian’s responsibilities for animal welfare and food safety - a conflict that
veterinary journals rarely discussed until the 1980s or even later. The veterin
ary profession continues to debate aspects of the veterinarian’s role in herd
health today, but high-intensity livestock production dominates the global
markets and veterinarians provide crucial services to maintain it.
However, in most parts of the world, livestock were (and still are) raised in
small numbers and with hand labor. While large-scale farms increasingly
supplied global markets, small-scale livestock production remained very
important locally and regionally. Small-scale dairy farming practices are not
the same everywhere, obviously. But usually, these farmers kept ten or fewer
animals (usually goats or cattle), which they milked by hand and cared for
themselves. Beginning with local breeds that could survive local diseases,
farmers took advantage of dairy development programs to crossbreed with
imported animals to increase milk yields. The major health problems for these
farmers continued to be parasitism, vector-borne diseases (such as East Coast
fever in eastern African regions), and bacterial infections, with high juvenile
mortality. Veterinary care, often provided by government veterinarians, began
with vaccination programs against the local diseases that most threatened
people (such as brucellosis) and the animal economy (such as rinderpest).
Vets also provided advice and education, anthelmintics and antimicrobials, and
the coordinated response to epizootics. Sometimes they performed surgeries or
treated individual animals. Finally, vets provided the inspections and certifica
tions necessary for small-scale owners to sell their animals’ milk, meat, and
other products to the markets. These veterinarians, especially the government-
employed ones, addressed herd health for smaller herds.

The herd health approach was designed to increase the supply of foods of
animal origin, for both local areas and the global market. With international
efforts after World War II and large-scale development projects in decolon
izing nations in the 1950s and 1960s, the veterinary profession concentrated on
solving local problems to help the global food supply. Veterinarians were also
involved in developing national and international legislation aimed at increas
ing production, quality, and safety of livestock. They drew up inspection
procedures, quality standards, and safeguard clauses to facilitate national and
international trade in live animals and food of animal origin. The European
Economic Community (EEC) consulted veterinarians for its directives on the
trade of live animals (pigs and cattle), for example. International trade within
the EEC was strongly stimulated by the regulated trade of fresh meat and the
higher quality of food products. Similar standardization and regulations were
also established within the Office International des Epizooties (OIE), Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the Veterinary
Public Health Division of the World Health Organization (established in
1949). These measures facilitated trade in animals and their products on a
global scale, and they standardized expectations for production.
Becoming herd health and preventive medicine managers meant also
changing veterinary education. Animal husbandry with the subdisciplines of
breeding, genetics, statistics, animal handling, and farm management obtained
a more prominent position in the veterinary curricula over time. New fields
such as food science, technology, and legislation were incorporated to provide
the students with adequate knowledge of the food chain, quality control, and
(inter)national trade. Veterinary schools and associations were in the process
of specialization at this time. Those students and practitioners who were
especially interested in livestock practice and herd health formed groups such
as the World Association for Buiatrics (cattle practice), which in 1960 joined
together the existing Danish, Austrian, German, and Norwegian associations.
By the 1970s, cattle-practice specialty associations had formed in Australia,
North America, Britain, France, Uruguay, the Netherlands, Italy, Argentina,
and Mexico. The Federation of Asian Veterinary Associations (FAVA),
founded in 1978, also had a specialty group for bovine and herd health
veterinarians.
Another route to specialization was to attain a species-specific certification
in clinical practice, reflecting advanced training and successfully passing
examinations. These specialists had expertise in dairy animals, beef cattle,
and other types of clinical practice beyond the knowledge of most practicing
veterinarians. They were certified by the national government and national
societies (such as the American Board of Veterinary Practitioners, under the
American Veterinary Medical Association). Modeled after the specialty
Colleges in academic subjects (pathology, microbiology, etc.), expert

Diseases Are Social Events 287
clinicians (including herd health veterinarians) could now attain a higher

status. Since the late 1970s, clinical specialty certification (of various types)
has grown to include more nations and regions and more categories (such as
swine health management and exotic companion animals).
Veterinarians working with cattle, poultry, swine, and other farm animals
became even busier during the 1970s and 1980s, with the resurgence of
epizootics. Foot and mouth disease, swine fever, Newcastle disease, and
encephalitis, as well as many other diseases, appeared more frequently to
challenge governments, livestock owners, and veterinarians. These outbreaks
could almost always be traced to the increasing global trade and travel in
animals and animal products. In the next section, we will describe how these
events led to new programs of veterinary preventive medicine and veterinary
public health.
Diseases Are Social Events: Global Disease Challenges and the

Veterinary Response
The huge increase in global animal economies, including higher concentra
tions of livestock populations and international traffic in live animals, animal
feed, and food of animal origin, led to outbreaks of familiar and new animal
diseases and zoonotic infections among humans. These diseases spread and
circulated quickly due to modern international transport technology and large-
scale systems, as well as changes in the food chain. Veterinarians worldwide
responded to these challenges with further developments in preventive veter
inary medicine. In the 1970s-1990s, preventive veterinary medicine sought to
serve high-density livestock production and veterinary public health by con
trolling diseases. However, the veterinary profession also needed to respond to
social attitudes and cultural beliefs on the part of consumers of meat, milk, and
other animal products, as well as people concerned with ethics and animal
welfare. These groups placed limitations on the power of the livestock industry
to control food production. Veterinarians sometimes felt that they were caught
in the middle of debates about livestock production and, especially, how to
respond to disease problems.
Strategies for Controlling Animal Diseases in the Global Economy

Annual statistics on livestock production, as well as on the health status of
livestock, and outbreaks of animal diseases can be found in archives of
ministries of agriculture and national veterinary services in most countries
around the world. This also goes for international (veterinary) organizations,
notably the OIE. Since the 1920s, the OIE has provided information about the
state of the art of preventing and controlling animal diseases and zoonotic

diseases. Guidelines drawn up by international veterinary experts are used as

standards by national veterinary authorities. Well known are the former OIE
A- and B-lists with classifications of animal diseases. A-list diseases had three
characteristics: (1) the potential for very serious and rapid spread across
national borders, (2) serious social or public health consequences, and (3)
major economic importance in the international trade of animals and animal
products. These diseases required an international control strategy. B-list
diseases had socioeconomic and/or public health importance within countries,
regions, or even only on the one-farm level.
In 2005, OIE established a single list of notifiable terrestrial and aquatic
animal diseases that replaced the former lists A and B. In cooperation with the
World Trade Organization, OIE created and manages the World Animal
Health Information System (WAHIS). In 2020, it provided actual information
on 117 animal diseases, infections, and infestations such as rabies, BSE,
anthrax, Q-fever, FMD, classical swine fever (CSF) and African swine fever,
Newcastle disease, glanders, bovine babesiosis, equine influenza, salmonel
losis, and many others. The OIE and its partners coordinated the international
campaign against rinderpest, the first animal disease eradicated from the globe
in 2011 (discussed later in this chapter). The rinderpest eradication campaign
has served as a model for campaigns currently undertaken by the OIE against
other important animal diseases, such as CSF and FMD. The combination of
test and slaughter of infected animals and vaccination (if a good vaccine exists)
are central strategies of anti-disease campaigns. Additionally, highly conta
gious diseases such as CSF and FMD also require preventive culling: “ring
culling” of all animals on infected farms, quarantine of the area, and prohib
itions against moving animals. Because humans can spread the disease on
shoes, boots, clothing, and vehicles, both animal and human movements are
often restricted in the quarantined areas. Although necessary to control the
disease, these strategies are economically and psychologically devastating to
farmers and livestock producers.
Despite experience with eradication and vaccination strategies in the 1940s
and 1950s, CSF and FMD outbreaks continued to occur in Europe in the
second half of the twentieth century. Outbreaks of bovine tuberculosis and
brucellosis remained limited. In case of outbreaks of CSF (classical swine
fever), infected farms were isolated, while pig markets, moving animals, and
imports were prohibited. An eradication cull-and-slaughter policy with (some)
compensation to the farmers was carried out. In some heavily infected areas,
healthy pigs were immunized by a live, attenuated vaccine (developed in
rabbits) combined with injection of immune serum. CSF remained a problem
in Central and South America, Europe, and Asia and parts of Africa. North
America, Australia, and New Zealand remained free of the disease. Large
outbreaks of CSF occurred in Germany (1993-2000), Belgium (1990, 1993,

1994), Italy (1995, 1996, 1997), and the Netherlands (1997-1998). The
outbreak of a severe epidemic of CSF in February 1997 in the Netherlands
and the mandatory cull-and-slaughter policy led to the destruction of 11 million
pigs using ring-culling (infected farms and preventive killing) at a cost of US
$2.3 billion to the livestock sector. Due to quarantine lockdown measures in
infected areas, even more money was lost in the economic sectors of tourism,
the hospitality industry, and recreation. Many farmers and local businesses
never recovered. This tragic event represented the biggest CSF outbreak ever
in the European Union (EU) as a whole.
As with CSF, outbreaks of FMD continued to occur in the second half of the
twentieth century. Depending on the scale and region, eradication and/or
vaccination strategies were followed. More effective vaccines against the
different strains of FMD were developed and applied in various countries.
Annual vaccination schemes against FMD were conducted by government
veterinarians or private practitioners, often assisted by veterinary students.
However, only domesticated bovines were vaccinated, since regular vaccin
ations of huge amounts of wild animals or slaughter pigs with a short life cycle
was practically impossible and too expensive. FMD remained a continuous
problem in parts of eastern and southern Africa, especially due to imported
animals (although wild animal populations were often blamed as the source of
“endemic” FMD). In Europe, between November 1961 and August 1962 more
than 320,000 pigs were killed to stop FMD in the Netherlands. In 1967 another
FMD epidemic caused huge economic losses in Western Europe. Fortunately,
the annual vaccination approach was quite successful in many countries, with
very few bovine cases. Despite this success, the European countries changed
strategies in 1991: they decided to stop vaccinating cattle against FMD.
Instead, the eradication/ring-culling and quarantine strategies alone would be
used against FMD. This decision illustrates the high stakes of animal disease
control policies. Why was a vaccination strategy that seemed successful
abandoned in Europe in 1991?
The Mathematics of Devastation: Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD)

To answer this question, it is important to remember the situation in the late
1900s. International relationships depended in part on positive trade relation
ships, including the trade of animals and animal products. A disease outbreak
could threaten good diplomatic relationships as well as cause economic dev
astation. CSF was a good example: major importing countries like Japan and
the United States had no CSF, and these countries tested samples of European
pork for CSF. A positive result condemned the whole shipment and sometimes
led to a complete ban on animal products from European countries with
endemic CSF or other diseases. Bans on “infected imported meat” caused

economic hardship and anger in the country of origin. Another example was
the international incident between Argentina and the UK in the late 1960s,
when British importation of some infected Argentinian meat almost led to a
diplomatic crisis. Veterinary historian Abigail Woods has called these FMD-
related international crises “manufactured plagues” (see Further Reading)
because an agricultural problem that could have been contained was magnified
into an international incident. Veterinary concerns quickly got overruled by the
economic and diplomatic implications. International political changes, such as
the formation of the EU, meant new rules for the global market in animal
products. Scientific considerations were also important, especially the qualities
of the tests and the vaccines. For example, animals that had been vaccinated
against FMD become seropositive, the same as infected animals; testing could
not tell the difference between them. In addition, the existing modified live
vaccines against FMD could cause outbreaks if the vaccines were not
carefully produced.
Given these problems, agricultural and veterinary economists were
employed by the EU to determine whether it was more cost-effective (for the
government) to vaccinate all animals or to stop vaccinating and rely on early
warning and quick cull and slaughter in the case of new outbreaks. These
economists developed mathematical models that simulated outbreaks. Based
on the results of their models, they recommended that it was cheaper for
governments to stop vaccinating against FMD. This decision left all
European animals susceptible to FMD. If an outbreak began, a rapid and
overwhelming response would stop it. Of course, this would necessarily
destroy a lot of animals and cause economic (and social) damage to farmers
and livestock producers. Despite the availability of effective vaccines against
CSF and FMD, the EU non-vaccination policy was issued in 1991. This policy
dictated EU member states to apply a cull-and-slaughter policy in case of
outbreaks, and it also influenced other countries exporting animals and meat to
the EU. Any imported animals or products that were seropositive for FMD
were rejected. Since vaccinated animals were seropositive, countries that used
vaccination could not export animal products to the European market.
The non-vaccination policy led to tensions and concerns within the veterin
ary profession, particularly between practitioners who worked with farmers
and the official (government) veterinarians responsible for the cull-and-slaugh-
ter policy. Veterinarians complained that they had to kill thousands of animals,
even after new vaccines were available to solve the problem. With these so-
called DIVA [Differentiating Infected from Vaccinated Animals] or “marker”
vaccines, it was possible to differentiate between field-virus infected and
vaccinated animals. This scientific development could have solved the prob
lem. However, national and international trade rules overruled veterinary
science. The number of outbreaks increased within Europe, culminating in a

major catastrophe in 2001, when an epizootic began in Britain. Ironically, this

devastating FMD epizootic started in Britain by feeding swill containing
infected meat to pigs, exposing the importance of regulating not just animals
but also imported animal feeds. Next to Ireland and Denmark, Britain was one
of the EU nations most in favor of non-vaccination legislation. Britain would
pay a huge price for this legislation.
From February 2001, FMD quickly spread to farms all over Britain, where
2,000 cases were reported in the initial wave of the outbreak. The British
government, despite farmers’ lawsuits, still viewed the cull-and-slaughter
strategy as the right response. As Abigail Woods has shown, this strategy
reflected the EU’s policy, and it was also viewed by the British government as
a morally upright policy that would force farmers to act for the overall
common benefit to the market, but at their own expense. Angry farmers and
upset rural people watched as the government condemned and slaughtered
their herds. The epizootic was stopped only after the killing of more than
6 million cows and sheep. Economic losses for agriculture and the food chain
were estimated at about £3.1 billion. By transportation of infected animals
from the UK, the disease spread to Ireland and from there to farms in France
and the Netherlands. Besides Britain, the Netherlands became the worst
affected country with more than 265,000 animals killed by the strict preventive
cull-and-slaughter policy applied. The economic damage amounted to some
2.8 billion Dutch guilders. As terrible as the FMD outbreak had been, this
disease was not new; and it did not cause dangerous infections in humans. The
world would not be so lucky with the next major disease outbreak, which again
occurred in Britain and again reflected the importance of animal feeds
and fodder.
Making the Cows Go Mad: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy

(BSE) and the Prion Diseases
The history of BSE is an excellent example of how the veterinary perspective
has enabled primary scientific discoveries in biomedicine. BSE was also a
major social and political problem in Europe, specifically Britain, in the 1980s
and 1990s. BSE is a fatal neurodegenerative disease of cattle, and it is
categorized as a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE). Animals
slowly develop progressive central nervous system signs, including aggres
sion, nervousness, pacing, rubbing, licking, ataxia, trembling or fits, anorexia,
coma, and death (thus the common name of “mad cow disease”). The first
infections of this disease in British ruminants probably occurred in the 1970s
or even earlier, but no unusual cases or deaths were reported at the time. Only
in 1986, when veterinary pathologist G. Wells at the Weybridge Central
Veterinary Laboratory in England noticed the unusual lesions in the brains

of animals that died with these symptoms did veterinary authorities become
alarmed. The brains of affected animals were full of holes, and they looked like
sponges, leading to the name of the disease (spongiform). Definitive diagnosis
was made at postmortem, and with Wells’ publication of two cases in 1986,
veterinarians and pathologists began to look for these brain lesions in animals
that died with central nervous system signs and symptoms. Pathologists and
bacteriologists also sought the cause of the disease, looking especially for
viruses that caused encephalitis. They were puzzled when they could not
definitely find a causative organism. Based on the brain lesions, pathologists
had a theory that this “new” disease was in fact closely related to some well-
known diseases in other species that looked similar, such as scrapie in sheep.
The unique veterinary perspective that these diseases were probably related
and caused by similar infectious agents proved crucial to the medical under
standing of the TSEs (and the discoveries that would lead to two Nobel Prizes).
In the 1980s, veterinary pathologists did not at first realize how important
their research would become; but relating “mad cow disease” to scrapie in
sheep was the first step in a major scientific discovery. Scrapie, or “trembles,”
in sheep had been categorized as a puzzling disease thought to be caused by an
unidentified “slow virus” - a transmissible virus or agent that developed in an
infected animal over long periods of time, eventually causing neurological
symptoms and death. Because scrapie often appeared in inbred herds, some
thought it was partly a heritable disease. Sheep herders, veterinarians, and
scientists had been aware of scrapie since at least the 1700s, and by the mid-
1800s they understood it as a disease that could be transmitted through the
placenta of infected ewes to their lambs. In 1898 at the Toulouse (France)
veterinary school, Charles Besnoit (1867-1929), M.Ch. Morel, and colleagues
described the characteristic holes or vacuoles in the brain tissues of animals
that died of scrapie. They noted that infected materials from lamb births could
also expose other animals to the disease.
By the 1930s, Toulouse veterinary researchers Jean M. Cuille (1872-1950)
and Paul-Louis Chelle (1902-1943) concluded that scrapie was caused by a
“nonconventional agent” that was not a virus. They successfully inoculated
healthy animals (intraocularly) with scrapie-infected brain tissue and patiently
waited almost two years for the disease to appear in the inoculated animals.
When the animals became sick with classic symptoms, Cuille and Chelle had
proved that scrapie was a transmissible disease. However, they still could not
identify a causative agent. Veterinarian D.R. Wilson at the Moredun Institute
in Edinburgh, Scotland, had demonstrated some puzzling attributes of scrapie:
it could not be prevented by trying to kill the mysterious infectious agent with
ionizing radiation or heat; and scrapie also seemed to have a genetic compon
ent, with the infectious agent infecting much higher percentages of some
breeds and families of sheep (W.S. Gordon’s research). Finally, veterinarian

I.H. Pattison discovered that goats were 100 percent susceptible to scrapie,
thus establishing its ability to jump between species.
The next important development that would eventually link scrapie to BSE
and other similar diseases occurred halfway around the world, with humans as
the affected population. In Australia, the physician and virologist Frank
MacFarland Burnet (1899-1985) had established an important center of
research devoted to infectious and zoonotic diseases and the immunological
response of hosts. One of Burnet’s colleagues, physician Carlton Gadjusek
(1923-2008), began investigating kuru, a central nervous system disease of
humans in Papua New Guinea. Able to demonstrate characteristic brain
lesions, Gadjusek and colleague V. Zigas could not isolate an infectious agent
but published reports about the disease in 1957. An American veterinary
pathologist, William J. Hadlow (1921-2015), quickly noted the similarities
to scrapie in sheep, publishing a paper that theorized kuru and scrapie to be
manifestations of the same disease process in different species. Hadlow’s
observation stimulated Gadjusek’s lab to try inoculating chimpanzees with
kuru-infected brain tissue and, crucially, to wait patiently for two years for the
disease to manifest in the experimental animals. This was the first transmission
of the disease between humans and non-human primates, and Gadjusek won
the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work.
Pathologists were also already linking kuru to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
(CJD), named for the two German neurologists who had characterized it in the
1920s. By the late 1960s, veterinarians had demonstrated that scrapie, a similar
disease in mink (Aleutian disease), kuru, and CJD belonged in the same
category of diseases: the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs).
CJD had also been reported in people receiving transplants of central nervous
system tissues and growth hormones from cadavers. The evidence was build
ing up: these diseases could freely pass between humans and between humans
and animals, not only chimpanzees but also laboratory mice and other species.
CJD was transmitted by injecting, implanting, or feeding infected materials,
and this is exactly what happened with BSE in cattle in the 1980s. Cattle feed
was commercially produced using poorly rendered offal from sheep and cattle
slaughtered for meat. The practice of recycling meat-and-bone meal, derived
from slaughterhouse waste and dead animals in rendering plants, goes back to
the early twentieth century. This was considered very profitable for a cleaner
environment and the production of cheap, protein-rich animal feed. By the
1970s, infected carcasses were certainly being used to produce cattle feed,
bone meal, gelatin, and tallow and in pharmaceuticals for both humans and
animals. By the mid-1980s (the incubation period of the transmissible spongi
form encephalopathies is very long), a major outbreak of BSE appeared in
cattle in Britain. Veterinary investigation revealed that the animals had been
infected by commercial feeds produced from infected animal carcasses,

probably after changing the rendering process to a lower temperature and

pressure around 1980.
The BSE outbreak heightened investigations into both the zoonotic aspects
of these diseases and the race to find the causative agent - and this discovery
would be the biggest breakthrough in disease biology in a century. American
neurologist and biochemist Stanley Prusiner (b. 1942) and colleagues had
shown that the cause of BSE was something entirely new: rather than a living
microorganism, the causative agent was misfolded proteins known as prions.
(Prusiner won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 for this
research.) Finding the process by which normal proteins became “infected”
and misfolded created a new branch of disease pathology. These prions were
not alive; and that explained why they survived ionizing radiation. They had to
be injected or eaten and had to pass through the blood-brain barrier. They took
a long time to convert proteins in the central nervous system tissue to the
pathological forms that, once they built up, caused the characteristic symp
toms. Finally, they could easily travel between species because they were not
living organisms that had to adapt to new hosts. This explained the close
connections between transmissible encephalopathies in multiple animals
and humans.
The development of the prion theory coincided with the British BSE
outbreak, which became a crisis for the British government at the end of the
1980s that lasted for twenty years. Concerned that humans could become
infected with a form of BSE, the British government removed the most
dangerous meat from the food supply in 1989 and outlawed the use of cooked
animal parts in cattle feed. Government officials then reassured the public that
the meat supply was safe. However, panic broke out in 1996 when some
people in Britain began to show signs of CJD, and their infections were traced
to earlier ingestion of contaminated animal products. They showed the classic
signs and symptoms of CJD, but some of these victims were young people.
This is very unusual for classical CJD, which is almost always diagnosed in
elderly people. This variant was thus named “new variant CJD” (vCJD) and it
was definitively linked to BSE in British cattle using molecular genomics in
the late 1990s. (We now know that the same agent caused both BSE in cattle
and vCJD in humans, and humans became infected through the food supply.)
In the 1990s, there was great fear that everyone who had eaten meat in Britain
could die of this new disease, which spread to other countries where infected
British bone meal had been added to animal feed. Trying to eradicate the
infection, the British government ordered that every animal older than
30 months in the national herd be immediately slaughtered. About 4.7 million
cattle were killed and their bodies burned on huge pyres during the weeks-long
culling. The photos of the pyres and upset farmers appeared in media around
the world. The EU banned exports of British beef from 1996 to 2006, and

nations around the world banned imported animal products from Britain.
Along with the FMD outbreaks, BSE destroyed the livelihoods of farmers
who had raised cattle for the beef market. Trade controversies, called the “beef
wars” in the popular media, fed British anger and bitterness against both the
UK government and the EU.
Around the world, importation restrictions against British beef have con
tinued until recently, due to the long incubation period of vCJD and fears that
more people could begin to show signs of the disease. In humans, as with other
animals, prion diseases are fatal. The signs in humans include personality
changes, memory loss, problems walking, and coma. In 2020, fewer than
250 people have been diagnosed with vCJD since its appearance in the
1990s and the vast majority have been British citizens. Since 2000, new
vCJD cases have been declining in Britain. However, new cases could still
be diagnosed for some time to come, due to the long incubation period.
Research has shown that the genetic makeup of the infected people determines
which types of prion proteins are developed, and some types take longer than
others. This explains why early scientists thought that CJD could be partially
inherited. Fortunately, vCJD is extremely rare and will probably remain so.
But the TSEs, nicknamed the “zombie diseases,” remain greatly feared by
the public.
To protect the human food supply, the European Union and other countries
adjusted feeding and rendering regulations and banned feeding meat and bone
meal to cattle. In U.S. and EU slaughterhouses, the brain, spinal cord, intes
tines, eyes, and tonsils from cattle were classified as “Specified Risk Materials”
that must be disposed of at high temperatures (incinerated or digested at high
pressure and temperature). These measures resulted in an interruption of the
transmission cycle and a strong reduction of BSE cases. Infectious prion
particles were never found in whole muscle tissues, such as beef roasts and
steaks. New, strict regulations on the production of mixed-tissue products,
such as sausages, have been developed in many nations. Importation of food
and products derived from cattle and sheep are highly regulated around the
world. These measures have slowed the spread of BSE and probably greatly
reduced cases of TSEs in animal species that are part of the global economy.
However, it was much more difficult to restore faith in the various govern
ment officials who were involved in the BSE crisis, and the veterinary profes
sion also experienced some criticism. BSE and vCJD redefined what was
“natural” by turning the public spotlight on large-scale animal production
and forcing it to change. BSE exposed the practice of feeding dead animal
products to cattle, which are naturally herbivores that do not eat meat.
Journalists and the media closely scrutinized the animal industries, and con
sumers were shocked and disgusted to learn the details of where and how their
meat was produced. The BSE crisis changed public opinion. Politicians and

the public alike were opposed to the idea of making herbivores eat the remains
of their sisters, which was unnatural and “cannibalism. The “cannibalism” idea
was encouraged by salacious media accounts about kuru, the disease Carlton
Gadjusek had studied in Papua New Guinea. Gadjusek had found that kuru
was spread by funerary practices of New Guineans, who respectfully ingested
parts of the deceased person (including the brain). Kuru disappeared after these
practices were outlawed. To British citizens in the 1990s, modern prejudices
fed the horror of equating vCJD with kuru in “uncivilized” people who
engaged in “cannibalism.” Critics charged that the government (and farmers
and veterinarians) should have known that such practices were wrong and
would spread diseases.
These criticisms also influenced the pet food industry. Pet owners were
shocked to learn that their beloved companions had been fed recycled parts of
various species of dead animals in canned pet food ever since rendering plants
became active during the 1900s. The fact that pets were fed with offal from
slaughterhouses and meat factories did not fit into the ideology of a highly
civilized society. This practice was also widely denounced as “unnatural.”
However, these pet owners were not aware of the history: for centuries, pigs
and dogs had been fed animal carcass remainders obtained from knackers’
yards and slaughterhouses. This fact did not eliminate the public’s criticism of
pet food production practices, however. During the 1990s and early 2000s,
concerns about the use of offal in pet foods contributed to the increasing
production of commercial “natural” and vegetarian foods for dogs and other
pets. These products allowed owners to feel that they were not supporting what
they considered to be pet food companies’ immoral, dangerous, and disease
spreading production practices.
The number of TSEs will undoubtedly continue to grow in the future, with
new variants being discovered in domesticated and wild animals, and even
humans. The spread of these diseases in the modern era has been driven by the
practices of the global commercial livestock economy, particularly including
materials from animal carcasses in animal feed and in a wide range of products
used and consumed by humans. These practices not only have increased profits
for companies selling these products, but have also increased the development
of, and our attention to, these diseases. Another example is the recent recogni
tion of “chronic wasting disease” in North America, in herds of wild and
captive elk and deer. This disease is also a TSE that is similar to scrapie. CWD
is a potential zoonosis since these animals are hunted and their meat is
consumed by humans. First described by Colorado State University veterinar
ians Beth S. Williams (1951-2004) and Stewart Young in 1978, chronic
wasting disease has been increasingly detected in parts of the midwestern
United States and Canada, where it is spreading. Cases of CWD have recently
been discovered in Swedish and Norwegian reindeer and caribou, and it is now

likely to spread across Eurasia in wild cervids. Scientists have probably

uncovered only a few of the diseases caused by transmissible prions in
susceptible wild animal populations.
Changing Societal Context: Challenges to Animal

Production Methods
In Europe, the crises around BSE, CSF, and FMD made clear that these
outbreaks were strongly influenced by a changing societal background. Until
the 1970s, outbreaks of epizootic diseases were mainly considered to be a
problem in the agricultural sector, and they drew little media or popular
attention. Most consumers were only interested in keeping meat and milk
prices low. They were not very concerned with controlling animal diseases
or ensuring animal welfare. However, the systematic killing of millions of
healthy animals during the BSE, CSF, and FMD outbreaks, with images of
burning piles of livestock, generated great opposition throughout society,
particularly in high-income countries. The modern media, which had become
less distant and more critical during the late 1900s, were responsible for
putting these diseases in the spotlight in newspapers and on radio, television,
and the Internet, thereby enhancing the negative image of factory farming held
by the wider public. Faced with popular protests, politicians were forced to
reevaluate their policy toward environmental sustainability in livestock pro
duction, disease control, and animal welfare. The public response also showed
the large gap that had developed during recent decades between the urban
consumers and the producers living in the countryside. Modern factory
farming had moved far from urban life, to be invisible behind the walls of
huge barns and slaughterhouses. This was also the working environment of
veterinarians who specialized in preventive medicine and food safety.
Therefore, public criticism also extended to them. Veterinarians were accused
of facilitating and making money out of animal production, without paying
enough attention to animal welfare and ethical production practices. Since
these outbreaks, and under negative public pressure, the veterinary profession
in Western countries has begun reappraising its role in factory farming.
The way in which farmers, the meat trade, the meat and dairy industries,
veterinarians, the media, and the wider public responded to outbreaks of
epizootics showed that long-standing legislation could still be changed.
Measures dealing with livestock health, which are firmly dictated by national
and international trade interests, eventually turned out to be negotiable when
critically discussed by the various actors in society. For instance, since 2003 a
European Union Directive on FMD has changed its position on eradication
methods based on large-scale culling (which was very controversial). The EU
now allows a combination of culling on infected farms and protective ring

vaccination of healthy animals surrounding the infected area (instead of killing

them). Many national governments have begun to regulate the livestock indus
try in terms of animal welfare and environmental pollution. For example, the
Dutch government has issued several recent regulations on milk quotas and
reducing numbers of animals (and manure and nitrogen output) per meadow
and stable area, resulting in a decrease of livestock numbers. While this does
not completely reverse the high-density methods of livestock production, it
certainly influences those methods and changes them to some degree.
Another example is legislation concerning antibiotics used in veterinary
practice. This legislation is a response to pressure from medical authorities
who blamed the widespread use of antibiotics in veterinary practice as a major
cause of resistance to antibiotics used in human medicine. The governments of
Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and (recently) the United States have
banned the addition of antibiotics to animal feed. Antibiotics are still com
monly used in animal feeds, with varying regulations, in the Americas, parts of
Asia, and many African countries. In most African countries, antibiotics can be
purchased without a veterinary prescription. The penicillins, tetracyclines,
aminoglycosides, and fluoroquinolones are the most widely used. A recent
study in Rwanda showed that over 90% of farmers use antibiotics routinely,
mainly as a feed additive to prevent diseases, in intensively raised poultry and
other animals. According to the OIE, antibiotic use is mostly unregulated in
African countries such as Rwanda. Livestock production is crucial for feeding
the population and, in most areas, is a significant part of each country’s gross
domestic product. These conditions are common around the world. By 2030,
antibiotic usage in animal production is estimated to increase worldwide by
50% to 67%, with countries such as China, Brazil, India, South Africa, and
Russia expected to be the major contributors to this trend. Antibiotic-resistant
infections in human populations are likely to increase, also.
In livestock production, the problems with antibiotic resistance can be traced
to several factors: the use of low levels of these drugs in animal feeds; the fact
that animals are often not given a full course of treatment (to save money); and
the lack of veterinary supervision that can lead to improper usage of antibiotics.
Usage of low levels in animal feeds, including medications that are sporadically
used to prevent coccidiosis in poultry, causes selection pressure in communities
of microorganisms. After the drug has killed off the susceptible microorganisms,
only the resistant ones are left to reproduce. These resistant strains take over,
becoming the majority microbial flora in animal populations and their environ
ments. Once this happens, the farmer must switch to a new antibiotic. If a sick
animal receives some, but not all, of the antibiotic it needs, again the microbes
will adapt and only those resistant to the antibiotic will multiply.
Finally, veterinarians have been trained to administer the correct antibiotic
for the infection (this is best done using a culture of the microbes and antibiotic

sensitivity testing). If farmers use antibiotics without veterinary supervision,

they are much more likely to administer the wrong medication for the infection
by relying on the cheapest or most familiar antibiotic. This, too, leads to the
development of antimicrobial resistance. Many of the original antibiotics
developed in the 1940s and 1950s are useless today due to widespread micro
bial resistance. Unfortunately, microbes develop resistance faster than scien
tists can develop new antibiotics. Human infections of antibiotic-resistant
microorganisms include extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR TB)
and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). These infections
have skyrocketed recently, especially in certain areas of the world and among
certain populations; and they can easily spread around the world. The problem
of antimicrobial resistance will only become more difficult in the future, and
social concerns about these infections are likely to drive further changes in
livestock production practices.
Antibiotics are not the only chemicals used in livestock production that have
become controversial. In the United States, bovine somatotropin (BST) was
introduced in the 1990s. Administering BST, a growth hormone, to dairy cows
resulted in a 10% to 25% higher milk production. Within 10 years, BST was
being used in about 33% of the dairy cows in the United States. Veterinarians
quickly realized that BST made cows sick, with an 80% increase in mastitis
infections and udder inflammation and decreased fertility and suppressed
immune systems. Moreover, if growth hormone metabolites were present in
the milk, they could cause hormonal and allergic effects in people consuming
the milk, especially infants and children. BST injection of dairy cows is not
allowed in the EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel, and
Argentina, and it is currently being challenged in the United States, where it
began. Similarly, the use of estrogens and other anabolic steroids was regu
lated after human health problems, including cancers, occurred in the 1980s
and 1990s. Significant numbers of consumers have refused to purchase milk or
products that they suspected had been produced using hormones, arguing that
it was cruel to cows and unethical, and that there was not enough information
to ensure the milk was safe for people to drink.
However, companies producing and distributing these synthetic hormones
made a lot of money, and they pushed hard to prevent regulation of their
products. Farmers also knew that these illegal substances would help them
make higher profits in the short term. In European countries, farmers quietly
purchased the outlawed hormones from criminal organizations (the “hormone
mafia”) that illegally imported the drugs from the United States. This generated
huge profits for the hormone mafia, until governments appointed veterinary
inspectors to investigate and stop the illegal sale and use of these chemicals.
This led to a tragedy: Belgian veterinarian and government inspector Karel van
Noppen, well known for his struggle against the illegal use of hormones in

livestock production, was shot and killed by criminal hitmen in front of his
house in 1995. This horrific event caused public outrage and protests. In
response, the Belgian government enacted Europe’s strictest legislation con
trolling the use of antibiotics and hormones in veterinary practice. Other
European nations soon adopted similar laws. By 2000, it became very clear
that global livestock production methods could not be determined by economic
factors alone. Societal attitudes, cultural beliefs, animal health and welfare, and
consumer and environmental protection all had to be considered as well
(Fig. 6.4).
Figure 6.4 Image symbolizing the widespread use of antibiotics in livestock

production. The Netherlands 2011.
Source: A. Sikkema, “Stoppen met spuiten,” Wageningen Resource 6 (2011)
September 3: 12-15.

Veterinary Responses to Disease and Public Health Challenges 301
Veterinary Responses to Disease and Public Health Challenges
Research and Control of Parasitic Diseases

With some notable exceptions, veterinary historians have focused on panzootic
diseases (such as rinderpest) and have neglected the persistent parasitic and
vector-borne diseases (especially those diseases endemic in the Global South).
However, these diseases cause tremendous morbidity and mortality and are
very persistent. For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in areas of the
Middle East and South Asia, several animal diseases caused by trypanosomes
cause huge losses in livestock productivity every year. Trypanosomes, proto
zoan blood parasites transmitted by biting flies, easily infect camels, horses,
cattle, and many species of wild hoofed animals. In the 1960s and 1970s,
African postcolonial nations such as Kenya and Somalia maintained veterinary
research and vaccine production laboratories that were among the world’s
most experienced centers of research on veterinary trypanosomiasis, methods
of fly control, and disease ecology. This applies to viral diseases, also. The
control of various types of vector-borne encephalitis emphasizes that these
diseases are constantly moving, often spreading to new geographic areas with
the importation of animals and insects. They appear to be “new” diseases, and
sometimes they are new if they manage to jump to a new host or become
endemic in a new area. Usually caused by arboviruses, diseases such as
eastern, western, and Venezuelan equine encephalitis and West Nile virus
have been increasing in incidence worldwide.
Parasitic diseases have threatened the domesticated animal economies of
most of the world’s nations. It is a mistake to think that parasitic diseases are
only problems of low-income societies in the Global South; they affect large
commercial livestock operations everywhere. Parasitic diseases have increased
due to human activities, especially increased buying, selling, and moving
animals as part of the global economy. Two excellent case studies in veterinary
history show how widespread these problems are and how the veterinary
profession has responded to them: the eradication (1960s-1990s) of screw
worm infection in the Americas, and the global campaign against
Echinococcus infection in dogs, sheep, and humans (1960s through today).
These case studies highlight several themes in the veterinary response to
diseases in these decades: the mobilization of new technologies; the import
ance of international relationships and economic partnerships; and the neces
sity of cooperation and education between veterinarians, farmers, and ranchers
who raise livestock.
Screwworms are parasitic flies that lay their eggs in wounds and under the
skin of warm-blooded animals: cattle, horses, pigs, sheep and goats, dogs, cats,
wildlife, and (rarely) humans. Once the eggs hatch, the larvae burrow into and

consume the flesh of the host, causing tissue damage, itching, and pain; up to
3,000 larvae have been discovered in a single wound pocket. The infected
animal suffers terribly: it stops eating, yields less milk, stops moving, and can
die in a week or two. Once the larvae mature, they drop off the animal and
pupate in the soil. Within 14 days, fresh flies hatch and seek more animal
hosts. Screwworms, an ancient problem, had traditionally been attacked by
livestock owners using both topical and environmental methods. Animals’
wounds were smeared with oil mixed with tobacco to ward off the flies and
suffocate any hatching larvae. Livestock owners also burned smoky fires to
protect their animals from the flies. However, it is very difficult, if not impos
sible, to remove all larvae from wounds of an infected animal, and insecticides
must be reapplied every few days. These strategies are not practical with large
numbers of animals. As cattle ranches became large “production units,”
especially during World War II, unprotected cattle were crowded together in
open feedlots, and screwworms caused great suffering, morbidity, and mortal
ity in the Americas.
In the 1930s, veterinarians and entomologists decided that prevention of
screwworm infection would only be possible with eradication of the insects.
Screwworms were injuring and killing so many animals in the southern United
States, especially along the border with Mexico, that the U.S. and Mexican
federal governments partnered with the FAO to sponsor an eradication pro
gram. In the 1950s, entomologists tested an innovative but untried technique:
irradiating screwworms to make them sterile, then releasing them into the wild.
The sterilized flies would mate with the wild population, but the eggs would
not be fertilized, and no fresh flies would hatch. In theory, the wild screwworm
population would die out. Borrowing the idea from genetics research, the
entomologists used U.S. Army war-surplus medical X-ray machines to irradi
ate flies. They determined the dose that would sterilize but not kill the insects,
preserving their ability to mate. They raised large populations of sterilized
male insects, then conducted tests on screwworm-infested islands: they
released the sterile males on Sanibel Island (Florida, USA) and, cooperating
with the Dutch government, on Curasao (Netherlands Antilles). By the end of
three weeks, the screwworm population was disappearing rapidly, and the
remaining individuals were sterile - thus eradicating the population of flies
on both islands. (However, without continuously releasing fresh sterile flies,
screwworms returned to Curasao, and eradication began again in the 1975.)
The sterile-insect approach was a major innovation in entomology and in
veterinary control of insect-borne diseases. Using this technique, screwworms
were eradicated from a vast territory in the southern United States by 1966.
Since 1991, Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and
Nicaragua have also eradicated screwworms, as have areas in northern
Africa. Anti-screwworm campaigns are active in Central and South America

today. The technique is considered friendly to the environment, since no

chemicals are used. The successful North American eradication campaign
depended not only on the new technology, but also on cooperative inter
national agreements between Mexico and the United States and between
adjoining Central American nations. The screwworm-free zones are main
tained today with buffers of sterile insects covering a vast territory, over
2,000 kilometers of the Mexican-U.S. border. Fresh sterile insects are pro
duced at a factory in Chiapas, Mexico, owned by a joint Mexican-U.S.
commission, from which they are transported and released in the buffer zone
every few weeks. Governments have declared that they continue to participate
in this international program for several reasons: saving more animals on the
plains and pampas encourages livestock producers to avoid cutting down
forests to create new pastures; the program helps to ensure enough food both
for the nation and for export; and it saves farmers and governments a lot of
money. There are difficulties: inaccessible mountainous or jungle areas can
still contain flies; different local cultures and languages make communication
difficult; and governments must agree to share the cost. But overall, local
farmers across vast regions have supported the effort to get rid of the flies.
International cooperation in the Americas has continued for more than fifty
years. Without this constant maintenance of the cooperative program, screw
worms would return with imported animals and insects, as they did on
Curasao.
Cooperation has also played an important role in another parasitic problem:
Echinococcus granulosus and E. multilocularis, which produce hydatid cysts
in mammals (including humans) and cause “hydatid disease.” Echinococcus is
a dog tapeworm whose life cycle must include an intermediate host, often
livestock. The immature stages of the parasite can infect many species as
intermediate hosts, including sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, horses, and wild ungu
lates and rodents. Humans and other mammals are accidental dead-end (“aber
rant”) hosts - the immature stages cannot become adults. Unable to leave the
host body, the immature worms eventually cause tissue damage and clinical
signs. Echinococcus is also known as the “bladder worm,” because the cysts
containing the immature worms are bladders filled with clear fluid. In aberrant
hosts, such as humans, the cysts can form anywhere in the body, including the
brain, becoming quite large over time, causing illness and eventually death.
Infected humans suffer grotesque swellings of the abdomen, eye area, or
anywhere else the cysts have grown. Hydatid disease is a particularly serious
problem in children. The complex life cycle of Echinococcus is perfectly
completed by the common practice of humans raising sheep, using dogs to
herd the animals, and feeding the dogs with viscera from dead or slaughtered
sheep. Echinococcus occurs worldwide, from the Arctic south to New Zealand,
wherever dogs and livestock are kept in proximity.

By the 1850s, veterinarians and parasitologists had worked out the basic life
cycle of Echinococcus. They advocated controlling hydatid disease by inter
rupting the life cycle of Echinococcus. In the 1860s, the Danish government
started the earliest veterinary-agricultural control program in Iceland, where
about 20 percent the human population was infected. This program focused on
dogs as the most important definitive host. It included mandatory dog licens
ing, killing infected and stray dogs, destruction of infected viscera in slaugh
terhouses, and annual treatments of all dogs with areca nuts or arecoline.
Arecoline caused intestinal contractions and defecation of the worms; how
ever, it sometimes did not work. A much more important tool was educating
Iceland’s citizens to stop feeding sheep viscera to dogs. Pamphlets developed
by Copenhagen veterinary professor Harald Krabbe (1831-1917), translated
into Icelandic, were freely distributed around the country between the 1860s
and 1890s. Farm families read them so often that children memorized passages
from these pamphlets. At school, children also received special lessons about
the parasite’s life cycle and how to interrupt it. As a result, generations of
Icelandic farmers voluntarily stopped feeding viscera to their dogs and cooper
ated with the government program. Iceland has successfully controlled E.
granulosis, with the last human case reported in 1960.
At this same time, the WHO’s Veterinary Public Health division, led by
veterinarian Martin Kaplan, entered a cooperative agreement with the Pan
American Health Organization (PAHO) and the FAO to start an
Echinococcus eradication program. In the early 1960s, six Echinococcus
research groups existed in New Zealand, Lebanon, Japan, Chile, and the
United States (in Alaska and Atlanta, Georgia). Most of these groups were
headed by veterinarians, including veterinary epidemiologist Calvin
W. Schwabe (1927-2006), working in Lebanon, and veterinary pathologist
Michael A. Gemmell (1926-2003) in Dunedin, New Zealand. Both worked to
develop preventive hydatid disease programs. International cooperation pro
vided money, enabled veterinarians to share research, regulated imports and
exports of infected animal products, and standardized the methods used to
control the disease. International cooperation also led to national government
regulations requiring the destruction of infected offal and viscera (not feeding
it to the dogs) and the careful inspection of all animal products for the cysts
(veterinary inspection).
As with Krabbe’s program in Iceland, Schwabe and Gemmell found that the
most successful anti-Echinococcus campaigns included education, local
farmers’ cooperation, surveillance, and treatment and traceback of any infected
dogs. In New Zealand, Gemmell incorporated mathematical modeling and
surveillance. This program also focused on education, aimed at women who
wanted to protect their children’s health. But most farmers only began to
cooperate when their profits were threatened, after exports of infected sheep

livers were outlawed. Farmers then formed their own local hydatid disease
control committees. These committees registered every dog, treated them and
examined the stool, and treated them again if needed. Arecoline was replaced
by praziquantel in the 1970s, and mobile treatment units tested neighborhood
animals together. When one dog tested positive, everyone knew about it. Dogs
with repeated infections, which revealed that their owner illegally fed them
viscera, could be seized from their owners. This “peer pressure” approach has
been quite successful in breaking the Echinococcus transmission cycle in the
New Zealand sheep industry.
Today, over 1 million people around the world are infected with, and suffer
from, hydatid disease. Echinococcus infections cost the livestock industry over
US $2 billion per year. The infection is currently enzootic in several parts of
the world, including central Asia, China, northern Africa, and parts of South
America - wherever livestock and dogs are closely associated. Control pro
grams in China, Kyrgyzstan, Argentina, and Chile have been successful in
reducing infections in enzootic and endemic areas. A vaccine, EG95, can now
be used to immunize livestock. However, like screwworm, control of
Echinococcus can only be maintained with ongoing surveillance, expense,
and control activities. Social, cultural, and political cooperation are the essen
tial components of successful control of these complex infections.
Veterinary Public Health Scenarios and the Veterinarian’s Role

History tells us that from the 1960s onward, veterinarians were faced with new
challenges in livestock production and controlling food quality. The profession
responded with the further development of veterinary public health. Key roles
were played by the American veterinarians James Steele (1913-2013), often
referred to as the father of veterinary public health, and who worked for the
PAHO; Calvin Schwabe, the hydatid disease researcher who also worked for
the WHO; and Swiss-born American Karl F. Meyer (1884-1974). Other
pioneers in this field were Italian veterinarian Adriano Mantovani
(1926-2012), who worked at FAO in Rome, and Austrian-born Dutch veter
inarian Dan Kampelmacher (1920-2011), who worked for the World
Association of Veterinary Food Hygienists. The role of veterinarians as gate
keepers of public health was commissioned by them. Veterinarians had to
comply with consumers’ needs with shifting priorities from food security to
food safety and finally to food acceptance.
Veterinary public health (VPH) is that part of public health activities using
veterinary skills, knowledge, and resources to protect and improve human
health. This term was introduced in the 1970s, when veterinary authorities
recognized the importance of the veterinary contribution to preventing human
diseases. As we have seen, this insight was not new, but from the 1960s

onward, fundamental transformations in livestock production, food technol

ogy, the supply chain, consumption of food of animal origin, human-animal
relations, and society have precipitated changes in the science, ideology, and
practice of VPH - especially with surveillance strategies and state intervention.
The globalizing livestock production provided many challenges for veterinar
ians, not only in rich countries with large-scale, capital-intensive factory
farming but also in areas where transhumance and peasant farming remained
dominant. Vets also had to adjust to shifting attitudes toward food of animal
origin in urban consumer societies. In the development of livestock produc
tion, consumption, and VPH, three different scenarios with different roles of
veterinarians can be distinguished.
In the first scenario, the food chain is short, and veterinarians play a limited
role. Today, this scenario is most common in rural areas around the world,
especially those of lower income. In higher-income areas, this scenario lasted
for centuries, until the twentieth century. Peasant and transhumant herding,
farming and home slaughter, and barter and local markets provide consumers
with food. However, farmers get little profit and there is often no margin for
problems in the system, which could be disrupted badly by crop failures and
livestock diseases. This system is also labor intensive, requiring many people
to focus on raising food. Animal healers and veterinarians provide care only
when a valuable animal is seriously injured or ill. Veterinarians employed by
the government or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) also provide mass
vaccination and disease control. In more urban areas, as dairies and slaughter
houses are established, veterinary inspection often becomes required by the
municipality. In this scenario, the main goal of veterinarians is to try to secure
a steady food supply.
In the second scenario, the food chain is longer and based on more intensive
farming to ensure a reliable supply of food for large urban populations. Once
an adequate food supply is available, the next goal is to be sure that food
originates from healthy animals (food safety). Veterinarians in this scenario
carry out several activities: treat sick animals; monitor animal health at the
farm level; inspect centralized slaughtering facilities; conduct traditional meat
inspection; and inspect milk and dairy products (see Chapter 4). As in the first
scenario, governments often employ veterinarians to maintain disease control
and response, including mass vaccination.
In the first scenario, farmers and veterinarians in developing countries with
fast-growing populations focus on increasing the production of healthy live
stock for the provision of food of animal origin for local markets. International
trade rules and quality requirements and guarantees often make it difficult to
export animals and food from low-income to high-income countries, but
veterinarians inspect both exports and imports. Within the interior,
government-sponsored veterinary services are often robust, especially in

providing large-scale vaccination campaigns and herd health. In more urban

areas, traditional food inspection under veterinary control is organized. The
second scenario is more common in high-income countries, where the food
chain has become longer, with food production largely hidden from con
sumers. In this scenario, veterinarians provide assurances to consumers that
the food chain provides healthy food. More and more urban consumers have
demanded that their food should be healthy and originate from healthy (and
happy) animals that were raised sustainably on appropriate feed, in a clean
environment, and with attention to the animals’ welfare. These demands have
represented a big challenge for veterinarians in modern society.
Notably, these different scenarios are not chronological or place independ
ent, and one scenario does not inevitably lead to the next. For instance, highly
developed and hygienic poultry production and slaughter under veterinary
surveillance take place in countries like Thailand and Brazil, next to unin
spected home slaughter and unhygienic local markets that lack refrigeration. In
the United States, home slaughter of both wild and domesticated animals is
legal and often carried out in rural areas, alongside the vast, veterinary-
inspected food production industries.
Modernizing Veterinary Food Control

While food inspection and safety are very different in different areas, the
European Union provides a good model of how veterinary participation in
livestock production and slaughtering may change in the future. Until the
1960s, the traditional methods of meat inspection proved to be quite success
ful. In general, veterinary authorities were satisfied with the way in which meat
inspection had developed since regulating acts had come into being around
1900. Inspection had become much more effective because of centralized and
more hygienic slaughtering under veterinary supervision. Since then, the
health status of animals had improved considerably, resulting in a much lower
number of condemned animals. The incidence of food poisonings had also
dropped significantly due to better hygiene, and preservation and cooling
technology. Indeed, by 1960 professionals in human and veterinary medicine
alike had the rather triumphalist idea that thanks to progress in diagnostics,
pharmacy, microbiology, and immunology (chemotherapy, vaccines, antibiot
ics), most infectious diseases could be kept under control. However, that
optimistic vision was challenged by recurrent outbreaks of salmonella, often
with human deaths. Research showed that salmonella was present not only in
livestock but also in (imported) animal feed, seagulls, pigeons, animal feces,
and water - in short, in the whole environment. This stimulated the study of
large food cycles, as well as ways to create effective intervention measures

(prevention, sterilization, decontamination, preservatives, etc.) to accomplish

food safety.
With slaughtering, ever larger production units became operative from the
1970s onward, while speed of slaughtering lines increased, leaving less time
for adequate inspection. As a result, much emphasis was laid on the introduc
tion of strict hygiene codes to increase the standard of hygiene in the meat
production and processing chain. However, despite these measures, infections
transmitted by foods of animal origin continued to occur. One of veterinary
inspectors’ main problems was the presence of microorganisms such as
Salmonella and Campylobacter, which do not necessarily produce clinical
illness or pathological lesions. For such diseases, a more flexible system of
control is required. The effectiveness of the traditional ante- and postmortem
meat inspection based on incision, palpation, and organoleptic and visual
inspection was questioned from the 1980s onward. Authorities and food
experts recognized that end-product testing had become an outdated and
inefficient form of food safety control.
Innovative frameworks were scaling up, based on risk assessment, more
uniformity in inspection methods, lower inspection costs, and a rational
employment of inspection personnel. After the example of the automobile
industry, it became clear that the demands for safe and high-quality food could
only be met via a longitudinally integrated quality control system, in which the
primary responsibility for safety and quality lay with the producer. Large-scale
factory farms have responded by gradually replacing traditional meat inspec
tion with new concepts of process control and certification, such as Good
Manufacturing Practices (GMP), Good Veterinary Practices (GVP), Hazard
Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP), and surveillance strategies with
(electronic) identification and traceability systems “from farm to fork.” The
producer was responsible for implementing risk assessment of HACCP and
Integrated Quality Control (IQC) in the whole production chain of food of
animal origin. The framework of risk analysis was incorporated in operating
procedures of the international standards organizations. Requirements have
been put in place for process control in the meat and dairy industry, based on
the principles of HACCP. The role of government veterinarians is to inspect
the producers’ system. Modern inspection requires transfer of data on the
health status of groups of animals from veterinary practitioners responsible
for their care to their colleagues in abattoirs and dairy and meat plants.
Related changes in slaughtering processes greatly affected the veterinary
profession, particularly in terms of requiring specialized training in GVP and
HACCP and in reducing the number of ordinary veterinary inspection jobs.
Due to increased competition, higher inspection charges, and national and
international regulations, slaughterhouses and abattoirs consolidated: smaller
ones were absorbed into larger ones. This trend increased with changes in EU

legislation, in which strict hygiene measures were set from 1991 onward.
Many small slaughterhouses and public abattoirs could not comply with the
new regulations, and they lost their “EU-Approved” status and their license to
export meat. Small enterprises were closed when they could no longer compete
with large-scale (international) corporate slaughterhouses. Larger units proved
more cost-efficient and were quicker to incorporate new technology. As a
result of replacement of public abattoirs by huge corporate slaughterhouses
in Europe, the veterinary profession has lost many positions as directors and
inspectors formerly available in smaller abattoirs.
The changing food habits of modern consumers also represented a challenge
for veterinarians. On the one hand a huge market for “fast food” developed
with globally operating companies. This food is generally safe; however, the
composition and certainly the quantity of popular meat and cheese snacks
consumed have resulted in an obesity epidemic and poor health among
consumers in high-income regions. On the other hand, some consumers turned
away from fast food and returned to so-called slow food. Next to regular
supermarkets, a separate market for “organic” or naturally prepared food
developed. Such food is also sold in open-air farmers’ markets (often without
supervision by inspection authorities) and may be labeled “biological” or
“organic.” Because consumers would pay higher prices for milk, meat, and
eggs produced organically, some farmers turned away from factory farming to
become small-scale, specialized producers of organic foods. These farmers
must comply with imposed regulations, including a ban on fertilizers for
animal feed production, restricted use of antibiotics, and more living space
for animals. Also, some of these farmers have turned away from evidence
based Western medicine and asked for alternative or irregular veterinary
treatment and medicines (homeopathy, orthomanual therapy, acupuncture,
magnetism, herbal medicine, etc.). Again, this represented a challenge for
veterinarians who had not been trained in these techniques. Also, veterinarians
feared that diseases that had been controlled for a long time (such as trichin
osis, bovine tuberculosis, and brucellosis) could reemerge in nonvaccinated
and uninspected flocks and herds, because conditions for old pathogen cycles
became favorable again.
In high-income countries, the public image of producers and veterinarians
involved in inspection of food of animal origin has remained somewhat
negative due to the adverse effects of factory farming on the environment,
controversies about the ethics of meat production, and the many fraud and food
poisoning scandals that have occurred. Debates about food safety culminating
in international trade conflicts continue to affect public opinion today. The
perceived conflict between the needs of humans, animals, and the environment
has become a cause of widespread concern. In these circumstances, govern
ment authorities have been forced to take public action. However, the general

public’s knowledge about food safety and health risks is often limited. This
topic doesn’t always get enough (objective) attention in education and infor
mation via the media. When consensus among scientists and objective infor
mation from scientific research is lacking, policy making proves to be difficult.
Consequently, public concern regarding food safety is fed by biased reporting
from the media, mainly highlighting sensational scandals. Public distrust
toward industrially prepared food and “chemophobia” concerning food addi
tives has increased, while agriculturists and many food scientists claim that our
food has never been as safe as it is today.
With increasing income, more people around the world will become con
sumers of animal products on a larger scale. Consumer cultures will develop in
their own ways, and the region’s veterinarians will need to adapt to changes in
economics, consumer preferences, livestock production practices, and food
safety regulations. As a society’s income rises, another major change for the
veterinary profession has been the increase of a relatively new patient popula
tion: companion animals, or pets, kept for sentimental rather than economic
reasons. Finally, social changes have led to changes in the veterinary profes
sional workforce itself, including the increasing gender diversity in the profes
sion. Traditionally a profession that was largely restricted to men, veterinary
medicine in many countries has only recently made educational and employ
ment opportunities available for women. This has been one of the many
changes in the veterinary workforce and veterinary practice.
How Veterinarians Work: New Paradigms in Veterinary Practice

The 1980s witnessed fundamental changes in veterinary practice. First, the
demand for veterinary services in the various fields of the profession increased
dramatically from the 1960s onward. Until then, most veterinary graduates
found employment as an individual practitioner. However, it became increas
ingly difficult for an individual to practice all aspects of the profession. From
the 1970s onward, the number of group practices, as well as the number of
veterinarians per group practice, grew. This was mainly the case with farm
animals of mixed practices; many companion animal practitioners continued to
work in solo practices. In the late 1980s and 1990s, large companies began
opening veterinary practices for pets, where they employed salaried
veterinarians.
The importance of pets for veterinary practitioners increased significantly;
toward the end of the twentieth century, most veterinarians found employment
in that growing segment of the profession. This shift in veterinary practice
strongly stimulated specialization within the profession. Within the larger
practice units, further division of labor and species or discipline specialization
was facilitated. In some countries, veterinary associations had a keen eye for

How Veterinarians Work 311
market regulation as well as for self-regulation within the profession. Special

postgraduate programs of education and research for several veterinary spe
cialists on a national and international level came into being. Veterinary
associations, as well as the World Veterinary Association and the European
Association of Establishments for Veterinary Education (EAEVE, established
in 1988) supported and aligned these programs and facilitated national and
international examination, accreditation, and registration. Furthermore, some
national associations also introduced a system of certification of veterinary
practices. A recent development is the buying up of veterinary practices by
large international investment companies - an extension of the corporate trend
that began in the late 1980s.
Another change in veterinary practice was the way in which the whole chain
of production, registration, distribution, administration, prescription, and appli
cation of veterinary drugs was adapted. For centuries, veterinarians had mixed
their own medications with which they filled their practice pharmacy. By the
last decades of the twentieth century, pharmaceutical companies supplied
veterinary practices with almost all their drugs. This shift allowed authorities
to better control the quantities of used veterinary drugs, as well as their
residues in food of animal origin and in the environment (especially
antibiotics).
As we have seen in previous chapters, next to educated veterinarians, all
sorts of other animal healers were active in the field. This continued in many
countries, but veterinary associations were keen on protecting veterinarians’
core activities and responsibilities. They did so by lobbying for legislation
(liability and disciplinary law) in which competencies and responsibilities
between educated vets were protected from “unqualified” animal healing by
farmers, animal owners, and auxiliary personnel such as castrators, obstetri
cians, animal physiotherapists, inseminators, technical veterinary assistants,
embryo transporters, and animal dentists. Education, accreditation, and regis
tration for these professionals were established and enforced. Competition also
came from people offering alternative and complementary treatments such as
homeopathy, acupuncture bio resonance, shiatsu, Reiki, and magnetizers, as
well as manual, holistic, cranial-sacral, and aromatic therapies. The demand
often came from customers who had turned themselves to such treatments. In
many countries, veterinary associations disqualified all these workers as
“quacks” and praised the standard of evidence-based veterinary medicine.
However, it also led to tensions within the profession when educated vets
began offering alternative and complementary therapies. This very broad
category encompassed traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic treatments; ethno-
veterinary medicine based on botanical knowledge of Indigenous people
around the world; competing Western medical systems such as homeopathy
and osteopathy; and everything else that was not taught in a traditional

Western veterinary curriculum. Veterinarians who were critics of these “alter

native” medical systems accused their colleagues of using them to please
clients and make money, not because they believed these treatments actually
worked. Certainly evidence-based Western medicine and science were the
foundation of veterinarians’ claim to professional autonomy; by bringing these
other therapies into veterinary practice, vets might be jeopardizing their own
professional position. Moreover, research done by veterinary skeptics had not
shown these techniques to be successful. Although these critiques continue,
and it is still not clear what role “alternative” therapies will play in veterinary
medicine, the fact that consumers are asking for these services means that
some vets will provide them.
Today, some veterinary schools offer courses in “Integrative Veterinary
Medicine,” (IVM), which combines conventional medicine with complemen
tary and alternative veterinary medicine (CAVM). A 2011 survey of veterinary
schools in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States
found that almost half offered a course in CAVM subjects such as nutritional
therapy, acupuncture, and rehabilitation or physical manipulation therapy.
Almost a quarter of schools surveyed were conducting research in CAVM,
stressing that only evidence-based therapies would be included in the curricu
lum. The integration of these therapies into conventional veterinary medicine
has not shown any signs of disappearing over the ten-year period 2010-2020.
As long as animal owners want to consider using these unconventional
therapies, CAVM will probably be included in veterinary curricula and con
tinuing education despite the controversy.
Of all these changes at the end of the 1900s, the biggest and most difficult
for many veterinarians was the feminization of the veterinary profession.
Although a few women had managed to become veterinarians, the profession
was traditionally a male bastion that opposed educating and admitting women
as qualified veterinarians.
Women in Veterinary Medicine: A Slow Start and a Fast

Acceleration
Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, some brave and determined women accepted
the challenge of becoming a formally educated veterinarian. Scholars around
the world have identified these pioneer women veterinarians and have written
their biographies. They describe how these women faced a misogynistic
environment at veterinary schools, followed after graduation by an unfriendly
male working environment as well as reluctant clients. Women sometimes
traveled far from home for veterinary education. Some historians have stated

Women in Veterinary Medicine 313
Figure 6.5 Record from the archive of the veterinary school of Alfort showing
that Marie Kapsevitch (Marija Kapcevic) from Russia (Ukraine) graduated on
July 23, 1897.
Courtesy: Prof. Christophe Degueurce, Director Ecole Nationale Veterinaire d’Alfort
and Curator Musee Fragonard, Paris.
that V. Dobrovoljskaja, a Ukranian woman, graduated from the Zurich

(Switzerland) Veterinary School in 1889. However, Swiss veterinary historian
Marianne Sackmann-Rink (1985) searched the Zurich school’s archives and
could not find any record of Dobrovoljskaja or other Ukranians in the 1880s.
Therefore, Marija Kapcevic, born in 1855 in Loknika, Russia (today’s
Ukraine), was probably the first European woman to obtain a veterinary
degree, in 1897 (Fig. 6.5). She was allowed to attend the French Alfort school
(1893-1897) only under a special license. Often reluctantly, veterinary schools
had to open their doors for women after changes in legislation. This was the
case in Germany (1913), Britain (1919), and the Netherlands (1925). But the
schools established special rules and quotas that still severely limited the
numbers of women allowed to study. In these ways, most European and
U.S. schools affiliated with universities excluded women, although legally
they were allowed to attend.
Women developed strategies to gain access to education: they used family
connections and money; worked to be the top students at school; traveled far
from home; or attended private schools, which were less strict as long as the
student could pay the fees. For example, six of the first seven U.S. female
veterinarians graduated from private veterinary schools. One of these private
schools ran a correspondence course taken by Pearl Howard Dawson, the first

woman in New Zealand to obtain a diploma (1920). Occasionally the profes

sors (all men) of a school would allow women students. Isabelle Bruce “Belle”
Reid (1883-1945) was allowed to attend the Victoria Veterinary Institute in
Melbourne, Australia. She excelled in her studies, one of only five members of
her class to pass the qualifying examinations in 1906. Finnish woman Agnes
Hildegard Sjoberg (1888-1964) was not allowed to study veterinary medicine
in Zurich (Switzerland) in 1911. Instead, she enrolled in Dresden (Germany)
and graduated from the Berlin veterinary school in 1915. She was the first
woman in the world to obtain a PhD in veterinary medicine, on July 27, 1918,
in Dresden. Sjoberg was born into a wealthy family and raised in a time of
growing Finnish self-consciousness, which resulted in Finland declaring its
independence from Russia in 1917. Until then, Finland was an autonomous
part of Russia with its own parliament; and it was the first country in Europe to
allow women the right to vote (1906). Back in Germany, the Dresden school
closed and moved to Leipzig in 1923, apparently a more progressive location,
and three more women gained their veterinary degrees there in the 1920s:
Germans Ruth Eber and Inkeri Bernhard and Finnish Airi Borustedt.
The early 1900s witnessed turmoil and many social changes associated with
World War I, and women used this to help them get their veterinary education
and qualifications. Another pioneer female veterinarian was Anglo-Irish Aleen
Cust (1868-1937), who obtained her degree in Edinburgh in 1897. (Due to her
family’s opposition, she enrolled under a different name.) However, the Royal
College of Veterinary Surgeons in London refused to allow her to take the
qualifying examination. It was not until 1922 that she was officially registered
as veterinarian, after Britain passed a law making it illegal to exclude women
from working in the professions. British women demanded this law (and the
right to vote), pointing to their service for their country during World War
I. Aleen Cust served in a diagnostic laboratory on the battlefield during the
war. Another determined woman, Polish Helena Bujwid-Jurgielewicz
(1897-1980), also served during the war and graduated from Lvov veterinary
school in 1923. Romanian Zoe Draganescu (?-1980), attending the Bucharest
veterinary school during the war, served in the army, and graduated in 1919.
Women could also begin to enroll in veterinary schools in the newly estab
lished countries such as Estonia, Latvia, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia after
World War I. Although these women seized their opportunity during wartime,
veterinary medicine still remained one of the most strictly male professions,
even as others (such as human medicine and law) admitted more and
more women.
Beyond the conditions of World War I, the social and political situation
greatly affected the availability of veterinary education to women, and the
history of women veterinarians in Turkey is an excellent example. As Tamay
Bajagag Gul and colleagues have shown in their 2008 paper, “Historical

Profile of Gender in Turkish Veterinary Education,” the establishment of the

Republic of Turkey (1923) included loosening the restrictions on women in the
Faculties of Law and Medicine in Istanbul University, and later the Faculty of
Veterinary Medicine in Ankara. Merver Ansel, who transferred to the veterin
ary school after two years of medical school, became the first woman graduate
in 1935. Although eighteen other women followed her path before 1940, the
hardships of the economic depression and World War II contributed to an
employment crisis. Fewer women continued to higher education in the 1940s,
and by the 1950s less than 2% of the Ankara school’s graduates were women
(an average of 1.4 women per year during this decade). Gul et al. also point to
the rise in the 1950s of the Democratic Party, which held conservative views
about higher education for women. This party lost power in 1960, and a new
constitution in 1961 granted more autonomy to the universities in Turkey.
These events probably contributed to the modest increase in the number of
women enrolling in veterinary school during the 1960s. Still, the enrollment of
women in the veterinary schools of Istanbul, Ankara, and Bursa only rose
above 10% in the 1980s; and the percentage of women students overall
remains under 50% today, so this process is ongoing in Turkey.1
After graduation, women worked in various aspects of veterinary medicine
depending on their local and national circumstances. Several women were able
to work in private clinical practice, treating horses, livestock, and companion
animals (pets); but this was often difficult because clients were reluctant to
consult a woman veterinarian. Instead, some women vets (such as Belle Reid
in New Zealand) established their own animal breeding farms, raising and
caring for large numbers of animals themselves. An important niche for
women vets has been working in positions such as diagnostic or bacterio
logical laboratories, university labs or teaching, and in government employ
ment. Several early graduates found employment this way: O.T. Markus (Tiiu
Koplus), graduate of the Veterinary Faculty at Tartu, Estonia, in 1925; Jeannette
Donker-Voet (1907-1979, graduated from Utrecht, the Netherlands, 1930);
Jelka Bojkic (graduated from Zagreb, Croatia, 1932); Maria Luz Zalduegni
Gabilondo (1914-2003, graduated from the University of Madrid, Spain,
1935); and Abide Koray (graduated from the Veterinary School in Ankara,
Turkey, 1938). Industry, including pharmaceutical companies, has been
another source of jobs for women, including Erzsebet Schvartz (1915-1993,
graduated from the Budapest Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, 1937). These
positions were not dependent on the whims and prejudices of often-
conservative farmers, and women could also pursue higher degrees and
1 Gul, R.T.B., Ozkul, T., Akgay, A., and Ozen, A. (2008). ‘Historical Profile of Gender in Turkish
Veterinary Education’, Journal of Veterinary Medical Education vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 305-309.

specialization (such as the Doctor of Philosophy or Doctor of Science)

while working.
The feminization of veterinary medicine had begun slowly in most coun
tries. Until the 1970s or later, female veterinarians accounted for less than 5%
of the profession in the Western world. Of course, there are important excep
tions - countries and regions in which more women have worked as veterinar
ians. Today’s Russian Federation, formerly the USSR, is an excellent example.
During the tsarist period, some women from the Russian empire fought
successfully to attend medical school and become physicians. The Bolshevik
Revolution opened the doors of medical schools to women in 1918, and the
percentage of women physicians and feldshers (a type of physician’s assistant)
increased. By 1965, about 70% of physicians in the USSR were women. Even
during the Soviet period, however, numbers of women in veterinary medicine
lagged behind those in human medicine, reflecting women’s lack of access to
education. Veterinary education was not equally available to women, and far
fewer veterinarians were women in 1967: only about 30% of all qualified
veterinarians were women. (Only one other profession had fewer women at
that time: engineering.) However, the tiered educational system in the USSR
meant that more women could achieve the lower qualification of “vet-feldsher”
(veterinary assistant, requiring fewer years of education). The Soviet veterin
ary journal Veterinariia included stories about women vets, calling them “A
Wonderful Collective” and “Good Workers,” according to the Communist
Party line. Women worked as vet-feldshers at state farms and also as special
ists in laboratory sciences, meat inspection, and epidemiology. They may not
have been as numerous as women physicians, but women veterinarians in the
USSR were far more common than in the rest of Europe. Today, women are
79% of the veterinary workforce in the Russian Federation.
From the 1970s onward, however, the enrollment of female veterinary
students in other European countries started to increase steadily from around
10% to about 70% to 90% in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Since
then, this percentage has stabilized, and veterinary medicine is now the most
feminized of the comparable health professions in the Western world. After the
Soviet Union, it was the Nordic countries where feminization accelerated
before the rest of Europe: first in Finland, then followed by Scandinavian
countries Sweden and Norway. In Helsinki and Stockholm, women comprised
60% of all students in the 1975 classes. From the 1990s onward, more than
90% of Finnish veterinary students were female, and in Oslo (Norway) this
average was more than 80%. As in many countries, enrolled female students in
Madrid (Spain), Utrecht (the Netherlands) and the colleges in the United States
began to outnumber the male students in the 1990s. In 2005, the EAEVE
published data on the enrollments of female students in 26 countries. Lower

percentages were in Turkey (12%), Bosnia-Herzegovina (34%), and Ukraine

(47%). In France, 70% of veterinary students were women; Belgium had 71%
and Britain had 72%. Most veterinary students were women in Finland (88%),
Austria (91%), and Switzerland (92%) by 2005. These changes are reflected in
the demographics of the profession today (2020): in Finland, 89% of veterin
arians are women; in Sweden, 82%; and in Turkey, 19% of the veterinary
workforce are women.
Figures for the United States and Canada show an increase of female
enrollment during this time period to about 80%. Until the 1970s, few women
were allowed to enroll in U.S. veterinary schools, especially after the private
schools closed in the 1920s and 1930s. University-based schools kept the
numbers of women at 2% or less, arguing that admitting women would deprive
men of educational (and employment) opportunities and that women could not
do the physical work of handling large animals. Deans and professors at
American veterinary schools openly derided women, telling them to “go back
to the kitchen” and to stop behaving in an “unfeminine” manner by seeking
higher education. The few women veterinarians banded together in 1947 to
start the Women’s Veterinary Medical Association; they received hundreds of
letters every year from young women asking how they could gain entrance to a
veterinary school. The socially conservative atmosphere of the 1950s allowed
veterinary schools to continue to reject women. Employment for women was
difficult to attain and lower paid, despite federal legislation in the 1960s that
supposedly barred gender discrimination. The situation only changed in 1974,
when the federal government forced veterinary schools to accept equal
numbers of women or lose federal funding. The next year, the numbers of
women enrolled in veterinary schools doubled and have continued to rise
since then.
Overall, women have become the majority of the student population in
European and North American veterinary colleges (Fig. 6.6). By 2018, women
accounted for almost 60% of practicing vets registered in the Western world.
This trend is continuing in Europe, where the proportion of female veterinar
ians has risen from 53% in 2015 to 58% in 2020. There and elsewhere, this
figure is likely to further increase because around 80% of students enrolling
veterinary colleges are now female. While female students became dominant
in veterinary colleges, in many countries, women earn less money than equally
employed men. In North America, few women have been appointed as deans
of veterinary schools or other leadership positions until recently. The
American Veterinary Medical Association did not elect its first woman presi
dent until 1996. However, as older men retire from the profession, the profes
sion’s leadership is likely to include more women, with corresponding changes
in compensation and availability of opportunities.

— Norway
— Netherlands
— Spain
— Turkey
— South Korea
— Finland
USA
Figure 6.6 Enrollment of first-year female students (%) in the veterinary college of Helsinki (Finland), Oslo (Norway), and
an average of 28 colleges in the United States. Female graduates (%) of the veterinary colleges of Madrid (Spain), Seoul
(South Korea), Utrecht (the Netherlands), and Turkey (average of veterinary colleges in Ankara, Bursa, and Istanbul) in the
period 1970-2007 and of Ankara (2010-2020). Courtesy: Prof. Tamay Bajagag Gul, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine,
Ankara University; Prof. Myung-Sun Chun, College of Veterinary Medicine, Seoul National University; Ann Kristin Egeli,
Study Advisor, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Oslo; Prof. Joaqum Sanchez de
Lollano, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Complutense University, Madrid, and Prof. Antti Sukura, Faculty of Veterinary
Medicine, Helsinki University. Data from the U.S. Internal Report Assoc. of American Veterinary Medical Colleges 1970
2017. Courtesy: Monique Tersteeg B.Sc. Department of Population Health Sciences, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine,
Utrecht University.
Ethnic and Racial Diversity in Veterinary Medicine:

The United States
Other groups remain underrepresented in veterinary medicine, however -
especially people of color and Indigenous peoples. Similar to the situation
for women, they struggled to gain access to education. The United States, with
its multi-ethnic population, presents an interesting case. The first Black
(African American) graduate of a U.S. veterinary school was Henry Stockton
Lewis, Sr. (1858-1922), who graduated from the Harvard University
Veterinary School in 1889 (this school closed in 1902). Eight years later,
two more Black men earned veterinary degrees. The first, Robert F. Harper,
graduated in 1897 from a private veterinary school, the short-lived Indiana
Veterinary College (1892-1924). His colleague, Augustus Nathaniel
Lushington (1869-1939), completed a degree in agriculture at Cornell
University and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Veterinary
School in 1897. Lushington, born into a poor family on the island of
Trinidad, worked his way to the United States. After attaining his veterinary
degree, he worked in private practice in Philadelphia, taught Veterinary
Sanitation and Hygiene at a college, then practiced for the rest of his life in
Virginia, where he experienced severe racial discrimination. His alma mater,
the University of Pennsylvania, graduated four more Black men in the early
1900s. Another early leader in veterinary education for Black men was The
Ohio State University. The initiative of these students, and the willingness of
veterinary administrators to enroll them in these two schools, defied the racism
that characterized U.S. society at the time. Although the first Black meat
inspector, Cornelius Vanderbilt Lowe (University of Pennsylvania, graduated
in 1909) was hired in 1910 by the U.S. government’s Bureau of Animal
Industry, the more conservative American Veterinary Medical Association
did not elect its first two Black members until 1920.
Cornelius Lowe, while working for the U.S. government c. 1910-1945,
traveled around the southern and midwestern United States, giving speeches
about the opportunities in veterinary medicine. Black students later remem
bered that they were astonished to see a Black veterinarian, and they began to
see veterinary medicine as a possible career. Very few could afford the cost of
moving far from home, however. In 1945, the historically Black university
Tuskegee Institute (now University), in Alabama, established its own veterin
ary school to provide opportunities for people of color to get a veterinary
education. The first Black woman to graduate from a U.S. school of veterinary
medicine was Alfreda Johnson Webb, who graduated from Tuskegee and
qualified in 1949. After earning a master’s degree in anatomy, Webb worked
as an instructor at two universities during her career and was active in politics.
She immediately joined the Women’s Veterinary Medical Association. Today,

the Tuskegee University College of Veterinary Medicine has graduated nearly

3,000 veterinary students, many of them Black or people of color. Despite the
success of the Tuskegee school, in 1973 only 2.2% of American veterinary
students belonged to minority groups and even today (circa 2020) this number
is only around 30%, with only 4% identifying themselves as African American
or Black.
The history of Native American (American Indian) people working as
veterinarians in North America is a topic that needs further research.
Indigenous peoples’ expertise, particularly with botanical treatments, is well
documented from the early days of European contact and this has been the basis
of most veterinary care. The U.S. Census listed three Native American veterin
arians in 1910 and only five in 1930, three of whom worked on reservations.
(These were probably non-graduate practitioners.) Few White veterinarians
ventured onto reservations, and owners and local healers provided veterinary
care for the millions of animals owned by Native Americans. For potential
veterinary students growing up on the reservations, the road to veterinary school
was long and hard. They had to overcome poverty, limits to early education, and
the shock of living far from home in a discriminatory culture. Ethel Connelly,
who grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation in the state of Montana, graduated
from the Colorado State University Veterinary School in 1989, the first Native
American woman to do so. She remembered how difficult it was to complete her
education, eventually returning to the reservation where she has cared for all
species (except snakes). Today the Native American Veterinary Association
supports Native American students and veterinarians.
In 2020 and beyond, leaders of the veterinary profession in the United States
and the American Veterinary Medical Association are pledging to continue
working to increase diversity in the veterinary profession. Some improvements
have been made, but there is much work to do. Research by the Association of
American Veterinary Medical Colleges (AAVMC) on students enrolled in
U.S. veterinary colleges in 2009 found that 4% of students identified as
Asian, almost 4% as Hispanic, 2.4% as African American, while only 1%
identified as Native American. In 2020, about 12% identified as Hispanic, 8%
as Asian, 5% as multi-racial, about 4% as African American, and about 1.5%
American Indian/Native Alaskan. This situation is not unusual, and veterinary
medicine remains one of the Western world’s most ethnically homogenous
professions.
Women and Indigenous Africans in Veterinary Education, on the

African Continent
Dutch veterinarian Katinka de Balogh, who is affiliated with FAO and who has
worked as a lecturer for many years in Africa, has pointed out the main

differences between activities of Western and African female vets. While most
students in Western countries find employment in clinical practices, in Africa
most veterinarians work in the government structure and are generally occu
pied with disease prevention and control, as well as administrative activities.
Fieldwork is not popular and has a lower status than administrative tasks,
which is preferred by male vets. Female veterinarians in Africa are mostly
working in government service in urban areas, in diagnostic and research
laboratories, or as staff in veterinary and agricultural colleges. Generally, the
salaries at these institutes are quite low, another reason why their male
colleagues have gradually shifted to veterinary work in the private sector.
Next to the old African veterinary schools in Cairo (1827), Pretoria (1920),
and Khartoum (1938), Africa counted 25 veterinary schools in 2000; most of
these were established after 1960 when many former colonies became inde
pendent states. Veterinary faculties were established in Angola, Congo,
Ethiopia, Kenia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and
Zimbabwe. Nigeria has five veterinary colleges, and many of their graduates
work in other African countries. Some African students, such as Jotello Festiri
Soga (Chapter 4), graduated from veterinary schools in Europe (often the
former colonial nation). After 1960, African schools admitted more African
students, but many were also trained elsewhere: France, the UK, Japan, and the
United States; or the USSR, Romania, Hungary, DDR (East Germany), and
Cuba. The long stay abroad made it more difficult for female students,
particularly for those with children. In South Africa, the Medical University
of South Africa (MEDUNSA), including a veterinary faculty, was opened near
Pretoria in 1976. This university accepted only Black South Africans; their
compatriots of Indian origin were excluded both from Onderstepoort and
MEDUNSA. After apartheid was abolished, the MEDUNSA veterinary faculty
was absorbed into Onderstepoort in 1996.
Feminization of veterinary medicine also occurred in African nations, par
ticularly during the most recent decades. Overall, African nations with veter
inary schools have seen increasing numbers of women entering higher
education, including veterinary studies. Other nations, such as Tunisia,
Algeria, Sudan, and the island nation of Madagascar, also have higher levels
of participation. Gradually, African female veterinarians have also entered
higher earning and leadership positions. For instance, after various African
countries had established veterinary associations, female vets became presi
dents of those associations in Botswana, Ethiopia, and Uganda.
Asian Nations
In Asian nations, the picture is different depending on location. In Japan, both
public universities and private veterinary schools provide accredited education.

About 30 students are admitted to each of 11 national or public universities per

year, and about 120 to each of 5 private schools. The veterinary student
population became half female around 2010, and this trend is expected to
continue. In Thailand in 2018, about 65% of veterinary students were women,
and other nations such as Sri Lanka and Malaysia also have quite a high
representation of women in veterinary medicine. Data from the College of
Veterinary Medicine from Seoul National University (South Korea), in
Figure 6.6, shows that the feminization process started in the 1990s there.
The percentage of women students has fluctuated around 40% until today.
Explanations for the Increase in Women Veterinarians

The most remarkable aspect of the feminization of the veterinary profession is
that it happened basically concurrently around the world. Various explanations
are given for this phenomenon. Some scholars claim that the higher influx of
female students coincided with the second feminist movement in the Western
world. However, in interviews of Dutch female veterinarians graduated in the
1970s and 1980s, the majority stated that they did not consider themselves as
active feminists. Instead, they concentrated on the development of various
fields of veterinary medicine during their career. They did not want to be
judged on the fact that they were women, but - just like their male colleagues -
on the quality of their veterinary work. Nevertheless, they played an important
role in the acceptance of women in Dutch veterinary medicine. Interviews with
161 female vets who had studied in schools in France and Belgium between
1950 and 2010 confirm this picture. Despite some obstacles and misogynist
remarks, they kept working and they were positive about the way they had
overcome the obstacles.
Another explanation reflects the fact that the veterinary profession in high-
income countries has become oriented toward companion animal practice.
Women, who are supposed to “love animals,” could be more attracted to
companion animal practice than male vets. That sector also offers more part
time jobs. Indeed, most women veterinarians work in practices that exclusively
treat companion animals (primarily dogs and cats), rather than in the mixed or
large-animal practices. However, most men do, too - because there are far
more jobs in companion animal practice than in mixed or large-animal prac
tice. In the Western world, most female students report being interested in
working with companion animals. However, feminization of the veterinary
profession has also occurred in African countries, where companion animal
practice is a much smaller sector of the economy. Both women and men work
in government positions with food-producing animals.
Workforce issues are also tied to changing economic realities in much of the
world. Livestock or general practice, the old image of a veterinarian’s work,

has declined in nations where populations have urbanized (and acquired pets)
and farm practice has become high-tech preventive veterinary management.
The small, mixed animal veterinary practice of the past is becoming rarer. It is
not clear how these trends affected the increase in women in veterinary
medicine. But it is a problem for the veterinary profession that the earnings
and employment for necessary veterinary work, such as livestock care and
meat inspection, have decreased. Moreover, fewer male students are attracted
to veterinary medicine because they can make more money and work under
better conditions in other professions. Compared with human medicine, or
working as scientists in industry, veterinarians earn far less money per hour
worked but still pay similar costs for their education. For a student, the cost
benefit analysis does not look favorable for veterinary medicine. (In the United
States, veterinary students now expect that they must acquire large debts to pay
for university and veterinary school.) Research shows that men are far more
motivated to achieve a high salary than are women, who tend to choose
according to personal preference. This factor may explain some of the femi
nization of veterinary medicine over the past forty years: men have left
veterinary medicine as earnings in other professions have outpaced it.
Another explanation for veterinary feminization is demographic. More and
more female students entered universities from the 1960s onward. In many
countries, this trend followed from legislation that guaranteed access to edu
cation for women. In the United States, the federal government forced veterin
ary schools to allow women to enroll, using legislation in the 1970s. Female
enrollment immediately increased. In Europe, girls have also achieved better
grades throughout secondary education than boys, which made it more likely
that universities would recruit more women with the top grades. Finally,
although this is much more difficult to study, social and cultural values seemed
to liberalize throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Progressive policies, and work
force needs, meant that the percentage of women increased over all profes
sions. Veterinary medicine was merely following this larger trend.
As with most major social changes, many factors probably contributed to
the feminization of veterinary medicine in the late twentieth century. The
convergence of economics, demographics, social and cultural changes, the
modernized livestock industry, and the growth of commercialized pet keeping
all encouraged the influx of women into veterinary medicine. Was the profes
sion ready for such a dramatic transformation?
Concerns and Criticisms of the Changing Veterinary Profession

The feminization of veterinary medicine was initially seen as a problem by
many male veterinarians. Veterinary schools only reluctantly accepted female
students. For instance, when the Veterinary College of Helsinki opened its

doors in 1946, there were 16 female and 21 male applicants. However, the
professors decided that women could not be successful in the veterinary
profession and allowed 13 male and only 2 female students to enter. Despite
this setback, feminization increased on average from 8% in the period
1946-1958 to 26% in 1959-1965 and 44% in the years 1966-1973.
Ample examples and anecdotes exist about the hostile attitude of some male
professors. Many did not consider women intelligent enough to study science,
and not physically strong enough to become a good vet. Female students were
sometimes openly discriminated against or harassed. Well known is the story
of professors who persisted in opening their lectures with “good morning
gentlemen,” despite the fact that there were more and more women in the
lecture halls. Women were accused of only wanting to work with dogs and
cats, but those who expressed interest in livestock were told they could not do
so because it was a “man’s job.” A 1976 report by the U.S. Department of
Health, Education, and Welfare found that veterinary school alumni and
agricultural interests pressured school administrators to limit women’s enroll
ment, assuming that women would not work once they married and would
therefore deprive qualified men of the opportunity to become veterinarians.
The concern that women would deprive men of education and employment
survives to this day, in surveys that point out how many women are “not
actively practicing,” presumably to manage a household and raise children.
Until the recent advent of corporate veterinary practice, few part-time jobs
existed for veterinarians.
For many male practitioners, the masculine, rough culture of veterinary
medicine persistently excluded women, no matter how skilled or knowledge
able they were. Women studied and worked in a climate filled with sexual
jokes and comments, a distrust of anyone who “loved animals” or was senti
mental, and livestock owners who openly refused to allow women to treat their
animals. The idea of women veterinarians not only threatened the professional
aspirations of veterinarians but also violated masculine livestock culture. This is
an important reason why, in the 1970s and 1980s, women encountered
entrenched discrimination within the veterinary colleges, the veterinary profes
sion, and among traditional animal owners, particularly farmers. By the 1990s,
with larger numbers of women veterinarians in the workforce, farmers had to
learn to accept the presence of female vets in their barns and meadows. In most
countries and cultures, skilled female vets have gradually won the confidence of
farmers, who then have slowly lost their prejudice against having their animals
treated by female vets (a continuing process).
In the 1980s and 1990s, veterinary professional leaders also watched the
growing feminization of their profession with some concern. They believed
that the biggest problem was the veterinarian’s salary. Almost everywhere,
women earned (and still earn) less than men. There was a persistent idea that

women would “work for less,” and therefore more women meant lower
earnings for all vets. It would be a vicious cycle: as the salaries and earnings
decreased, men would leave the profession and veterinary medicine would
become a “pink-collar,” lower-status profession. Many surveys were done to
assess the impact of women on the profession, and almost all their conclusions
found that veterinarians’ earnings tracked the general economy and the value
of animals, not the numbers of women. In the United States, for example,
veterinary earnings had already begun to decrease before numbers of women
increased in the profession. Although data did not support professional
leaders’ fears, this anxiety has persisted in the face of increasing costs for
veterinary education and stagnant profits for practicing vets. Economics, as
well as social status, has always been a concern for the profession’s leaders,
and undoubtedly this will continue in the future.
Shattering the Glass Ceiling?

The “glass ceiling” refers to how high women might rise in the profession.
Will they assume the leadership roles? Will they become top earners? The
integration of women into all areas of the veterinary profession has been a
gradual process. Except for in the former Soviet bloc countries, European
veterinary public health, and particularly meat inspection, proved to be rather
conservative in its acceptance of female veterinarians. Despite more women in
the profession, the representation of female veterinarians among policy
making officials, leading veterinary authorities, and academic staff is still
relatively low. In 2010, women occupied 78% of faculty positions in U.S.
veterinary schools, but women were still underrepresented in leadership
(department heads and chairs and deans). Apparently, it remained difficult
for women to break through the “glass ceiling” in veterinary medicine.
In Europe and the United States today, male veterinarians still dominate the
top earning positions (partners, owners, or directors of practices), compared to
their female colleagues. Women are working more often as associates or
assistants in practices owned by others. Statistics demonstrate not only that
female veterinarians are less likely to be elected or appointed to leadership
roles, but also that their average earnings are lower than their male counter
parts. In the Western world, women earn about 20% less than men in compar
able positions. This is the case elsewhere, although the earning gap is not
always quite so large. For instance, in Mozambique women earn 10% lower
salaries and those in Thailand have 11% lower earnings. From this point of
view, veterinary medicine could still be considered as “a man’s job,” or at least
a profession that disproportionately rewards men. Despite the fact that the
profession is now female dominated, veterinary medicine has remained gen
dered masculine in some ways.

Over the past forty years, both men and women veterinarians have
responded to the shift toward caring for companion or pet animals. The still
growing numbers of companion animals in cities will continue to provide
much work for urban vets. Pet keeping is certainly not new, but its impact
on the veterinary profession was particularly dramatic in the last decades of the
twentieth century. In the next chapter, we examine how the veterinary profes
sion responded to the challenges of changing human-animal relations, the
demand for expertise in companion animal medicine, and the other challenges
and opportunities of the twenty-first century.
Conclusions
From this survey of the period 1900-1960, we can conclude that:
1. As wealth increases, people consume more meat, milk, yoghurt, cheese,
eggs, and other animal products. Intensive animal agriculture, “factory
farming,” developed as a way to produce large numbers of food-producing
animals cheaply. Combined with a vast global network of distribution,
factory farming has revolutionized the production of foods from animals.
2. This increased food production came with a price, however. Confining
large numbers of animals indoors makes them vulnerable to diseases and
undesired stress behaviors, causing concerns about animal welfare.
Factory farms have also caused large-scale waste disposal problems and
contributed to the production of greenhouse gases (climate change).
3. Meat production quadrupled between 1961 and 2018 worldwide. In 1960,
Asia nations produced only about 12% of the world’s meat; today they
produce 42% (with China the leading producer). By weight, pigs and
poultry supply most of the world’s meat, with beef and buffalo third.
4. Ninety-six percent of mammals living on the earth today are either
humans or domesticated animals (only 4% are wild); and 70% of all birds
living on the earth are domesticated poultry. Although humans are only
0.1% of life on earth, we are causing the biggest changes in the compos
ition of the earth’s animals due to our vast production of livestock.
5. Veterinarians have contributed to this massive increase in food-producing
animals by helping to develop intensive livestock husbandry methods.
These methods included new reproduction practices, such as artificial
insemination, and the use of vaccines and treatments, such as antimicro
bials to control disease outbreaks in closely confined animal populations.
6. Veterinarians shifted to herd health and preventive medicine after World
War II, partially in response to international efforts from the FAO, OIE,
and WHO. Becoming herd health managers meant changing veterinary
education, also. Animal husbandry with the subdisciplines of breeding,

Conclusions 327
genetics, statistics, animal handling, and farm management obtained a

more prominent position in the veterinary curricula. New specializations
were developed in swine, beef, and dairy practice and
preventive medicine.
7. The growing global production networks quickly spread diseases such as
classical swine fever, foot and mouth disease (FMD), and many others.
Veterinarians worked to control diseases locally, using test and slaughter,
culling, and vaccines (if available). The FMD outbreak in the UK illus
trated the tensions between preserving markets (especially for export) and
preventing disease outbreaks. Animals that had been vaccinated against
FMD became seropositive, the same as infected animals; other nations
stopped importing British cattle and products; and FMD exploded into an
international diplomatic and economic problem in 2001.
8. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) illustrated how veterinary
problems stimulated important scientific discoveries. Veterinary patholo
gists identified BSE in British cattle in 1986 and related it to scrapie and
other diseases. Physicians linked BSE to sick humans who had consumed
beef from infected cattle. The cause of BSE was something entirely new:
rather than a living microorganism, the causative agent was misfolded
proteins known as prions that jumped between species.
9. The animal industries (and veterinarians) were targets of social and cul
tural criticism that increased from the 1970s on. Some critics focused on
poor animal welfare conditions in factory farms and slaughterhouses;
others worried about food safety and diseases spread to humans. The
overuse of antimicrobials (for growth promotion and disease control)
was linked to increasing pathogen resistance, making some of these drugs
useless in human medicine.
10. Another challenge for veterinarians has been the control of parasitic and
vector-borne diseases, such as scabies, hydatid disease (Echinococcus),
screwworms, and trypanosomiasis. The most successful campaigns
against these problems have been internationally led and included educa
tion, local farmers’ cooperation, surveillance, and treatment and traceback
of any infected animals.
11. Veterinarians are at the vanguard of food safety, using both traditional
techniques and new technologies (risk assessment, etc.). Systems such as
Integrated Quality Control (IQC) seek to coordinate these efforts in the
whole production chain of food of animal origin.
12. Responding to client demand, new paradigms in veterinary practice have
included traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic treatments; ethnoveterinary
medicine based on botanical knowledge of Indigenous people around the
world; competing Western medical systems such as homeopathy and
osteopathy; and everything else that was not taught in a traditional

Western veterinary curriculum. Today, some veterinary schools offer

courses in “Integrative Veterinary Medicine” (IVM), which combines
conventional medicine with complementary and alternative veterinary
medicine (CAVM).
13. Traditionally opposed to educating and admitting women to the profes
sion, the veterinary profession included few women (with some excep
tions, such as the Soviet Union). In the late 1970s, veterinary medicine
began feminizing in several places around the world. The uneven pace of
this shift, from men to women as veterinarians, reflected the cultural
attitudes and social realities of each region or nation. By 2000, women
were the majority of veterinary students and veterinarians in many places.
This complex change can be traced to several factors, including legal
changes, the women’s movement, changes in veterinary practice, and
economics. The shift to women veterinarians was controversial with older
generations of male veterinarians. Today, women are still underrepre
sented in veterinary leadership. The profession does not include much
racial and ethnic diversity; veterinary medicine remains one of the
Western world’s most ethnically homogenous professions.
Question/Activity: What kind of animal food production methods and

veterinary food inspection system developed in your country or region of the
world? Which major animal disease challenges and veterinary responses were
connected to the food chain in your nation? What major changes in veterinary
practice took place in your country during the last decades of the twentieth century,
particularly regarding feminization and ethnic and racial diversity?

7 Veterinary Medicine and Animal Health,
2000-2020
Introduction
This final chapter considers recent veterinary history, focusing on companion
animal practice; technological developments, especially the digital revolution;
One Health; and finally, the challenges facing veterinary medicine today. As a
result of growing prosperity from the 1960s onward in some areas, more and
more veterinary practitioners obtained their income from pet animal owners.
This sector of veterinary medicine, together with wildlife and zoo veterinary
medicine, has received much positive public attention which resulted in a
higher image and status for veterinarians. In response to a changing need for
veterinary services, further differentiation and specialization within education
institutes and veterinary practice have also developed in the twenty-first
century. The growth of companion animal medicine was also an expression
of changing human-animal relationships and the changing position of animals
in society in large parts of the world.
Other striking developments that changed society and veterinary medicine
in significant ways were technological innovations. These include molecular
biology, biochemical techniques (genome, DNA typing), and pharmaceutical and
medical technology enabling new diagnostic tools (CT scans) and new gener
ations of drugs and (chemo)therapies (monoclonal antibodies). As part of the
digital revolution, personal computers, email, and the Internet were introduced in
the 1980s and 1990s. This has created an increasingly interlinked online commu
nity. This also brought about a huge and constant flow of digital scientific infor
mation, with applications in research, diagnostics, online databases, and websites,
as well as global electronic communication and knowledge exchange.
The beginning of the twenty-first century also witnessed an increasing
awareness among veterinarians of the importance of the environment, includ
ing climate change and the sustainability of livestock production. Emergent
and reemergent infectious human diseases, about 70 percent of which are
transmitted between animals and humans, have stimulated the growth of
interdisciplinary research and disease control strategies involving veterinar
ians. In 2011, a major triumph for the veterinary profession and animal health
329

330 Veterinary Medicine and Animal Health, 2000-2020
officials was the eradication of rinderpest, the cattle killer that had caused so
much suffering, famine, and death for centuries. The veterinary profession
combined its celebration of rinderpest eradication with the anniversary of the
proclamation establishing the first modern veterinary school in 1761.
We end our journey through the history of veterinary medicine in the year
2020. This annus climactericus (a turning point year) witnessed an overriding
zoonotic pandemic, COVID-19, which disrupted the functioning of societies
worldwide. This pandemic has highlighted the significance of the One Health
triad: the inseparable connections between humans, animals, and the environ
ment. These are only some of the important challenges and events that the
veterinary profession and other animal healers have faced in recent decades.
Within the limited space of this book, it is impossible to describe all these
changes and topics in detail over time, and we urge veterinary historians
around the world to analyze these changes in their own regions and nations.
For veterinarians and veterinary students, these larger themes and how they
influence your local area are important in shaping your career and the whole
veterinary profession.
The Importance of Companion Animal Medicine and

Animal Welfare
Valuing Animals for Companionship

Companion animals, especially dogs, have been associated with humans for
millennia. We do not have much information about the nature of the relation
ship between people and these animals, which probably included using the
animals for religious purposes, for food, as workers, and for companionship.
The rise of commercialized pet keeping is relatively recent, developing since
the mid-twentieth century in most regions. It depends on owners valuing their
animals for sentimental reasons, and it is often associated with high income
and increases in leisure time. Even this is not new; the urban middle and upper
classes in many nations accepted animals in the home as domestic compan
ions, and sought health care for them, at least since the eighteenth century.
What has changed is the increase in numbers of animals kept for companion
ship, the rise of widely available goods and services for pets, and the veterinary
profession’s attention to these animals. These trends are among several indi
cations that human-animal relationships have become important social and
cultural concerns in recent decades.
This change has been reflected in the field of history and historical texts.
Since historian William McNeill argued in 1976 that animals and microbes
have changed human history on a large scale, more interdisciplinary research
was initiated on the topics of human-animal relations and animals as important

The Importance of Companion Animal Medicine and Animal Welfare 331
actors in history. Knowledge about animals, society, and veterinary medicine

has increased considerably due to new academic fields such as animal studies,
gender studies, and environmental and global history. These animal-centered
approaches have enriched and extended veterinary history, as well as historical
studies in general. Historians have become increasingly interested in topics
about animals, in the relationships between humans and animals, and the role
and status of animals in modern society. In recent decades, veterinary history
has been building upon this scholarship in human-animal relationships.
Affection for animals took on economic value through sociological and
cultural changes. Remarkably, sentimental reasons were often given a higher
value, even without any economic benefits from these animals as sources for
transport, food, or other products. In wealthy nations, households incorporated
the companionship and affection - implicit in pet keeping - into two major
social structures, namely, mass popular and consumer culture. For centuries,
keeping animals just for fun was an isolated luxury hobby only for nobility and
the rich. In the second half of the twentieth century, affection for and keeping
of companion animals became a widespread consumer activity in higher-
income areas. In addition, social and demographic change in society, particu
larly the individualization, loneliness, and the proportional increase in elderly
people (in the Western world, at least), stimulated the increase in numbers of
pets. Increasingly, more and more owners considered their companion animals
as family members. For instance, sociological research in England revealed
that many people preferred talking to their cat or dog rather than to their family
members. Prints of the dog’s or cat’s paws appear on obituaries as signs that
the pets of the lost family member are also in mourning, assuming that the pet
has human-like feelings.
This process of attributing human characteristics and behavior to animals in
households is called “anthropomorphism. ” Seeing their companion animals as
human-like or as family members, many people tended to treat (and spoil) pets
in the same way. This concept explains why some pet owners view their
animals as members of the family. Owners may express their love for their
pets by spending money on goods and services for them. Pets were provided
with attention, empathy, and pet-related products and services such as luxury
pet food, (fashion) gadgets, toys and clothes, hair dressing, nail clipping,
animal insurance, and veterinary care. Along with veterinary practices, shops,
asylums, kennels, trimming salons, babysitting, walking services, elderly
homes, hotels, cremation centers, and cemeteries for pets shared in the
booming pet business. In the late 1990s, Americans spent more than $5 billion
on pet food and $7 billion on veterinary care every year on dogs alone. In the
Netherlands, for instance, the economic significance of the pet-keeping sector
has become larger than that of the poultry sector. Among the world’s wealthier
people, certain pet breeds, particularly purebred animals, became fashionable,

thereby forcing up prices for the animals themselves. Purebred breeders

contributed to this demand because owners were willing to pay more and
more money for buying such expensive (purebred) animals as well as for their
health care and well-being. (In fact, pedigree animals are more likely to
become ill, particularly due to inherited weaknesses.) This vast economy of
goods and services revolved around owners’ consideration of their pets as
“priceless” family members entitled to full lives (Fig. 7.1).
Not only horses, but also cows, pigs, sheep, goats, llamas, and donkeys have
been turned into companion animals. Hobby-farmers often have a few live
stock pets, but in some areas, the hobby farmers outnumbered the large-scale
farmers (producing for the markets). This caused problems during eradication
campaigns of foot and mouth disease, swine influenza, and other diseases
among livestock being produced for the market. Owners considered their
animals family members, not market production animals. These owners
refused to have their livestock pets vaccinated, controlled, or killed to stop
transmission of the diseases. Next to the rise of dogs, horses, and mules as
companion animals, their function as war animals continued, although at much
lower numbers than in World War II. Horses and mules remained important for
pack transport in difficult mountain terrain (Afghanistan, for example).
However, it seems that dogs have become the main military animal: dogs
were deployed in the conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, Iraq, and
Afghanistan. They were used for guard duties and as tracker dogs for enemy
soldiers, and to locate caches of arms and explosives, including mines. In
addition, dogs were very effective in detecting narcotics, have worked as
service dogs, and have been important companions to treat people with post-
traumatic stress disorder. Most people living in earlier time periods would
probably be amazed at the sensibility toward animals today: about the ways we
talk about and treat our pets as companions or as children; how we spend
money on them and view them as objects of beauty, status, or pleasure; and
how concerned many societies are about animal welfare.
They would also be amazed at the sheer numbers of animals kept as
companions. The dramatic increase in pet animal populations in wealthy
nations is as spectacular as the increase in livestock numbers. It is estimated
that worldwide over 470 million dogs and 370 million cats were kept as pets in
2018. This number continues to increase dramatically: European countries had
a population of 157 million pets in 2015; within 5 years, they had almost
doubled that number (290 million by 2020). In France, the number of cats and
dogs grew from 7.5 to 18.5 million in the period 1967-2008. In China, pet
keeping has increased at a high rate since the partial privatization of the
Chinese economy in 1989. From almost none in the late 1980s, 20% of
Chinese households now include pet animals. Between 1988 and 2019, the
percentage of U.S. households with one or more pets rose from 56% to 67%.

Figure 7.1 Position of pets in postmodern society. Mark Ulriksen, “City

Dogs,” The New Yorker, April 11, 2005.

The United States counted 25 million dogs in 1961; in 2017, this figure was 77
million, next to nearly 58 million cats. Japan counted an estimated 12 million
dogs and 10 million cats by 2015. In 2019, a small country like the
Netherlands counted 27 million companion animals (compared to a human
population of 17 million). About 8 million pond fish, 8 million aquarium fish,
3 million cats, 2.4 million songbirds, 1.7 million dogs, 1.5 million chicken,
geese, and ducks, 1.5 million pigeons, 0.6 million rabbits, 0.5 million rodents,
0.3 million reptiles, and 0.3 million horses were kept in 48% of all Dutch
households. The top three species, with one or more animals per household,
are cats (23%), dogs (18%), and ornamental fish (7%).
This distribution of species reflects changes over time in companion animal
populations. For example, the number of cats has risen in societies with a
larger percentage of households in which all the adults are out of the house,
working, during the day. Cats can easily stay alone for longer periods; the
same is true of reptiles, rodents, fish, birds, and exotic animals, and their
numbers have been steadily increasing. During the COVID-19 pandemic of
2020-2021, early reports and surveys have shown that pet ownership
increased, with owners working from home and seeking companionship and
comfort from their pets during stressful times. “Pandemic puppies” and kittens
were brought into many homes without pets; also about 20 percent of
pet-owning households added a second or third pet during 2020. Almost
three-quarters of these owners took their pets to a veterinarian during 2020,
reflecting increased attention to their pets’ health and well-being.
Numbers of horses, kept as backyard pets or for riding or sports, have
increased in recent decades as well. After World War II, horse numbers fell
globally. Horses in the armies became redundant after the war and due to
mechanization in transport and agriculture. Due to postwar food shortages,
many horses were slaughtered and consumed in the war-torn regions, such as
the European mainland and Southeast Asia. In the United States, many farmers
sold their horses to pet food companies, helping pet food to become a booming
business as a result of the growing market for pets. Specialized niches for
horses, such as racing, remained important in some countries, while in more
rural and low-income areas, horses continued to perform traditional tasks in
transport and agriculture. Overall, however, horse populations dramatically
decreased until around 1970. In the second half of the twentieth century, horses
themselves slowly became companion animals in higher-income areas. This
unforeseen factor brought horses back into the landscape of many regions for
the first time in decades (and ensured the continuity of equine veterinary
medicine).
Elite equestrian recreation and sports date from antiquity but became popu
lar and widespread in high-income countries in the Middle East, Europe, North
America, and other regions. Flat and harness racing worldwide, rodeo and

related activities in North America, and dressage, jumping, vaulting, and

endurance competitions in Europe and the United States flourished as never
before. Equestrian sports gained headline status in the world Olympic Games,
with lucrative television contracts and millions of fans. The FEI World
Equestrian Games were held for the first time in Stockholm in 1990. These
elite activities have, in turn, stimulated the participation of amateur eques
trians. In many high-income countries, equestrian recreation and sports rank
among the top five in terms of people actively practicing it. A small country
like the Netherlands has about 1,000 riding schools whose clients are mainly
female teenagers. In this country, equestrian sports are second to soccer only;
in France, equestrian activities rank third after soccer and tennis. Equestrian
sports are gaining in popularity around the world overall.
With horses now considered companions and sport animals, we have traced
a full circle from the horse-oriented economies of the early modern period,
through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the dramatic decline in
horse numbers due to mechanization in the twentieth century and the restor
ation of horse populations in some areas today. Of course, in many parts of the
world, horses (and other equids) have always remained important, particularly
in rural areas, for transport and work. Regardless of the species, those animals
that have been designated by various human societies and cultures as compan
ions or pets have drawn special attention. Not only have they have become key
drivers of consumerism, but owners’ concerns about their welfare have been
ethically elevated almost to the level of human welfare. An excellent example
of this is the politicization of animal welfare, especially in particular nations
and regions.
The Politicization of Animal Welfare at the End of the

Twentieth Century
Animal protectionists put forward the centuries-old questions about what
animals feel or think. Do they have life expectations? Is it possible to measure
discomfort, suffering, and pain? Answers to these questions are crucial in our
thinking about animals because these factors help determine how we should
treat animals. The more similarities between humans and animals that people
notice, the more they are inclined to treat animals like humans. By contrast,
greater emphasis on human-animal differences support the more businesslike
approach, in which animals are merely economic property. Consuming foods
of animal origin, hunting, trading animals, and seeing livestock as mere
production units are examples. In previous chapters, we have discussed how
animal protectionists united in movements to achieve their goals. Until the
1960s, it was mainly upper-class activists who campaigned against cruelty to
animals and tried to improve animal welfare in general.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, animal welfare activism

changed in two ways: the broadening of membership to all layers of society
and the politicization of animal welfare issues in several European countries.
Due to larger and more influential animal protection pressure groups, animal
rights and welfare became political issues. Many political parties in Europe
included animal welfare issues in their programs. In Germany the
Tierschutzpartei [Animal Protection Party] was established in 1993, but in
2006 the Dutch Partij voor de Dieren [Party for the Animals] became the first
political animal protection party worldwide to obtain seats in a parliament.
Since then, this political party together with similar (green) domestic and
foreign parties promoted an animal- and environmental-friendly policy and
succeeded in obtaining animal welfare legislation on national and international
levels. This included a ban on animal fights (cocks, dogs, bulls), tail and ear
docking and other procedures such as declawing of cats, further regulation of
animal husbandry (transport, size of cages, number of animals kept in a certain
area), slaughtering methods, and breeding.
Even the economically oriented livestock industry came under scrutiny for
the welfare of animals produced for food. Well known is the research by U.S.
animal scientist Temple Grandin (b. 1947). She is an expert on animal behav
ior, particularly livestock being slaughtered. She measured behavior and stress
exposure during transport, handling, and restraint and in different ways of
killing (pre-stunning, kosher, halal), thereby providing a deeper insight into the
extent to which animals experience suffering or pain. She determined how
long animals remained conscious after various ways of killing and stated that
slaughter animals are not aware of the oncoming killing. New technologies and
equipment were developed, as well as slaughterhouses designed to be more
animal friendly. Due to Grandin’s work, the humane treatment of livestock for
slaughter has increased considerably. Finally, the societal debate on animal
welfare also triggered changes in veterinary practices. For centuries, veterinar
ians focused on healing animals, often ignoring suffering and pain in their
patients. The past decades witnessed a shift to analgesia during treatments for
both livestock and especially for companion animals. This new interest in
alleviating animal pain reflected the public’s concern about animal welfare (a
success for animal protectionists).
Animal protectionists also renewed their battle against the use of animals in
biomedical research and education. Changing ideas about animal welfare
contributed to a significant reduction of laboratory animals in the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries. For example, 6 million animals were used in
laboratories in Britain and 1.3 million in the Netherlands in 1980. Under the
pressure of anti-vivisection activists and politicians in various European coun
tries, the European Union enacted a directive in 1986 (updated in 2010),
ordering each member state to incorporate legislation to regulate the use and

welfare of laboratory animals. Since then, European countries have reduced

their usage of laboratory animals by more than 50 percent by applying the
“3-R” principles: replacement, reduction, and refining. Live animals were
replaced wherever possible with in vitro or other methods; the numbers of
animals were reduced per experiment or test; and experiments were refined to
be more efficient. These principles have been incorporated into legislation
worldwide and have stimulated research in alternatives for animal use (human
stem cells, molecular biology and genetics, bioinformatics, modeling, and
other methods).
Similar to the 3-Rs approach used in reducing laboratory animal use, basic
and uniform principles were sought on which animal welfare in general could
be defined, and hence regulation and legislation could be built. However,
neutral assumptions supported by all parties involved are hard to find, since
so many different - and often emotional - ideas about animal welfare exist.
Compromises between different stakeholders are hard to find, since growing
affection and sentiment for more animal species has conflicted with the
traditional businesslike approach in farm animals. Within political debates on
animal welfare, some books and authors have proved to be very influential. An
important new impetus was the book Animal Machines, published in 1964 by
English writer and animal welfare activist Ruth Harrison (1920-2000). Her
description of abuse and the poor quality of farm animal life had a profound
impact on public opinion in Britain. It prompted a government enquiry,
resulting in a 1965 report by a committee presided by Irish zoologist Roger
Brambell (1901-1970). By analogy with the United Nations Universal
Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the Brambell Committee published
basic needs for animals: freedom from hunger or thirst, discomfort, fear,
distress, pain, injury, or disease, and the freedom to express (most) normal
behavior by providing sufficient space, proper facilities, and company of the
animal’s own kind. These minimal standards for animals’ lives were designed
to be implemented in all settings, from farms to laboratories.
Similarly influential for the further development of animal rights and veter
inary ethics were studies by philosophers in the 1970s-1990s. The Australian
Peter Singer published Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of
Animals (New York, 1975), and American philosopher Tom Regan followed
with The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley, 1983). Animal “rights” differed
from animal welfare, these authors argued, because animals were no longer
defined as “things” but as sentient beings who possessed “intrinsic value.” This
philosophical movement extended to veterinary medicine. For example,
American philosopher Bernard Rollin published An Introduction to
Veterinary Medical Ethics: Theory and Cases in 1999. Rollin argued for
new attitudes in the profession toward animals: veterinarians would need to
be guardians of what was best for the animal, even if it cost the owner money.

Based on these studies, some new standards of animal welfare were defined
and used in developing regulation and legislation. Also, several traditional uses
and roles for animals have been questioned and regulated. In some countries,
this has led to a strong limitation in keeping, trading, or exhibiting exotic
animals as well as a ban on wild animals in circuses, carnivals, and exhibitions.
Currently under debate is whether certain animal species should be kept in
zoos, children’s farms, and natural parks. Some cities (such as San Francisco in
the United States) have even passed legislation stating that animals, as indi
viduals with intrinsic rights, cannot be “owned” but instead have human
“guardians.”
Within debates on politics and legislation concerning animal welfare (and
health) it became very clear that emotions and strong convictions often
dominated the discourse. This complicated policy, law, and regulation because
scholars from various disciplines argued that scientific facts, not emotion,
should be the basis for decision making. Veterinarians joined research that
was aimed at obtaining scientific facts and evidence that was desperately
needed to gain deeper insight into how animals feel and behave. For scientists,
measuring is knowing. Therefore, ethologists and neurobiological scientists
are researching cognition and consciousness in animals. They occupy them
selves with major question such as, How do animal brains work? What are the
differences between brains of certain species (humans, other mammals, birds,
fish, reptiles, amphibians, insects)? What does this mean for their perception of
positive factors such as comfort, well-being, and pleasure on the one hand or
discomfort, fear, stress, and pain on the other hand? Based on results, these
scientists have tried to determine (objective) parameters for the welfare of kept
animals. Basic needs such as food, water, mobility, and shelter from hostile
animals and elements of nature are obvious. More problematic is the prerequis
ite that kept animals should be able to show their natural behavior, within the
limits of their ability to adapt. Dogs for instance, originate from wild canids
that roamed freely. If roaming is “natural” behavior for domesticated dogs,
most pets do not have that ability. Should they therefore be banned from our
homes? Animals in confinement indeed have less control over their natural
behavior. During the past decades, more animal-friendly houses and facilities
have been designed and built, allowing for more animal behavior needs to be
met and a certain feeling of control which are crucial for welfare.
“Man’s Best Friend” or “Danger to Society”?: Inconsistent

Attitudes toward Animals
Beliefs and concerns about the welfare and rights of animals are cultural and
social ideas. Therefore, they will differ from one place to another, and even

from one observer to another. In many parts of the world, the notion that
animals have rights equivalent to those of people would be incomprehensible.
For many people in low-income areas, human survival and well-being are the
important issues, not animal welfare or rights. Yet, because people with few
resources depend on their animals, they are careful with them. Animal health
contributes to human health, and animals may have high value in a family
setting for that reason. The animal welfare movement has often been classist
and selective: lower-class people have been disproportionately blamed for
ignoring animal welfare, while middle- and upper-class pet owners have been
blind to their own violations of animal welfare. Finally, it is important to
recognize that multiple attitudes toward pet species exist at the same time,
sometimes even for the same animals. A dog can be a pet, a war hero, or
“man’s best friend”; and that dog can also be a nuisance or a danger, a stray, or
a laboratory animal without a name.
Critics of the companion animal industry in high-income societies have
pointed out many problems and inconsistencies. While accusing farmers of
not vaccinating their animals, pet owners themselves often forgot the (annual)
vaccinations of their pets against rabies, parvovirus, kennel cough (Bordetella
or viral infection), canine distemper, and feline leukemia, as well as antipar-
asitic treatment. Many pet owners prefer purebred and cosmetically altered
animals that suffer health problems as a result of genetic anomalies or unneces
sary surgeries. Gradually, cosmetic surgeries, such as trimming the ears and
docking the tails of dogs or declawing cats, have become more widely
considered to be violations of the animal’s welfare, physical integrity, and
rights. Another major problem has been the breeding of pedigree dogs and
cats, resulting in hereditary defects. A well-known example is the French
bulldog, bred for a brachycephalic head shape that results in a constant
shortage of breath, headache, and bulging eyes due to the small skull. Other
skeletal deformities, spinal abnormalities, and patellar luxation are common
problems in this breed. French bulldogs’ slim hips make it difficult, if not
impossible, for these dogs to breed naturally, and they must be artificially
inseminated. In this and other breeds, puppies must be born by caesarean
section due to abnormally shaped bodies. Despite these abnormalities, the
French bulldog is a popular breed in the UK, Australia, and the United States.
Another downside of pet keeping is that owners may lack knowledge about
keeping certain animals. Do people know the proper food, housing, and care of
regular and exotic animals? Poor nutrition, obesity, vegetable foods lacking
necessary proteins for carnivores, insufficient exercise, and confinement are
common problems veterinarians see in pet dogs. Do owners know how to train
their dogs and to control them? Apparently not, since accidents with dog bites
are widespread and sometimes even fatal. This is the case with people who are

keeping aggressive dogs as defending or attacking weapons. Pet owners often

don’t believe that they or their children can become ill from or injured by their
beloved pets. However, animal bites are a problem and outbreaks of rabies still
occur. Other zoonotic diseases result from intense close contacts between
humans and their pets (petting, kissing, licking, sharing food, sleeping
together). Parasites can also be transmitted between pets and people, including
roundworms in children and toxoplasmosis in pregnant women who have been
in contact with pet feces. Veterinarians play a crucial role here in informing
future and existing owners of companion animals. Finally, human cruelty
toward animals remains a problem, despite the increasing emphasis on love
for animals. Research has shown that cruelty to animals is often the prelimin
ary stage of domestic violence; therefore, veterinarians have an important
responsibility to recognize injuries in pets resulting from cruelty. In some
countries courses for vets are given to recognize such injuries, how to discuss
this with involved owners, and the duty to inform responsible authorities.
Unfortunately, pet animals can very quickly change status, from pampered
pet to homeless and hungry. Many pets are abandoned once owners are no
longer able to pay for food or (veterinary) care, or when they go on holidays,
or when their pets get sick, old, start to smell, or cannot be controlled any
longer. Fish and reptiles end up in the sewage system. Abandoned cats
become strays, surviving by killing songbirds and suffering from illnesses
and injuries. If shelters or facilities for abandoned animals are available,
these animals may have a second chance to find a home. But shelters for
abandoned animals do not exist in many parts of the world. According to the
World Health Organization (WHO), there are more than 200 million stray
dogs worldwide. These animals have hard lives and die at younger ages,
and they can spread diseases. For example, rabies virus persists in the
stray dog population worldwide. Rabies in India represents a major public
health problem, with 20,000 human deaths every year due to bites from
infected dogs.
The contradiction between sentiment and indifference toward animals has
also challenged veterinarians because they work on both sides of this changing
market for veterinary services. It has caused tensions between different interest
groups within veterinary associations. Gradually, veterinarians went along
with the shifting attitudes of the general public toward what is considered
ethical in our handling of animals. Vets had their own thoughts about it, but
eventually realized that they could make good money with treating pets. The
veterinary profession responded with further differentiation in education and
specialization and accreditation in practice, all aimed at providing high-quality
care. Modern medical technologies enabled more complex and expensive
treatments of such animals, and many owners were willing to pay for the best
treatment for their beloved animals.

“The Profession Goes to the Dogs”: Veterinary Services for

Companion Animals
A century ago, veterinarians expected few of their patients to have sentimental
value; nor would many veterinarians have considered the treatment of such
animals to be a primary mandate of their profession. Economic value deter
mined whether an animal would get veterinary care. Veterinary medicine
served the commercial interests of livestock owners and the public health,
not owners determined to pamper their pets. This was one of the reasons given
for excluding women from the profession. In 1897, a British veterinarian
acknowledged that women could make good “pet-doctors,” but he also indi
cated his disdain for this type of veterinary practice: “If the practice of
veterinary surgery consisted in making a round of visits among lap-dogs, ...
and simply diagnosing their diseases ... then, and only then, the profession
might be a suitable one for women possessed of any delicacy of feeling.”1
Women did not belong in the stable, barn, or pasture. This long-standing
attitude continues today in some sectors of the veterinary profession.
As we have seen, both the increase in women veterinarians and the shift to
companion animals in veterinary practice have turned this quote into reality
within a century. Companion animals became valuable for sentimental
reasons, and their owners sought veterinary care for their animals. This
development challenged the traditional focus veterinarians had on animal
health because the veterinary profession had to adapt to new ideas about
companion animals. Some veterinarians quickly saw the advantage of a new
patient population whose owners would be willing to pay well for veterinary
services. Gradually, companion animal veterinary practice has grown since the
1960s to be the majority of veterinarians’ work in urban areas, high-income
populations, and even in some rural areas. Veterinarians turned care for
companion animals into a very successful and popular domain of the market
for veterinary services within a couple of decades.
Of course, this has not been a universal trend, and veterinary practice varies
between different regions and different animal populations. A special category
is that of animals valued for a combination of sport, honor, and a kind of close
companionship. For example, pigeons are very popular with rural men in
Pakistan, who collect and train their birds to fly to targets and return. Pigeon
flying competitions are popular, both for honor and economic reward, and the
birds are quite valuable. Special ustad (masters) provide health care for
pigeons, using a combination of traditional Pakistani and Western biomedical
treatments (such as antibiotics). Qualified veterinarians almost never treat these
1 Bell, R. (1897). editorial. American Veterinary Review vol. 21, pp. 595-596, quote on p. 596.

valuable birds; instead, ustad are considered the experts in pigeon physiology,
nutrition, and diseases. Another popular type of bird in rural Pakistan, the
fighting cock, usually receives most of its health care from its owner, the local
imam (for prayer), and - when it is very sick - from a veterinarian who
administers Western biomedical treatment. For the local veterinarians, it is
frustrating because they are often not consulted until the animal is already
dying. Nonetheless, these examples demonstrate that veterinarians have varied
roles in providing health care for valuable small animals around the world, and
that they are often considered supplementary to other animal healers.
In many areas, however, companion animals became big business for the
veterinary profession over the past century. The emotional value of pets and
their higher status in society influenced this change, but the veterinary profes
sion has also worked hard to encourage the market for pet health and care. This
could occur only after veterinary practitioners learned to accept the new
paradigm, in which animals were valued for sentimental rather than economic
reasons. Within this context, veterinarians also had to change their traditional
focus on animal health alone to also include animal welfare, because pet
owners demanded it. In higher-income parts of the world, veterinarians began
to characterize their profession as the experts in animal welfare as well as
animal health during the mid-twentieth century. This strategy served the
veterinary profession well because it defined a higher moral purpose for their
work and supported the valuation of animals based on sentiment. They based
many of their strategies and standards of care on the model of physicians’
practices and human hospitals. Veterinary researchers developed vaccinations
for companion animals, which veterinary practitioners then integrated into an
“annual wellness check-up” for companion animals. Similar to human medi
cine, pet owners received friendly reminders to visit the veterinarian for their
pet’s annual vaccinations and health check. By cooperating with other animal
industries, such as pharmaceutical and pet food companies, veterinarians’
office visits became an important component of expert care of the modern pet.
Veterinarians built clinics and hospitals, incorporating medical technologies
formerly available only in human hospitals. Today, such interventions as open
heart surgery, replacement of the lens in the eyes of older dogs, and long-term
chemotherapy at very high cost are not exceptional. High-level imaging and
genetic testing are also available for animals. Although expensive, these
treatments can more easily be applied to smaller animals. Along with these
technological innovations, veterinarians offer a suitably caring attitude toward
companion animals’ owners, recognizing the owner’s love for their pet. For
example, in the past thirty years, veterinary practices began sending condol
ence cards and letters to owners whose beloved pet had died. Obviously, the
huge increase in the number of pet animals provided ample employment for
companion animal veterinarians. To meet the medical needs of their dogs, an

average household in the United States visited a veterinarian 2.4 times each
year (and for cat owners, 1.3 times per year). In 2018, U.S. dog owners spent
an average of $410 each year on veterinary care; cat owners spent $182 per
year. Increasingly, veterinarians have specialized: for example, feline-only
veterinary practices have grown rapidly in numbers since the 1990s and have
their own certification.
The shift to companion animals has proceeded at a different pace in different
parts of the world, of course. But the trend looks similar: as income and leisure
time increase, so does the demand for veterinary services for companion
animals. Veterinary practices focusing on companion animals were not
common in China until after 1989, with the partial privatization of the
Chinese economy. That year, the first private veterinary practice focusing on
small animals opened in the country’s third-largest city, Guangzhou. By 2015,
Guangzhou counted more than 150 private small animal practices. Other
Chinese cities are also experiencing this same trend. Today, about 20 percent
of all Chinese households own a companion animal. Most of these pets are
dogs, although numbers of other animals (cats, birds, and others) are
slowly increasing.
In China, the veterinary marketplace is quite varied. In cities, the registered
private small animal hospitals (Yi-yuan) employ state-qualified veterinarians;
there are over 5,000 of these in China. Also in cities, there are small clinics
(Xiao-zhen-suo, often attached to pet stores) that are largely unlicensed and
unregistered. These clinics may employ both licensed veterinarians and “vet
erinary technicians,” which are often veterinarians who have graduated from a
three-year curriculum or, after graduation from the five-year curriculum, have
not yet passed the national veterinary qualifying examination. In rural areas,
the veterinary technicians provide most small animal care. A small, but
increasing, sector of this market is corporate veterinary medicine, with one
company owning several private practices. The corporate model, imported
from the West, serves both Chinese and expatriate clients and their
companion animals.
A unique factor in China is the combination of traditional Chinese medicine
(TCM) and Western veterinary medicine. In the 2010s, cooperation between
Chinese and U.S. veterinary schools and organizations led to international
training courses in acupuncture and herbal medicine. This reflected the increas
ing interest in acupuncture and other components of TCM on the part of U.S.
companion animal owners. These treatments have been used on dogs with
arthritis and performance horses with injuries or stiffness, for example. An
estimated 6,000 American veterinarians have completed the certified veterin
ary acupuncture courses offered in the United States. Also in the 2010s, close
cooperation between some Chinese and U.S. veterinary schools began, with
exchanges of students and collaborative educational programs. The major U.S.

formulary, The Merck Veterinary Manual, has been translated into Chinese.
While international politics and diplomatic relationships will affect these types
of cooperative programs, the combining of Chinese and Western veterinary
knowledge and practice is likely to continue because companion animal
owners in the West and in China are demanding it.
With a long-standing capitalist economy, the situation is somewhat different
in Japan. In 2013, the Japanese Veterinary Medical Association reported over
13,000 small animal practitioners, which was 76 percent of all private practi
tioners in the country. The rise of companion animal practice reflected the
increase in ownership of these animals. Japan counted an estimated 12 million
dogs and 10 million cats by 2015. As with other capitalist countries, compan
ion animal ownership closely reflects the state of the economy, per capita
income, and amount of leisure time. Expecting this trend to continue in the
future, Japanese veterinary leaders have called for more continuing education
programs on the topic of companion animal medicine and for veterinarians to
work with animal humane organizations on animal welfare. Many nations
around the world report that a majority of veterinarians today specialize in
“small animal” or companion animal practice: South Africa, Brazil, most
European nations, the United States, Canada, and many more. Worldwide,
the pet care market is growing fastest in Asia and Latin America.
We cannot predict whether the veterinary profession will continue to shift
toward focusing on companion animals, but many indicators point in this
direction. Privately owned veterinary practices are more likely to treat the
animals whose owners will pay for their services. This has been true since the
era of the horse as veterinarians’ most valuable patients. These veterinarians’
work will be most responsive to broader economic shifts, closely following the
development of wealth. The other major sectors of veterinary medicine, public,
government, military, and industrial employment, respond not only to per
capita income but also to international markets and regulation. For all of these
market sectors, one of the keys to success is the development and adoption of
new technologies.
Technological Developments and Backlash at the Turn of the

Twenty-First Century
Technological developments have influenced veterinary medicine for centur
ies, from the thermometer to the microscope to the radiograph (X-rays). The
turn of the twenty-first century witnessed another rapid increase in the adop
tion of new technologies by veterinarians. Often, veterinary medicine has
adapted technologies built for human patients to the needs of individual animal
patients. Basic tools that we take for granted today - indwelling catheters,
echocardiograms, detailed blood cell and body chemistry tests - were not

Technological Developments & Backlash of Twenty-First Century 345
widely available in veterinary practice until a few decades ago (and are still
rare in some parts of the world). The development of nuclear science during
World War II enabled new technologies that could trace molecules moving
through the body’s metabolism and allow clinicians to see inside the body at
high resolution - all without penetrating the skin. As we have seen, new
pharmaceuticals revolutionized the ability of veterinarians to heal both individ
ual animals and protect entire herds. Biotechnologies have developed at a rapid
pace since then, including molecular genetic techniques such as polymerase
chain reaction (PCR) that have facilitated new knowledge about conditions such
as cancer and new vaccines and therapeutics such as interferons.
By the late 1900s and early 2000s, readily accessible high-speed computing
also brought important new tools to veterinary research and practice.
Veterinarians now use computerized axial tomography (CT scanning), mag
netic resonance imaging (MRI), and other digital tools for diagnosis and
treatment of individual patients. Herd management and herd health have also
become computerized, solving the problem of how to organize and access
information about large numbers of animals. Even in the remotest places,
satellite communications, remote sensing, and other technologies enable vet
erinarians to communicate and send samples to central laboratories. Life
without digital tools is hard to imagine these days. The benefits are tremen
dous: veterinarians can do much more for our animal patients, food safety, and
animal husbandry. The advantages for veterinarians are undeniable; but these
major changes also have critics. What are the consequences of, and responses
to, technological and digital innovations in the veterinary profession and
practices of veterinarians and animal healers?
The Digital World: New Opportunities, Old Challenges

Today it is hard to imagine that only a few decades ago everyone was writing
on paper with a pencil or pen or using a typewriter. In veterinary hospitals and
practices, data about patients and pharmaceutical inventories were kept in
paper files and card catalogues. From the 1970s onward, copy and fax
machines became more common, while calculations and statistics could be
done on electronic calculators. The digital revolution in veterinary practices
started in the 1980s, when hospitals and larger practices began acquiring
personal computers with programs that facilitated word processing, collecting
and storing data, and applying statistics. Originally developed in the 1960s, the
digital Internet (a vast network of computers) and electronic mail came into
general use during the 1990s, allowing fast exchange of information and data
that also changed scientific research. In 1996, 16 million people in the world
used the Internet. By 2006, 1.6 billion people used it to buy things, get
information, and communicate.

Another major innovation, the mobile phone, was originally installed in

vehicles. Although expensive, a mobile phone was very useful for veterinar
ians traveling to farms and distant villages. The development of cellular
networks and standardized equipment meant that mobile phones could be used
beyond local areas; by the early 2000s, these networks had connected people
around the world. More remote areas used satellite technology for networking.
As hand-held cellular phones became smaller and cheaper, their availability
and use exploded around the world in the 2000s. By 2010, cellular networks
and the Internet were both available on smartphones. The smartphone’s user
could carry a device that combined phone, computer, and camera in their
pocket, enabling face-to-face online communication at any time. The digital
world has now become an essential part of people’s daily lives.
The digital and technological developments at the turn of the twenty-first
century also reached into animal husbandry. These innovations brought bless
ings but also caused new problems. Biomedical science and technology and
the development of GMOs (genetically modified organisms) contributed to
even more intensive livestock raising and higher efficiency and productivity.
Farmers requested veterinary guidance for preventive medicine and detailed
electronic invoicing to improve their herd management. Exchange and
accountability were also facilitated by computers when identification and
registration of animals became required by veterinary legislation, either in
tracing and tracking during campaigns against animal diseases or in the use
of veterinary drugs. At first, identification of animals was done with sketches
of exterior characteristics or ear tags. Transponders facilitated the identification
and storage of specific data of individual animals, and computer programs now
monitored large livestock herds. Technologies for processing livestock
(slaughter lines, butchering, deboning, meat technologies such as preservation,
irradiating, dielectric heating, etc.) became more automated, controlled by
computers. Workers had to adjust to faster assembly lines. Food companies
used digital media to expand the impact of their message: that their meat, milk,
and other animal products were very safe and cheap. Using the Internet, pet
food and veterinary drug companies also advertised and sold their products
widely. Consumers now had even easier access to information, products,
supplements, and drugs for their animals.
Veterinarians had to adapt to the digital world, with its technological
opportunities but also its consequences. Like physicians, vets encountered
clients whose “Internet education” enabled them to question veterinary author
ity. Farmers could evade veterinarians altogether by ordering medications on
the Internet (a long-standing problem that only increased with Internet access).
Veterinary medicine and veterinarians themselves also used the Internet (and,
increasingly, social media) to advertise and compete for clients. Veterinary
professional ethics had long discouraged advertising as undignified and unfair;

but healers and veterinarians had always found ways to market their services
and compete with each other. The Internet enabled them to reach far larger
groups of potential clients, however, and made the crowded, contentious
veterinary marketplace more visible. Computer-based recordkeeping, for
patients and inventory, has become common in even smaller veterinary prac
tices. The veterinary profession has also gained new visibility due to the
media. In some countries, television documentaries and series on animals
and veterinary medicine became very popular, bringing the profession and
its professionals out of the shadows into the spotlight. Most portrayed veterin
arians as medical heroes, bringing comfort and health to people and animals.
However, many familiar social problems accelerated during the 2000s with
the rise of virtual web-based networks and communities (social media), which
changed everyday life considerably. This intensified the general feeling that
everyone should be available continuously within a 24-hour economy, increas
ing workers’ stress and fatigue. Digital social networks’ lack of regulation, and
little education for consumers, led to the spread of deceptive information that
caused uncertainty, xenophobia, digital fraud, crime, hacking, and deliberate
deception by dissemination of false data. For veterinarians, similar to other
medical fields, the output of information dealing with all facets of veterinary
medicine grew dramatically. Due to Internet search engines, such as Google
and PubMed, an endless stream of publications in an ever-increasing number
of digital scientific journals became available, also to the wider public. The
pressure on research scientists to publish (“publish or perish” - lose their jobs)
in high-impact journals became stressful and did not always improve the
quality of the research performed. For researchers, practicing veterinarians,
and the public, it has become more difficult than ever to navigate through the
overload of information to find what they need.
To be successful, veterinarians need information-processing skills and even
more sophisticated communication skills. Convincing a client to ignore misin
formation found on the Internet can be very difficult; likewise, clients may
have unrealistic expectations. For example, discussions with clients about
anthropomorphizing their pets represent a common challenge for companion
animal veterinarians. “Anthropomorphizing” is defined as attributing human
characteristics or behavior to animals and treating them as if they were human.
In wealthy countries, some companion animals now have the same problems
as their owners: obesity, cancer, mental illness, and other chronic lifestyle
conditions. At the same time, abandoned animals or those seen as merely an
economic resource may not receive appropriate feed, shelter, and medical care.
Even if treatments are available, many owners cannot afford to spend a lot of
money treating their animals.
Veterinarians occupy a difficult position: they are independent scientific
experts and animal advocates, but they are also entrepreneurs often competing

for clients. Do they discuss the premise that humans as reasonable beings have
a moral duty of care for kept animals (which means that suffering should be
avoided)? Do they outline limits? Must everything that is technically possible
be done? At what point should an individual animal be euthanized? These
daily decisions for practicing veterinarians must be effectively negotiated and
communicated with animals’ owners. Given the wide availability of infor
mation, and the ever-increasing complexity of veterinary medicine and sur
gery, good communication skills are absolutely essential to today’s
veterinarian. Recognizing this, veterinary schools are increasingly requiring
students to study the so-called soft skills such as communication, deontology,
ethics, and decision making.
Traditional Expertise First, Technology Second

One interesting aspect of technologies is the fact that people must decide how
and when to use them. As we know, European-style veterinary medicine is a
relative newcomer to much of the world. In many areas, both rural and urban
animal owners provided their own animal health care first and then decided
how to partner with veterinarians (if vet services were available). Owners had a
great deal of expertise in preventing and treating animal injuries and diseases.
They had developed and circulated expert knowledge during years of raising
livestock. This local expertise included ideas about contagion and preventing
disease spread; practices to protect animals from environmental problems such
as insect vectors of disease; and which problems were likely, given climate
conditions. This knowledge influenced veterinarians, both those educated
within the country of their birth and those who emigrated.
For example, the disease “redwater” (bovine babesiosis) was unknown to
European-trained veterinarians when they arrived in Kenya in the early 1900s.
This disease, known as Alembo in the local Dholuo language, was common in
cattle in the Kenyan district of Kisumu on Lake Victoria and also in the
Bukusu community in western Kenya. Cattle owners understood that it came
from ticks, and that nonlethal infection of young animals raised locally made
them immune to the disease. But European cattle brought to these areas died of
acute disease, and early veterinarians noted the high fever, weakness, nervous
system signs, and dark red urine (thus the name “redwater”). Only after
learning about the connection to ticks did European animal owners and
veterinarians begin to apply arsenic-based and other insecticides to prevent
infection, after 1910.
To fight tick-borne diseases, cattle owners had (and still have) their own
regimes of control that included tick removal and destruction, burning pastures
and grazing areas, and applying insect repellants. Wycliffe Wanzala, surveying
the Bukusu community in 2012, found that the cattle owners applied an

integrated method of tick control into which they could insert commercial
insecticides when available and affordable. Every morning, family and commu
nity members hand-picked ticks off the cattle and destroyed them. Cattle were
deliberately herded into areas frequented by tick-eating birds, the Kamacharia or
oxpeckers (Buphagus africanus). At night in enclosures, they burned grasses
and branches to create smoke to make the ticks drop off the animals. Pastures
and grazing areas were regularly burned to kill the ticks. Local animal healers
sold proprietary ethno-botanical products, which owners applied to the animals
as tick repellents. Commercial chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides worked
faster and were highly effective in the worst-affected areas. However, these
chemicals were expensive; very toxic to people, birds, and mammals; and not
always available; and the ticks developed tolerance to them. For these reasons,
even after veterinary control and cattle dipping were instituted in the 1960s,
cattle owners in western Kenya continued to rely on their own expertise and
practices to prevent tick-borne diseases such as redwater and East Coast fever.
They simply added periodic dipping to their usual practices.
In rural Tanzania, cattle owners also reported tick-borne diseases (mainly
East Coast fever and anaplasmosis) as the major cause of mortality and
morbidity in their animals. Here, the problem was more severe: almost half
the young cattle died within the first year of life, despite farmers’ attempts to
control ticks. East Coast fever, caused by a blood-borne parasite, was a good
example of the need for targeted technological development: a vaccine, pref
erably. To immunize animals, veterinarians used the “infection and treatment
method,” consisting of immunization with extracts from infected ticks
followed by a dose of long-acting oxytetracycline. This method caused symp
toms but not severe clinical disease while seroconverting about 80 percent of
animals, so it was effective. However, the problems with immunization
reflected societal factors: the vaccine was not heat stable and refrigerators
were rare; it was expensive; and it was packaged in vials with large numbers
of doses, which was not practical for the small herds kept by most livestock
owners. Technological development of vaccines and immunizations against
East Coast fever and other diseases had not been targeted to serve small-scale
rural farmers. Most small-scale farmers continued to rely on their own strat
egies of prevention: tick removal (by hand) and keeping animals away from
wildlife and areas known to be infested with ticks. Cattle owners decided how
to combine their own treatments with those available from veterinarians.
This pattern continued in other areas. In rapidly urbanizing African nations
such as Ethiopia, people brought their livestock with them to the city to ensure
that they would have a reliable food supply. In Dar es Salaam, for example,
almost 75 percent of residents kept livestock even in densely populated parts of
the city. This practice was illegal but tolerated by the local government, so that
citizens could feed themselves. In Kenya, half a million people lived in the city

of Kisumu and its municipal area, which contained many rural-like open
spaces (roadsides, unused lands, and rubbish dumps). A study by veterinarians
J.M. Kagira and P.W.N. Kanyari estimated that 60 percent of Kisumu’s
citizens participated in urban agriculture and kept cattle, chickens, goats, and
other livestock. Most of these animals were grazed in open spaces and housed
in bomas at night. Kisumu’s citizens brought rural knowledge with them and
adapted it to urban livestock raising.
In 2007, the major disease problems in Kisumu’s urban cattle included
lumpy skin disease, worms, diarrhea, respiratory problems, foot and mouth
disease, and impaction from ingesting rubbish (plastic bags). The municipal
area was served by veterinarians and local animal healers, while farmers
provided many treatments themselves. These treatments included traditional
ethno-veterinary products and remedies obtained from pharmacies and agro-
veterinary shops. Veterinarians relied heavily on vaccine technologies to carry
out anti-disease campaigns against foot and mouth disease and rinderpest;
anthelmintics to treat parasites; and antibiotics for serious infections.
However, the cost of veterinary services was the main limitation to using even
basic technologies in places such as Kisumu. The authors of the Kisumu study
concluded that the best way to provide veterinary services was through the
government-sponsored district veterinary offices. When these governmental
veterinary services were privatized, due to the World Bank’s financial restruc
turing programs in the late 1980s, farmers could not afford to pay for vaccin
ations and other veterinary care. This set of social problems - urbanization,
poverty, and government versus privatized veterinary services - limited the
ability of veterinarians to employ the necessary technologies.
“We Need These Technologies”: Veterinary Responses to

Technological Innovations
In wealthy areas around the world, veterinary practice has become dependent
on medical technology to a large extent during the past few decades. Patient
owners want the same high-tech instruments, equipment, techniques, and
drugs used in human medicine to be applied by veterinarians in treating their
animals. Noninvasive diagnostic imaging with advanced X-ray, ultrasound,
CT scanning, electron and scanning electron microscopy, MRI, and nuclear
perfusion scintigraphy have increasingly enabled veterinarians to “see inside”
their patients’ bodies while avoiding invasive procedures. Special courses and
advanced training in radiography and imaging became widespread in veterin
ary schools’ curricula. Beyond imaging, other relatively noninvasive proced
ures such as endoscopy, laparoscopy, and arthroscopy were made possible by
the development of accurate and less expensive instruments, which veterinary
students could learn to use during their education. Diagnostic veterinary

internal medicine benefited from ever-more sophisticated laboratory tests:

biochemistries to analyze organ function; hematology to assess immune func
tion; histopathology; monoclonal antibody testing; and many others.
Introduced in the last decades of the twentieth century, new generations of
drugs as well as more sophisticated inhalation anesthetics were and have
improved diagnostic and therapeutic possibilities. Double-blind, randomized,
and (placebo)controlled clinical trials and evidence-based veterinary medicine
became the standard for testing efficiency of drugs and therapies.
New materials and techniques have also changed human and animal sur
gery. For example, in university and specialist veterinary hospitals, improved
fracture fixation methods and the development of prosthetic body parts have
greatly decreased amputations and improved recovery. During the past decade,
the development of patient-specific 3D implants - new knees for dogs, for
example - is gaining ground in the veterinary world. In 2018, veterinary
surgeons in Canada and the Netherlands succeeded in printing new titanium
craniums (skull caps) and implanting them into dogs who had large tumors
removed from the skull. An advantage of 3D printing of prostheses is that each
part can be perfectly tailored for the individual animal (Fig. 7.2).
Figure 7.2 Surgery on a dog’s skull, Utrecht 2018. After removal of a large
tumor, a 3D-printed titanium implant is fixed on the skull. Printed from
porous titanium, the edge allows the bone to grow into the implant and
integrate it into the skull.
Courtesy: Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University.

Technological innovations have also helped the veterinary profession

address public concerns about animal welfare by reducing the number of
laboratory animals used by researchers and almost eliminating the use of
animals to train veterinary and medical students. Instead of using laboratory
animals, tissues, and organs, students now learn practical veterinary skills such
as drawing blood, suturing, and 3D anatomy and physiology on models made
of plastic, silicon, or plastinated organic tissue (which has the added benefit of
being environmentally sustainable). For students planning to work with live
stock production, it is essential to become proficient in the determination of a
cow’s estrus cycle stage and dating of pregnancies. Until recently, this meant
subjecting pregnant practice animals to repeated examinations by dozens of
inexperienced students, which caused discomfort and bleeding for the animals.
Recently, haptic technology (kinesthetic communication or 3D-touch) has
begun to be applied in high-tech robotic artificial cows and horses in a few
veterinary schools. This simulator allows students to practice conducting rectal
examination in a safe environment before they move on to real animals,
resulting in less discomfort for animals and more practice for students.
Students learn to confidently locate, palpate, and determine the position,
consistency, and shape of reproductive organs. Pressure sensors attached to
the silicon organs also allow students to see what they are feeling.
Recent advances in genetic and genomic technologies raise new issues
about the ability to manipulate animal production in the future. For example,
research on human and animal genomics has increased knowledge about the
relation between genome and disease and has resulted in genetic tests to
identify a high risk of disease. Another well-known example is cloning
animals. In this procedure, a biopsy of tissue DNA is extracted from the
animal to be cloned. Scientists then prepare recipient fertilized eggs by remov
ing their DNA and replacing it with the DNA from the animal they wish to
clone. This procedure was very complex, and it took years to create viable
cloned eggs that could be implanted into surrogate mothers. In 1996, scientists
at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Scotland, successfully cloned a sheep
they named Dolly. This Finn Dorset sheep, the first clone of an adult mammal,
lived until 2003. Just a few years later, a multi-million-dollar project was
started in the United States with the goal of cloning a beloved dog named
“Missy.” Although the “Missyplicity Project” failed, South Korean scientists
succeeded in cloning a dog they named “Snuppy” in 2005. Two years later,
they achieved a clone of “Missy.” Named “Mira,” this dog was the world’s
first clone of a family pet.
What began as an interesting laboratory project for genomic scientists now
has the capability to produce identical animals for anyone wealthy enough to
pay for the service. In February 2000 a company was founded in response to
the growing demand of customers who wanted to clone their beloved

companion animals. Since then, gene-banking technology has been used to

preserve DNA to clone dogs and cats, a technique which costs between US
$25,000 and $50,000 per animal. As with many new technologies, however,
cloning will probably become cheaper and easier over time if there is a market
for it. Possibly during the lifetime of today’s veterinary students, cloning of
pets and livestock could become routine. The “ideal” animal may be within our
reach, designed by and for human desires. To some observers, these proced
ures present ethical problems. To others, genetic manipulations are acceptable
because they are only the latest version of animal breeding practices that have
become more and more human controlled. For decades, artificial insemination
has been used to increase the impact of superior bulls, rams, and boars on
livestock herds. Frozen sperm of superior animals is used worldwide in
artificial insemination. In the 2000s, DNA patterns of young male animals
are now routinely compared with markers from a reference group of high
performing animals to select good breeding animals. The latest breeding
methods include embryo-transplant and in vitro fertilizations in livestock.
Veterinarians’ adoption of new technologies has depended on several
factors: the type, size, and location of the veterinary clinic; the patient popula
tions; the relative wealth of the animal owners; and the education of the
veterinarian. Research has shown that veterinary practices employ newer
technologies when they are viewed as effective for a common veterinary
problem and cost-effective, and when the veterinarian feels comfortable using
them. Medical supply companies spend huge amounts of money advertising,
running educational seminars and workshops, and demonstrating the uses of
new veterinary technologies (including pharmaceuticals). While these newer
technologies are protected by patent, they are expensive and mainly used by
veterinarians working with wealthier clients. However, once generic versions
are available, newer pharmaceuticals are often used in remote areas of the
world, if they are not too expensive and if they do not require frozen storage.
Veterinarians in remote areas caring for livestock find that their clients are
often willing to adopt vaccines and treatments from Western veterinary medi
cine and integrate them with more local, traditional treatments. Portable
scanners and X-ray machines and in-field blood sampling are quite commonly
used by veterinarians even in remote areas.
However, technological advancements have also caused concerns and some
issues for the veterinary profession. In wealthy countries, many people are
worried about the welfare of the animals living in factory farms, despite the
best veterinary care. Consumers have questioned the safety of their food,
produced in high-output slaughterhouses. Critics have sometimes accused
modern veterinary medicine of ignoring the ethical problems of high-intensity
animal agriculture and food production. In the area of companion animal
practice, some animal owners have criticized veterinarians for suggesting very

expensive diagnostic techniques and treatments. These clients are suspicious

that veterinarians are simply trying to make more money or satisfy their
scientific curiosity, at the owner’s expense. Finally, veterinary care was not
equally available to all people, and studies showed that veterinarians commonly
chose to work in the wealthiest areas. This meant that only wealthy people and
their animals were entitled to benefit from the almost limitless possibilities of the
digital information explosion and its associated technologies. For the veterinary
profession, this mismatch between the distribution of veterinarians and the needs
of societies was a workforce problem. But it was also a larger social problem -
public investment in veterinary education has often been insufficient. Many
areas of the world remain underserved and many animal owners cannot afford
to pay for veterinary care. This uneven social investment has limited the use of
many of the latest technologies, no matter how effective they are.
Success in meeting veterinary goals comes with the right combination of
technology and social investment, and an excellent example is successful
disease control campaigns. By 2010, veterinarians eagerly anticipated one of
the profession’s greatest triumphs: the eradication of rinderpest, the “cattle
killer” that had devastated livestock and wild animal populations for centuries.
The End of the “Cattle Killer” and Celebrating World

Veterinary Year
Today, only two diseases have been eradicated from the earth: smallpox and
rinderpest. Rinderpest eradication gained traction in the 1960s when the Food
and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Office International des Epizooties
(OIE) helped coordinate national and regional programs. At the same time,
veterinary pathologist Walter Plowright and colleagues, working in Muguga
(Kenya), developed a new tissue culture vaccine against the rinderpest virus.
After years of work, Plowright had a vaccine that was safe and cheap, and
produced lifelong immunity in animals susceptible to rinderpest (however, this
vaccine required refrigeration - a significant disadvantage in the field). In East
Asia, the vaccine developed by Junji Nakamura and colleagues during World
War II had been used to create disease-free belts and regions. Using this
vaccine and strict campaigns of stamping-out and surveillance, rinderpest
was eradicated in China and Taiwan by about 1960. In Japan, Kazuya
Yamanouchi and colleagues developed a new vaccine in 1976. They noted
the close genetic relationships between the rinderpest, measles, and canine
distemper viruses - thus potentially linking the evolution of viral infections in
humans, dogs, cattle, and sheep. Rinderpest remained a problem in the Middle
East, India, and eastern Africa, but the tools necessary for a global eradication
campaign - technologies and expertise - were now available. How would
these tools be used?

The End of the “Cattle Killer” and Celebrating World Veterinary Year 355
Successful eradication campaigns are rare because they require not just
technologies and expertise, but also governments’ commitments, international
cooperation, a lot of money, and good luck. The “good luck” refers to the
nature of the virus itself: how rapidly it mutated, whether its various subtypes
would evade vaccine-induced immunity, and so on. Rinderpest virus did not
mutate rapidly, and the important strains belonged to the same serotype, so that
was lucky. But there were other challenges: rinderpest traveled the world with
armies and with the global economy of animals and animal products; and
because it infected wildlife, rinderpest could hide from veterinary surveillance.
Both these challenges made this disease difficult to eradicate, and earlier
campaigns to control it had not succeeded in preventing further outbreaks.
An African resurgence of rinderpest in cattle in the 1970s, probably originating
in wild giraffes and kudus, touched off another pan-African epizootic. From
South Asia, armies carried the disease to the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
In the 1980s, the FAO and OIE again began lobbying governments and
international agencies to fund international rinderpest eradication campaigns.
Emboldened by the success of the WHO’s smallpox eradication campaign,
the OIE, FAO, and international veterinary leaders developed the “Rinderpest
Pathway” to eradicate the disease from the earth. This “pathway” did not
always make sense to livestock owners: used to depending on vaccination,
they were reluctant to stop vaccinating as a test to see whether the virus was
truly gone from the area. As with foot and mouth disease, available serological
testing could not differentiate between an animal that had survived a natural
infection and one that had been vaccinated. Both carried antibodies to the
virus. If an unvaccinated region remained free of rinderpest cases for three
years, it was declared free of the disease; after two more rinderpest-free years,
the region had eradicated the infection. That five-year wait was excruciating
for small-scale farmers, who feared losing their unvaccinated livestock.
Veterinarians worked hard to educate and encourage farmers, but their reaction
shows how rinderpest had different effects on small-scale subsistence livestock
raisers than it did on the big producers selling to the intensive global economy.
Subsistence farmers had more to lose (their family’s livelihood), while large
producers in wealthy countries had mostly disease-free herds and could expect
compensation. In this way, the type of production was an important predictor
of whether national governments and international organizations were willing
to fund global eradication.
In the summer of 2011, the OIE and FAO officially announced that infec
tions of the dreaded cattle killer, rinderpest, had been eradicated from the
earth’s animals. Throughout its long history with humans and their animals,
rinderpest virus caused almost unimaginable misery, starvation, destitution,
death, and the dissolution of whole societies. By some measures, this disease
drove the establishment of modern veterinary schools, services, and regimes in

many parts of the world. It was a major reason for founding the OIE. After
almost a century of effort, rinderpest eradication was a major triumph for
veterinary medicine. The timing was almost perfect: 2012 would be the
250th anniversary of the first European veterinary school at Lyon in France
opening its doors. Since the Royal Decree establishing the school dated to
1761, vets around the world decided to celebrate both the Lyon Ecole’s
anniversary and the declaration that rinderpest was eradicated in 2011, during
a celebratory “World Veterinary Year.” At the World Veterinary Congress,
held in Cape Town, South Africa, OIE Director General Bernard Vallat called
the activities of the veterinary profession “a global public good” and reminded
the audience that veterinarians were not only doctors for animals but were also
essential to human welfare and public health. Veterinarians aided animal
protein production, worked in food safety and prevention of human diseases,
and therefore helped alleviate poverty around the world. Veterinary medicine
has had many successes and accomplishments in its 250-plus years. Clearly,
the profession had broadened its mandate: from mainly caring for armies’
horses during the 1700s, veterinarians in the 2000s treated companion animals,
contributed to global food security, and worked to control zoonoses. Vallat
saw the veterinary profession as a strong partner in ongoing international
efforts to deploy scientific developments (such as vaccines) for the betterment
of both animals and humans around the world.
The rinderpest campaigns proved that it was feasible to eradicate an animal
disease if all the necessary factors were in place: international and national
cooperation, with fairly stable political and military regimes; funding; the
availability of veterinary and other trained personnel; and persistence and
patience. However, as expected, wiping out the rinderpest in wild animals
was the final challenge. Particularly in regions of Africa, scientists needed to
understand the broader ecology of rinderpest in wild ungulates (antelopes,
buffaloes, wildebeest, giraffes, and wild pigs). Only then could they be sure
that smoldering infections would not flare up to cause epizootics in domesti
cated animals and threaten the survival of Africa’s wildlife heritage. We next
turn to the major challenges facing the veterinary profession and its partners,
now and in the future.
The 2010s: Veterinary Medicine, Now and the Future

The first decades of the twenty-first century witnessed the emergence and re
emergence of global outbreaks of infectious diseases that were closely related
to environmental disruptions and changes. It became clear that ecological and
epidemiological methods were needed to understand disease that could not
only be explained by the reductionist approach of germ theories. These

The 2010s: Veterinary Medicine, Now and the Future 357
emerging and reemerging diseases were a reminder that most human infectious
diseases are zoonoses (shared by humans and animals) and are influenced by
environmental conditions. The field of disease ecology, overshadowed during
the second half of the twentieth century by reductionist molecular biology and
microbiology, further developed to provide answers to the disease challenges
imposed on animals, humans, and veterinary medicine by environmental
change. In this final section, we discuss how the complex and dynamic
interactions between groups of animals, humans, plants, ecosystems, and
microorganisms influenced ideas and actions regarding the control of animal
and human diseases during the 2010s. For the veterinary profession, the usual
concerns about economics and workforce were joined by fears of zoonotic
disease outbreaks and epidemics. In response, the veterinary profession has
been a major driver of a recent approach that builds on disease ecology and
comparative medicine - One Health. This approach broadened during the early
2000s in response to growing alarm about climate change, ecosystem destruc
tion, and the human impact on the planet.
Sustainable Animal Production in a Globalizing World

As agricultural historian Paul Brassley has described, the global economy
intensified when producers from the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand
entered the European markets. At first this was international trade with move
ment of commodities, but in the course of the twentieth century this global
economy also included the transfer of labor and technology, foreign invest
ment, and advertising/branding. This was true for rich countries, where big
high-tech international companies sold branded goods in an essentially global
food chain (subject to national and international politics) for a market of
consumers that spent about 20 percent of their disposable income on their
food. However, this global economy did not reflect the food system in many
parts of the world. Small producers, using traditional production methods,
supplied food for the local market for less wealthy consumers, who spent
about 70 percent of their income on food. Much of this local meat and milk
production did not rely much on formally trained veterinarians, and its impacts
on the labor supply and environment usually remained local.
However, the global economy for animal-derived foods required huge
amounts of basic resources (animal feed, water, land) and international veter
inary cooperation to create systems of food inspection for safety and quality
control. When the quality and safety of these goods was compromised by food
scandals or food poisoning, it immediately became a very sensitive political
matter. As we have seen, this was not a new problem for veterinarians, but it
certainly became more complex during the past half-century. From the 1960s
onward, the “Green Revolution” yielded a spectacular increase in crop

production in many countries achieved by the use of new chemical fertilizers,

synthetic herbicides, pesticides, and high-yield crop varieties. In China, India,
and Mexico, international scientific collaborations changed the cultivation
patterns of wheat, rice, and other crops. Livestock raising changed, also, with
a shift to bigger populations of animals, often raised in high densities (inten
sive animal production). With more supply came more consumer demand for
meat, milk, and other animal-origins foods. More areas of the world were
becoming incorporated into the global economy as the new millennium began
in 2000. The benefits for the global food production were obvious, even if this
increased production caused the decline of traditional agriculture.
The global economy, and its cycle of growing demand for animal foods and
increasing populations of animals, meant that huge quantities of land, water,
and animal feed were required. “Factory farms” (raising animals in high
densities) in the Global North have been notorious for poor animal welfare;
producing huge amounts of manure and greenhouse gas emissions (methane,
CO2); and overuse of water, land degradation, and erosion of biodiversity. In
Figure 7.3, the amount of plant-based animal feed necessary to produce foods
of animal origin in one year (2016) is shown. The problems with these
livestock feeding practices also led directly to other environmental impacts
Feed required to produce one kilogram of meat or dairy product Our World
in Data
This is measured as dry matter feed in kilograms per kilogram of edible weight output.
Figure 7.3 Globalization of animal feed. Required amount of feed to produce

1 kg of meat, eggs, or dairy products, measured as dry matter feed in kg per
kg of edible weight output.
Source: Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, “Meat and Dairy Production,” Our World in
Data, 2016/2019, https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production .

such as deforestation in Brazil and Thailand, and nutrient deficits throughout

the Global South. In recent years, many groups of people have expressed
concern about environmental damage, the reduction of agricultural biodiver
sity, and the loss of more sustainable farming practices. Many have called for a
“new green revolution” based on less pollution, ecosystem disruption and
global sustainability. Environmental health became a very important political
issue in the first decades of the twenty-first century, as shown by the 2015 Paris
Climate Accords, a legally binding international treaty on climate change.
Concerned scientists, critical consumers, and environmentalists have urged
governments to change the global food economy and livestock industries and
turn to more sustainable food production practices. For example, small-scale
organic farming has increased in recent years, and some consumers prefer
organic products over the mass-produced products of factory farming. They
assume that this food is healthier and that the animals in organic farming
systems experience a higher level of welfare (the animals are more comfort
able). Free-roaming animals, outdoors with more space, are more able to
behave naturally and do not have the stress of confinement. They are also
not fed antibiotics, growth-promoting hormones, and other artificial substances
that may pass into the meat and milk. On the other hand, research shows that
some animals raised organically are sick more often than those in confined
systems in which antibiotics, de-wormers, and other medications are heavily
used. Free-ranging chickens, pigs, and goats have more infections because
they are in contact with possible carriers of pathogens in their environments.
Small-scale organic production is also more expensive for the consumer.
Largely for this reason, the organic food market has remained small, at about
2 to 6 percent of mainstream factory farming. Of course, many people around
the world do not eat animal products, either by choice or due to the cost.
However, the global animal products economy has continued to grow in recent
years, and it still depends mainly on factory farming practices.
For veterinarians, public concern about factory farming and the call to return
to earlier farming practices represented a challenge. Since the end of World
War II, the veterinary profession had increasingly shaped itself to the needs of
animals raised in high densities. Keeping animals alive and well in the global
economy required eliminating the infections and parasites that could kill them
quickly when living in high-density populations. Using large amounts of
antimicrobials, anthelmintics, and other chemicals was the basis of veterinary
herd health. This became increasingly controversial, however. From the 1960s
onward, global antibiotic use in livestock caused growing concerns about
risks of drug residues and antimicrobial resistance. Methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) posed a problem in hospitals. The veterinary
profession was blamed by the medical authorities for causing antimicrobial
resistance due to the widespread use of antibiotics in treating animals. In

return, veterinarians claimed that research showed that veterinary use was
responsible for about 20 percent of such resistance, while the rest was due to
widespread use of antibiotics and unhygienic circumstances in hospitals.
Either way, the pathogens responsible for many long-standing infectious
diseases had developed some degree of resistance to traditional antibiotics,
urging new ways of treatment.
Animals raised in lower-density, outdoor, “natural” surroundings no longer
required the same type of high-tech preventive care veterinarians provided for
factory farms. Animals raised outdoors were exposed to (and became infected
with) parasites and microbial infections that previous generations of veterinar
ians had battled. The concerns about drug residues led to regulations forbid
ding or restricting the use of antimicrobials and other chemicals in animals
raised for human consumption. Therefore, veterinarians working with small
scale, organic farming had to learn new ways - or re-learn old ways - of
keeping animals healthy without relying on feed additives and “magic bullet”
chemotherapeutics. They were not trained to provide herd health care for
natural production and had to improvise in practice. Veterinary schools’
curricula only began to change in the mid-2010s, with a few schools in the
United States and Europe beginning to offer some instruction in “alternative”
modalities of treatment and prevention. One survey of midwestern U.S. veter
inarians found that, although organic livestock raisers were a very small
proportion of their clients, about half said they would be interested in knowing
more about how to serve these clients. Over half of all veterinarians surveyed
admitted that they had little knowledge about treatment options for organic
animal production; but they believed that better veterinary knowledge would
help the farmers and increase their profits.
Veterinarians seek training and knowledge to meet the needs of their clients
and to respond to regulations and laws governing animal production. Of
course, these conditions differ from place to place. Much of the world’s food,
purchased directly from the farmer or at local open markets, is not raised under
veterinary care or sold under veterinary inspection. Especially if such food is
kept without proper preservation, cooling, inspection, or supervision, food
safety may be compromised. Chemotherapeutics may also be unregulated,
leading to improper use of antibiotics and other chemicals freely available to
farmers. Regulating the distribution and sale of veterinary pharmaceuticals has
been a long-standing problem for the profession. The veterinary profession
now, as in the past, will adapt and help shape the ways livestock are raised for
food in the future.
Environmental health is another growth area for veterinary medicine. This
approach, closely allied with veterinary public health, calls for a broader
education and working with environmental scientists. This field grew from
concerns about environmental residues of chemicals, for example, with

insecticides used to kill vectors of diseases in humans and animals. A good

example is the chemical DDT, which began mass production as an insecti
cide around 1940 and was used to kill disease-carrying lice affecting World
War II troops and civilian refugees. By the 1960s, DDT was being used as a
very effective agent against the mosquito responsible for spreading malaria.
Malaria incidence and deaths decreased dramatically in many parts of the
world. However, scientists noticed as early as the 1950s that mosquitos
developed resistance to DDT. As more mosquitos survived being sprayed
with DDT, operators applied higher and higher doses. Unfortunately, exces
sive amounts of DDT were applied to huge tracts of land in the Americas,
Africa, and Asia without an understanding of its environmental effects. DDT,
with a half-life of about 20 years in the environment, accumulated in the
bodies of humans, fish, birds, and mammals and caused problems. For
example, it killed birds acutely exposed to it and led to the near-extinction
of several bird species by interfering with calcium uptake and egg
laying. The environmental movement, triggered by the publication of U.S.
biologist Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (1962), opposed the broad use
of DDT. In the 1970s, nations began developing regulations targeting DDT
and other pesticides, and research on nonchemical management of insects
and pests greatly increased. Today, national and international regulation has
led to a decreased use of pesticides and new ways of controlling pests
and diseases.
Another problem increasingly attributed to the unregulated growth of live
stock raising is the destruction of huge parts of the natural environment and an
alarming decline of wild populations of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, and
amphibians. According to the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report
2020 (livingplanet.panda.org), wild animal populations have declined an aver
age of 68 percent between 1970 and 2016 around the world. This decline is an
important marker for the overall health of ecosystems. The exponential growth
of human consumption, population, global trade, and urbanization since the
1960s has had a negative impact on biodiversity. Recent research has defini
tively linked biodiversity loss and other ecosystem disruptions to an increasing
rate of disease spillover from wild animals to human populations. Spillover
leads to increasing rates and severity of epidemic or pandemic zoonotic
diseases, such as COVID-19. The WHO, FAO, and World Veterinary
Association (WVA) have developed warning systems, procedures, and guide
lines to tackle disease threats in terms of dynamic interactions at the human
animal-ecosystems interface. Whether watching for local outbreaks of zoono
tic diseases, inspecting food, or working in governmental veterinary public
health, all veterinarians are important parts of disease prevention systems
today. This broad understanding of veterinary responsibilities is guided in
the 2010s and 2020s by the One Health framework.

Reinvention of the One Health Approach

One Health is not new. As we have described, natural philosophers and
biomedical scientists have stressed the importance of comparative medicine
from antiquity onward to obtain a deeper insight into diseases in both humans
and animals. Today’s One Health framework emerged from zoology, compara
tive anatomy, and comparative medicine. In the mid-1800s, Rudolf Virchow’s
“One Medicine” promoted the ideas that animal and human bodies worked in
similar ways, suffered similar diseases, and could be treated similarly. This
approach also led to scientific advances. Experimental animals were proxies
for humans in experiments that contributed to cell theories, germ theories, and
the understanding of zoonotic diseases. Observed homologies between animal
and human bodies, and their pathologies, were the foundation for One
Medicine. The most obvious cases were zoonoses, diseases transmitted
between animals and humans.
Today, about 70 percent of human infectious diseases (emergent and ree-
mergent) are actively zoonotic or vector borne (Fig. 7.4). Humans living
closely with animals have probably observed that diseases could be transmitted
between them for thousands of years. Since at least the late 1800s, scientists
have elucidated the complex life cycles of the microorganisms and their
interactions with insect, animal, and human populations. Zoonotic diseases
are caused by a variety of microorganisms: viruses (HIV-AIDS, SARS,
MERS, COVID-19, rabies, encephalitis, West Nile virus, etc.); parasites (giar
diasis, echinococcus, etc.); bacteria and protozoa (anthrax, plague, tubercu
losis, brucellosis, salmonellosis, Lyme disease, etc.); and prions (BSE/new
variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease). Many are vector borne (mainly spread by
insects). An important function of the One Health approach is to establish the
origin of the disease, often traceable to other species, and to understand how it
is spread (transmission). For example, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome
(AIDS) is caused by a virus (HIV) traced back to a simian (monkey) virus
present in wild primates in Cameroon. Humans were probably exposed to this
virus by hunting and consuming infected monkeys. Influenza viruses (human
type A), which have caused periodic pandemics in humans, have been genet
ically linked to influenza viruses in swine and wild birds. Proximity to these
animals is a risk factor.
Over the past century, recognizing the potential wildlife and domesticated
animal origins of these and other important diseases has broadened epidemi
ology to include the ecological and environmental sciences. This approach has
been especially important in the Soviet Union (today, the Russian Federation
and several other nations) where scientists developed the “natural focus”
theory of disease transmission in response to outbreaks of encephalitis, plague,
and other diseases. In the West, scientists rediscovered ideas from the 1800s

Figure 7.4 World map of emerging and reemerging infections; 70% are vector
borne or zoonotic.
Source: https://onehealthinitiative.com/.
One Medicine framework a century after Virchow proposed it. Veterinarians

such as Karl Friedrich Meyer (1884-1974), Calvin Schwabe (1927-2006), and
James Steele (1913-2013) argued for a return to the One Medicine approach
between the 1910s and 1970s. These pioneers’ training and experiences
convinced them that this approach was valuable. All three were trained in
both veterinary medicine and (to some degree) human public health, so they
felt comfortable crossing disciplinary boundaries. All had worked internation
ally and had confronted zoonotic diseases. They understood disease as a larger
biological phenomenon, not just from the perspective of human medicine
and epidemiology.
They also joined with physicians and microbiologists, such as Rene Dubos
(1901-1982), to advocate for the importance of a healthy environment to
human health. As medical historian Roy Porter has pointed out, environmental
improvements and better living standards today contribute more to health than
curative medicine. From this point of view, it is more worthwhile to invest in
public health, environmental hygiene, and nutrition, especially in less wealthy
countries lacking basic infrastructure, than in advanced clinical medicine

programs. Scientists also began to look for disease origins in wild animals’
environments, and in 2008 the One Health Initiative group (USA) added
“Environment” to the One Health framework to create the One Health
“Triad”: Human-Animal-Environment. This broader vision has been
embraced and promoted by WHO, FAO, OIE, and WVA. The One Health
Concept can be defined as a global framework that unites professionals
(including veterinarians, physicians, and environmental scientists) working
toward healthy animals, environments, and humans. In 2011, Swiss veterinary
professor Jakob Zinsstag and co-authors expanded One Health further to
emphasize the social, cultural, and ecological entanglements that determine
outcomes of disease prevention and control strategies. These authors con
cluded that One Health is “health in social-ecological systems (HSES).”2
Today, One Health is the strategy most often used to study zoonotic infec
tions and emergent/reemergent diseases. It encompasses not only zoonotic
infections, food safety, surveillance, and antimicrobial resistance, but also
the applications of comparative and translational medicine to environmental
and occupational health hazards, cancer, metabolic disorders, and the implica
tions of the human-animal bond. The proponents of One Health argue that it is
essential for prevention of zoonotic disease spillover and potential epidemics,
and that it emphasizes prevention of these events. Major epidemics and
pandemics caused by influenza viruses in 2009 and SARS-CoV-2 in
2019 have reinforced this claim. The major questions include how surveillance
of wild animals (bats, rodents, and other common host species) can predict
where spillover is likely to occur; the roles of pets or domesticated livestock in
spreading zoonoses; and how to break cycles of zoonotic transmission. Along
with encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration, One Health investigations
scale up from the molecular level to the ecosystem level. All these advantages
make the One Health framework crucial to preventing and responding to a
broad range of serious problems at the human-animal-environment interface.
Of course, the One Health framework has its critics. Veterinary leaders have
been disappointed that physicians and leaders of the human medical profession
have been less keen to cross disciplinary lines and truly collaborate. (This
reflects the often-troubled history of physician-veterinarian disciplinary rela
tionships discussed throughout this book.) One Health has been criticized for
being too focused on human diseases to the detriment of non-human problems.
In addition, research scientists may be reluctant to participate because their
reputations are built on specializing narrowly, which is the opposite approach
to the broad collaborative One Health approach. Citizens of poorer nations
2 Zinsstag, J., Schelling, E., Waltner-Toews, D., and Tanner, M. (2011). ‘From “One Medicine” to
“One Health” and Systematic Approaches to Health and Well-Being’. Preventative Veterinary
Medicine vol. 101, nos. 3-4, pp. 148-156.

Conclusions 365
view One Health with skepticism. The One Health framework reflects a
particular view of which diseases are important and how we should respond
to them - the view controlled by Western biomedicine. As scholars have
pointed out, deploying this framework effectively reproduces a kind of health
colonialism: the diseases we focus on are often those that elites in wealthy
countries see as a threat. Responses to these diseases may not address the basic
problems related to poverty and food and health insecurity present around the
world. Once an acute problem (such as a pandemic) dies away, we forget about
protecting the environment or improving the basic living conditions of poorer
people and their animals. While this historical pattern is common, it is not
inevitable. Already environmental scientists are seeking to expand One Health
to a new, broader framework: “Planetary Health.” Whatever framework is
available at the time, it is the duty of all veterinarians to advocate for better
health outcomes for the environment, wild and domestic animals, and human
populations.
Conclusions
From this survey of the early twenty-first century, we can conclude that:
1. Worldwide, over 470 million dogs and 370 million cats were kept as pets
in 2018, along with many other species too numerous to count (fish, birds,
small mammals, and reptiles). Horses have increasingly become compan
ions and sport animals. Commercialized pet keeping developed since the
mid-twentieth century in most regions. The numbers of pets, the wide
availability of goods and services for them, and the veterinary profession’s
attention to animals kept for companionship have all increased.
Worldwide, the pet care market is growing fastest in Asia and
Latin America.
2. Since the 1970s, historians have increasingly analyzed animals and
human-animal relationships. Anthropomorphism is defined as attributing
human characteristics and behavior to animals. This concept explains why
some pet owners view their animals as members of the family. Owners
may express their love for their pets by spending money on goods and
services for them; this has become a vast global industry. Veterinary
history has built upon this scholarship to explain developments in
veterinary medicine.
3. In the last decades of the twentieth century, animal welfare activism
changed in two ways: the broadening of membership to all layers of
society, and the politicization of animal welfare issues in several
European countries. Due to larger and more influential animal protection
pressure groups, animal rights and welfare became political issues.

Changing ideas about animal welfare contributed to a significant reduction

of laboratory animals. This also affected veterinary practice, with more
attention paid to animal suffering and pain and new developments in
analgesia during treatments.
4. Attitudes toward animals have been inconsistent because they are social
and cultural ideas. They change from one time period to another, from one
place to another, and between different groups of people. Some veterinary
procedures, such as declawing cats, became controversial, while owners
demanded purebred cats and dogs with high levels of genetic and con
genital health problems. Some pet animals are treated very well, while
others are not. Diseases and behavior problems, such as rabies, parasites,
and canine aggression, cause controversy. Finally, pet animals can be
abandoned, leading to suffering, disease, and injury since the pet does
not know how to survive. Veterinarians must confront these inconsistent
attitudes and realities.
5. Companion animal veterinary practice has grown since the 1960s to
become the majority of veterinarians’ work in urban areas, high-income
populations, and even in some rural areas. In many parts of the world and
for certain animals (such as falcons, racing pigeons, and fighting cocks),
health care is provided by local healers as well as veterinarians.
Traditional healing systems are often combined with Western
veterinary medicine.
6. Veterinarians have turned care for companion animals into a very success
ful and popular domain of the market for veterinary services within a
couple of decades. The standard of care was based on the model of
physicians’ practices and human hospitals. Animal hospitals and clinics
adopted new technologies, developed surgical procedures and medical
treatments, and offered a caring attitude toward companion animals and
their owners. Companion animal practitioners are now the majority of
veterinarians in nations such as Japan, South Africa, most European
nations, the United States, Canada, Brazil, and many more.
7. Veterinarians have incorporated new technologies, from echocardiograms
and detailed body chemistry tests to CT scanning and MRIs and genetic
testing. Although expensive, these technologies work well for smaller
animals whose owners are willing to pay for them. In food-producing
animals, the development of technologies such as GMOs (genetically
modified organisms) contributed to even more intensive livestock raising
and higher efficiency and productivity.
8. The digital revolution in veterinary practices started in the 1980s, when
hospitals and larger practices began acquiring personal computers with
programs that facilitated word processing, collecting and storing data, and

Conclusions 367
applying statistics. The Internet and hand-held mobile phones (and even
tually smartphones) have revolutionized veterinary practice (as well as
daily life for much of the world). Consumers now have even easier access
to information, products, supplements, and drugs for their animals.
9. Life in the digital world has caused some problems for veterinarians:
workload, fatigue, and stress have increased; animal owners believe
deceptive or false information; digital fraud and crime have increased;
and it is almost impossible to keep up with the huge amount of infor
mation available. To be successful, veterinarians need information
processing skills and even more sophisticated communication skills.
10. Social problems - urbanization, poverty, and government versus privat
ized veterinary services - have also limited the ability of veterinarians to
employ the available technologies. Sometimes technological develop
ments (including some much-needed vaccines) do not work well under
field conditions. Animal owners in many areas have continued to rely on
their own expertise and practices to maintain animal health, adding the
biomedical technologies when they work well within the local situation.
Uneven social investment has limited the use of many of the latest
technologies, no matter how effective they are. Public investment in
veterinary education has often been insufficient. Many areas of the world
remain underserved, and many animal owners cannot afford to pay for
veterinary care.
11. Rinderpest was declared eradicated from the earth in 2011, after the OIE,
FAO, and international veterinary leaders cooperatively implemented the
“Rinderpest Pathway” to eradication for over three decades. This was a
major triumph for organized veterinary medicine, which was established
in part due to the devastation caused by rinderpest over the past 400 years.
12. In 2011-2012, veterinarians celebrated the “World Veterinary Year,” the
250th anniversary of the first European veterinary school at Lyon, France.
Veterinary medicine has had many successes and accomplishments in its
250-plus years. Clearly, the profession has broadened its mandate: from
mainly caring for armies’ horses during the 1700s, veterinarians in the
2000s treated companion animals, contributed to global food security, and
worked to control zoonoses.
13. In response to increasingly common outbreaks of zoonotic diseases, the
veterinary profession has been a major driver of “One Health,” a recent
approach that builds on disease ecology and comparative medicine. One
Health is generally defined as a worldwide strategy for expanding inter
disciplinary collaborations and communications in all aspects of health
care for humans, animals, and the environment. Veterinarians collaborate
with physicians, environmental scientists, and other specialists to address

complex disease problems. While important, One Health has been criti
cized for being too focused on human diseases and for working on
diseases that wealthy countries see as a threat - without addressing the
basic social needs of poorer countries. This approach broadened during
the early 2000s in response to growing alarm about climate change,
ecosystem destruction, and the human impact on the planet.
Veterinarians are also beginning to work in environmental health, and
with organic farming, both of which advocate decreasing the use of
chemicals and other agricultural technologies that cause harm to ecosys
tems, add residues in food, and create resistance to antimicrobials.
Question/Activity: Did the veterinary profession shift from focusing on food

animal health to companion animal welfare in your country or region? Did animal
welfare become a political or societal issue in your country? Which veterinary
services for companion animals have developed in your nation? To what extent did
technological innovations as well as sustainable animal production affect veterinary
practice in your part of the world? What are the most important characteristics of the
One Health approach, and what impact does this have on veterinary medicine,
animal health, and human health in your country?

Epilogue
Veterinary Medicine in the Postmodern World
We began this book with the ancient Ayurvedic, Chinese, Indigenous

American, and many African peoples’ frameworks of understanding animal
health and disease. These frameworks included sophisticated theories about
the body, environment, and spirit that guided practitioners in their choices of
treatments for sick or injured animals. These ways of knowing are still strong
today and are often combined with modern veterinary medicine. Both the
Hippocratic tradition of holistic medicine (taking into account the whole body
of the patient and its environment) and the more reductionist analysis of
disease (focused on organs, tissues, cells, and molecules) have continued in
veterinary medicine. Biomedicine and veterinary medicine are also the prod
ucts of the European Enlightenment. They share the Enlightenment’s suc
cesses and its problems: not only the development of Western science, but
also the reliance on capitalist economics and the close ties to imperialism.
Throughout its history, veterinary medicine has been influenced by beliefs
about the human-animal relationship and major social and political events
such as wars. Since 1500, the animals themselves have changed, adapting and
evolving to new environments and new circumstances.
Historians cannot predict the future, but the one conclusion we can make is
that veterinary medicine and animal healing will continue to be affected and
molded by changing sociocultural and environmental conditions. Unforeseen
events and trends happen regularly: disease outbreaks, the rise of pet keeping,
wars, the feminization of the workforce. Veterinary medicine is constantly
shaping, and being shaped by, these broader social and cultural forces. Over
time, the changing needs of societies, and the value they have placed on
animals, have often determined the tasks undertaken by the veterinary profes
sion. As human-animal relationships have changed, so has veterinary medi
cine. As scientific knowledge has developed and traveled around the world,
veterinary medicine and animal healing have become increasingly complex.
Today, the major concerns for veterinary medicine’s future depend on one’s
point of view, including veterinary students and practicing professionals,
animal owners, public health officials, political leaders, and people concerned
with animal welfare.
369

370 Epilogue: Veterinary Medicine in the Postmodern World
The Challenges and Rewards of Working as a Veterinarian

In 1961, more than 161,000 veterinarians were active worldwide. Most of
these were in Europe (100,000), followed by the Americas (30,000), Asia
(28,000), Africa (1,900), and Australia and New Zealand (1,500). According
to the World Veterinary Association, there were over 500,000 veterinarians
worldwide in 2018, of which around 300,000 worked in Europe and 115,000
in the United States. The female-to-male ratio was roughly 3:2. It is estimated
that about 65% are active as veterinary practitioners, 10% are working in
public service, and 5% in industry, while the rest have unknown employment
or are unemployed. In some countries with many veterinary colleges (for
example, Spain and Italy), unemployment can be high. Due to an influx of
younger vets, a shift in age is taking place. Older generations have retired and
are being replaced by millennials (people born between 1981 and 1996). In the
United States, for example, millennials are now about 39% of active
veterinarians.
This newer generation of veterinarians is faced with critical farmers, envir
onmentalists concerned about sustainable animal production and climate
change, demanding pet owners, and anxious consumers of animal-origin
foods - all with different and sometimes opposite demands. The public image
of the profession is linked to consumer culture, international politics, outbreaks
of enzootic or zoonotic diseases, and the social value of zoo, wild, farm,
laboratory, or companion animals. The veterinary profession, and its members,
must be well informed, flexible, and able to change quickly - like our prede
cessors a century ago, who faced the disappearance of horses, their most
important patients. The historical narratives told in this book show that veter
inary medicine and its wide range of practitioners regularly had to adjust to the
ever-changing and different kinds of human-animal interactions that have
existed between and among animal owners, government authorities at different
levels, armies, colonies, businesses, consumers, scientists, and animal protec
tionists. Overall, veterinarians everywhere must contend with meeting animal
owners’ expectations, feeding the world’s people, and controlling animal
disease outbreaks without causing harm to societies and ecosystems. These
challenges emerge from the inequalities built into the global animal economy
and the realities of environmental conditions such as climate change.
Students seeking to become veterinary professionals are well aware of these
challenges. They also worry about the lengthy and expensive education, after
which they must compete in an often-crowded veterinary marketplace. Some
experienced veterinarians report problems with the job: debts from education,
more animals to treat in less time, the changing attitude of patient owners
(boldness, aggression, delayed payment). These factors, plus economic con
cerns, more administrative tasks, and the higher number of colleagues to

compete with are causing stress and stress-related illnesses, sometimes

resulting in burnout among relatively young vets (30 to 40 years old).
Unfortunately, the suicide rate among veterinarians has also increased during
the past decade. This worrying fact represents a challenge for the veterinary
profession, veterinary education, and veterinary associations. In veterinary
school, more attention needs to be given to the “soft skills” and “support
skills,” development and implementation of standardized stress management
interventions, such as courses for improving communication, managing stress
and caring for one’s own mental and physical health, and work-life balance.
Despite these points of tension, veterinary medicine remains a popular
career choice for several reasons. Surveys of veterinary students in Western
nations almost always show a high level of regard and love for animals.
Students joke that they prefer animals to people, at least in terms of caring
for them. Another positive factor is the desire to combine the rigorous intel
lectual aspects of biomedicine with hands-on practical work with animals.
Those students who wish to work with livestock enjoy the outdoor life and the
farm culture. Finally, students cite their strong desire to improve animal
welfare and alleviate suffering, reflecting the cultural emphasis on more
humane and sustainable values. As sociologists, philosophers, and political
scientists have discussed, critiques of modernism - especially capitalistic
modernism, in which profit is the most important consideration - have encour
aged a postmodern society that questions powerful institutions such as com
mercial food producers. Postmodern ideas, offering space for individual
autonomy, diversity, and self-expression, have influenced younger veterinar
ians and cultural ideas on how to keep and treat animals.
Does the Veterinary Workforce Meet the World’s Needs?

From the point of view of some government officials and political leaders, the
veterinary workforce often does not reflect the nation’s needs. In wealthy
areas, many veterinarians choose to work in urban companion animal prac
tices, while rural livestock owners often lack access to necessary veterinary
care. In less wealthy areas, animal healers and veterinarians will choose among
the traditional and biomedical therapeutics, vaccines, and surgical methods
available to them rather than expensive, highly specialized technologies that
do not meet their needs. Fewer rural veterinarians also lead to less oversight of
farmers’ husbandry methods, including not meeting animal welfare standards
and the use (and misuse) of antibiotics. Because young veterinarians often
emerge from school heavily in debt, they cannot afford the lower salaries paid
to government employees and meat inspectors, so not enough vets work in
these sectors. Yet global food production depends on them: imagine the
serious problems society as a whole would encounter if all veterinarians would

go on strike at the same time. Food production and supply would stop, while
animal owners would be deprived of acute care for their animals. This “work
force mismatch” between veterinarians’ career choices and global needs has
become more acute since the mid-twentieth century.
Today about 55% of the world population is urbanized; by 2050 this could
be 68%. Urbanization has already had consequences for veterinary practice
and the profession. In Europe, the United States, Japan, and South Africa, there
is already a shortage of vets in rural areas. Not many young vets want to move
to the countryside. This is the case despite the popularization of historical
veterinary-themed dramas in film and television, including the British James
Herriot and Dutch Dr. Vlimmen, both of whom were portrayed as well-
regarded professionals in small rural villages. These are nostalgic dramas,
however; this type of veterinary practice has almost disappeared. Veterinary
medicine is becoming an urban profession again, just as it was over a century
ago during the age of working horses. Veterinary professional leaders have
begun calling for incentives to encourage young veterinarians to work in food
animal practice and food safety. Increased salaries, reduced school fees, or
debt forgiveness have all been proposed in return for the young vet choosing to
work in an underserved rural area. These economic incentives can also be
augmented by attention to work-life balance: group practices, so that vets can
share the responsibility for emergency and after-hours work; better availability
of diagnostic laboratories and other support services; and transportation, hous
ing, and other benefits.
Despite the triumphs of biomedicine, animal diseases - including zoonoses -
have persisted and continued to reemerge. This has highlighted the importance
of veterinarians working in disease control, public health, and environmental
sustainability. The eradication of rinderpest, “the cattle-killer,” was a major
achievement for veterinarians; but swine influenza, Newcastle disease, para
sitic infections, and many other disease problems continue to kill animals and
to impoverish people. In industrialized countries, the drive for efficiency and
higher profits as part of modernization has reached a point of reduced benefits
in terms of disease control, animal welfare, and environmental health.
Unregulated human appetites for exotic foods of animal origin have contrib
uted to the emergence of novel pathogens and outbreaks of zoonotic diseases.
Environmental toxins and contamination of fresh food with pathogenic micro
organisms have also caused disease in human and animal populations.
Veterinarians are an obvious resource pool of professionals to help address
these problems, if given the power and resources to do so. When surveyed in
2018, veterinarians from thirty European countries listed the most important
resources to meet the changes of the next five years: more specialization; more
business training; more training in digital skills; and more legislation support
ing the profession.

Despite all these concerns (magnified by the stress of the COVID-19

pandemic), the veterinary histories in this book also speak of the resilience
of people and animals, the alleviation of suffering, and the deployment of local
expertise and biomedical tools to help achieve these goals. Many people have
helped unravel the mysteries of how animals’ bodies and disease processes
worked: the Ayurvedic and Chinese theories of the body’s circulation of vital
processes; Ibn al-Nafis’ explanation of the pulmonary circulation; Paracelsus’
view of digestion as a chemical process; and veterinarian Jean-Baptiste
Chauveau’s studies of the physiology of the nervous and hepatic systems.
Chauveau then used this knowledge to develop techniques such as cardiac
catheterization, drug delivery, the separation of red from white blood cells, and
vaccines. In southern Africa, the Zulu people struggled against European
colonialism while educating White farmers and vets about the importance of
the tsetse fly in spreading deadly cattle diseases. African leaders commonly
combatted animal diseases by imposing quarantines, while livestock owners
burned the bush to eliminate fly and tick vectors. The biomedical discoveries
of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries were built on these early efforts
to keep animals alive and well.
Veterinarians contributed greatly to the knowledge necessary for those
biomedical discoveries, such as vaccines and medications for both humans
and animals. Danish veterinarian Erik Viborg’s proof that glanders was conta
gious came too late to save the father of scientific veterinary medicine in
England, Charles Vial de St. Bel, who had died a horrible death due to glanders
a few years before. But Viborg’s conclusion supported isolating or destroying
infected horses to prevent the spread of the infection, which was particularly
important in army horses. It also led to an early allergic hypersensitivity test, the
mallein test, which helped eliminate glanders from Europe and North America.
In the 1890s, Americans Theobald Smith, Fred Kilborne, and Cooper Curtice
demonstrated the epidemiology and microbiology of a vector-borne disease,
Texas cattle fever; their work led to breakthroughs in malaria control and
research on many diseases of animals and humans in the Global South.
Veterinarians have played other crucial roles in safeguarding animal and human
health: they developed campaigns against bovine tuberculosis and brucellosis;
trichinosis and other problems with meat hygiene; and, most dramatically, they
were crucial to the eradication of rinderpest (only the second disease in history to
be eradicated from the earth). These campaigns, and the lifetimes of work and
sacrifices that contributed to them, demonstrated the determination of veterinar
ians and veterinary researchers to reduce animal suffering and the impact of
animal diseases on human well-being.
Veterinary medicine has tremendous opportunities today. Veterinarians and
animal healers are key providers of global health care for animals and food
security for people. Emerging disease problems (such as COVID-19) have

only reinforced the need for a “One Health” or “Planetary Health” approach
that brings biomedical scientists together, elevates veterinary public health,
and links the well-being of the world’s people to that of its animals. Moving
forward, veterinarians will contribute to global efforts to address disease, food
safety, inequality, disease, and environmental pollution. Animal healers and
veterinarians have a long and proud tradition of addressing the societal needs
of their time and place, and this will inspire the profession in the future.
Almost twenty years ago, veterinary historian Angela von den Driesch
finished her book on the history of veterinary medicine with the remark that
the modern veterinarian should act as a mediator between the use and care of
animals. Within these conflicting demands, a veterinarian must balance the
needs of humans with those of animals. But veterinarians can never forget their
duty to their animal patients: in dubio pro animale (when in doubt, act in favor
of the animal). We will end as we began: we have much work to do. Let us all,
as informed citizens and dedicated professionals, pledge to use our abilities to
make the world a better place for people, animals, and their environments.

Appendix A Spread of Veterinary Education
Institutions around the Globe (List of the First
Veterinary School Established in Selected
Nations, 1762-1960s)
Year City Country
1762 Lyon France

1767 Vienna Austria
1769 Turin Italy
1771 Gottingen Germany
1773 Copenhagen Denmark
1775 Skara Sweden
1787 Budapest Hungary
1791 London England
1793 Madrid Spain
1805 Kharkiv Ukraine
Bern Switzerland
1806 Vilnius Lithuania
1807 St. Petersburg Russia
1821 Utrecht Netherlands
1823 Edinburgh Scotland
1824 Warsaw Poland
1827 Cairo Egypt
1830 Lisbon Portugal
1836 Brussels Belgium
1842 Istanbul Turkey
1848 Tartu (Dorpat) Estonia
1853 Mexico City Mexico
1855 Boston USA
1861 Bucharest Romania
1862 Toronto Canada
1876 Tokyo Japan
1881 Lahore Pakistan
1883 Santa Catalina Argentina
Bombay India
1898 Santiago Chile
1900 Dublin Ireland
1902 Lima Peru
1905 Montevideo Uruguay
1907 Havana Cuba
375

376 Appendices
(cont.)
Year City Country
1908 Melbourne Australia

1909 Guangzhou China
1910 Manila Philippines
1912 Rio de Janeiro Brazil
1918 Brno Czechoslovakia
1919 Riga Latvia
Zagreb Yugoslavia
1920 Pretoria South Africa
1921 Bogota Colombia
1923 Sofia Bulgaria
1931 Marialb' Ecuador
1932 Kabul Afghanistan
Tehran Iran
1935 Oslo Norway
1938 Khartoum Sudan
Maracay Venezuela
1940 Bangkok Thailand
Santa Cruz Bolivia
1945 Taipei Taiwan
1946 Helsinki Finland
1947 Peradeniya Sri Lanka
Seoul Korea
1949 Kabete Kenya
1950 Addis Ababa Ethiopia
Thessaloniki Greece
1952 Tirana Albania
1955 Santo Domingo Dominican Republic
1956 Asuncion Paraguay
1957 Baghdad Iraq
1957 Guatemala City Guatemala
Riyadh Saudi Arabia
Rangoon Burma
Tripoli Libya
1959 Saigon Vietnam
1960 Nsukka Nigeria
1961 Mymensingh Bangladesh
Managua Nicaragua
Data are drawn from: Dieter Breuer, Weltkatalog der

Veterinarmedizinischen Lehranstalten, Doctoral thesis (Hannover:
Tierarztliche Hochschule Hannover, 1957), pp. 213-222; Astrid von
Cramon-Taubadel, Weltkatalog der Veterinarmedizinischen Lehranstalten

Appendices 377
nach dem stand von 1976/77, Doctoral thesis (Hannover: Tierarztliche

Hochschule Hannover, 1977), pp. 318-326; Angela von den Driesch & Joris
Peters, Geschichte der Tiermedizin (Stuttgart & New York: Schattauer, 2003),
p. 137; Reinhard Froehner, Kulturgeschichte der Tierheilkunde. Ein Handbuch
fur Tierarzte und Studierende. Vol. 3, Geschichte des Veterinarwesens im
Ausland (Konstanz: Terra Verlag, 1968), pp. 419-422, 458, 529-531,
640-642; Emmanuel Leclainche, Histoire de la medecine veterinaire
(Toulouse: Office du Livre, 1936), pp. 237-238. Thanks are also due to
Miguel Marquez (Mexico), Myung-Sun Chun (South Korea), and Junya
Yasuda (Japan).

Appendix A Spread of Veterinary Education
Institutions around the Globe (List of the First
Veterinary School Established in Selected
Nations, 1762-1960s)
Year City Country
1762 Lyon France

1767 Vienna Austria
1769 Turin Italy
1771 Gottingen Germany
1773 Copenhagen Denmark
1775 Skara Sweden
1787 Budapest Hungary
1791 London England
1793 Madrid Spain
1805 Kharkiv Ukraine
Bern Switzerland
1806 Vilnius Lithuania
1807 St. Petersburg Russia
1821 Utrecht Netherlands
1823 Edinburgh Scotland
1824 Warsaw Poland
1827 Cairo Egypt
1830 Lisbon Portugal
1836 Brussels Belgium
1842 Istanbul Turkey
1848 Tartu (Dorpat) Estonia
1853 Mexico City Mexico
1855 Boston USA
1861 Bucharest Romania
1862 Toronto Canada
1876 Tokyo Japan
1881 Lahore Pakistan
1883 Santa Catalina Argentina
Bombay India
1898 Santiago Chile
1900 Dublin Ireland
1902 Lima Peru
1905 Montevideo Uruguay
1907 Havana Cuba
375

376 Appendices
(cont.)
Year City Country
1908 Melbourne Australia

1909 Guangzhou China
1910 Manila Philippines
1912 Rio de Janeiro Brazil
1918 Brno Czechoslovakia
1919 Riga Latvia
Zagreb Yugoslavia
1920 Pretoria South Africa
1921 Bogota Colombia
1923 Sofia Bulgaria
1931 Marialb' Ecuador
1932 Kabul Afghanistan
Tehran Iran
1935 Oslo Norway
1938 Khartoum Sudan
Maracay Venezuela
1940 Bangkok Thailand
Santa Cruz Bolivia
1945 Taipei Taiwan
1946 Helsinki Finland
1947 Peradeniya Sri Lanka
Seoul Korea
1949 Kabete Kenya
1950 Addis Ababa Ethiopia
Thessaloniki Greece
1952 Tirana Albania
1955 Santo Domingo Dominican Republic
1956 Asuncion Paraguay
1957 Baghdad Iraq
1957 Guatemala City Guatemala
Riyadh Saudi Arabia
Rangoon Burma
Tripoli Libya
1959 Saigon Vietnam
1960 Nsukka Nigeria
1961 Mymensingh Bangladesh
Managua Nicaragua
Data are drawn from: Dieter Breuer, Weltkatalog der

Veterinarmedizinischen Lehranstalten, Doctoral thesis (Hannover:
Tierarztliche Hochschule Hannover, 1957), pp. 213-222; Astrid von
Cramon-Taubadel, Weltkatalog der Veterinarmedizinischen Lehranstalten

Appendices 377
nach dem stand von 1976/77, Doctoral thesis (Hannover: Tierarztliche

Hochschule Hannover, 1977), pp. 318-326; Angela von den Driesch & Joris
Peters, Geschichte der Tiermedizin (Stuttgart & New York: Schattauer, 2003),
p. 137; Reinhard Froehner, Kulturgeschichte der Tierheilkunde. Ein Handbuch
fur Tierarzte und Studierende. Vol. 3, Geschichte des Veterinarwesens im
Ausland (Konstanz: Terra Verlag, 1968), pp. 419-422, 458, 529-531,
640-642; Emmanuel Leclainche, Histoire de la medecine veterinaire
(Toulouse: Office du Livre, 1936), pp. 237-238. Thanks are also due to
Miguel Marquez (Mexico), Myung-Sun Chun (South Korea), and Junya
Yasuda (Japan).

Appendix B Table of Learning Objectives
Learning Objective Chapters
Recognize the different views of cultures and societies about animal 1,2
species
Understand how scientific ideas have been communicated between cultures 2, 3, 4, 6
Know the relative importance of different health problems according 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
to social needs and cultural values
Understand the role of sacred beliefs in animal healing 1
Learn various theories of disease causation and how they inform veterinary 1, 4, 5, 6, 7
treatment and policy
Understand the roles of technological development in shaping veterinary 5, 6, 7
medicine
Learn the role of comparative sciences (anatomy, physiology, & pathology) 1, 4, 7
in the relationship between veterinary medicine and human medicine
Understand the role of warfare in shaping veterinary medicine 2, 3, 4, 5
378

Appendix C Key to Main Topics for Use in the
Veterinary Curriculum
Main Topics Chapters
Anatomy 1
Materia medica & pharmacology 2, 4, 5
Physiology 2
Parasitology 4, 6
Pathology 2, 4, 5
Professionalization 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Cross-cultural 1, 2, 3, 6
Comparative medicine 4, 5, 6, 7
Surgery 2, 7
Microbiology, virology, & immunology 4, 5, 6
Food hygiene 4, 5, 6
Ethics and deontology 2, 4, 5, 7
379

Further Reading
Introduction: Human-Animal Relationships and the Need for

Veterinary Medicine
Martin F. Brumme, Tierheilkunde in Antike und Renaissance. Historiografische
Untersuchungen zur Konstituierung und Legitimierung (Berlin: Free University,
1997)
Jacalyn Duffin, History of Medicine: A Scandalously Short Introduction, 2nd ed.
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010)
Robert H. Dunlop and David J. Williams, Veterinary Medicine: An Illustrated History
(St. Louis, MO: Mosby-Year Book, 1996)
Erica Fudge, ‘What Was It Like to Be a Cow?’, in Linda Kalof (ed.), Oxford Handbook
of Animal Studies (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014/2017)
258-280
Koert van der Horst, Great Books on Horsemanship: Bibliotheca Hippologica Johan
Dejager (Leiden: Brill, 2014)
I. Hershkovitz, H.D. Donoghue, D.E. Minnikin, et al., ‘Tuberculosis Origin: The
Neolithic Scenario’, Tuberculosis (2015). doi:10.1016/j.tube.2015.02.021
L.P. Louwe Kooijmans, ‘Van jager tot boer in Nederland’, Argos 41 (2009) 8-14
Saurabh Mishra ‘Veterinary History Comes of Age’, Social History of Medicine 27
(2014) (Special online issue).
F.R. Rozzi and A. Froment, ‘Earliest Animal Cranial Surgery: From Cow to Man in the
Neolithic’, Scientific Reports 8 (2018) 5536-5540
1. Animal Healing in Sacred Societies, 1500-1700

James N. Adams, ‘The Origin and Meaning of Lat. veterinus, veterinarius’,
Indogermanische Forschungen 97 (1992) 70-95
Pelagonius and Latin Veterinary Terminology in the Roman Empire (Leiden, New
York & Cologne: Brill, 1995)
R. Tamay Basagag Gul, ‘From Folk Veterinary Medicine to Scientific Veterinary
Medicine in Turkey’, Conference paper, 37th World Association for the History of
Veterinary Medicine Congress, Leon, Spain, 23 September 23, 2006. www
.researchgate.net/publication/341106497_from_folk_veterinary_medicine_to_
scientific_veterinary_medicine_in_turkey
Bruce Boehrer (Ed.), A Cultural History ofAnimals in the Renaissance (Oxford & New
York: Berg, 2007)
380

Further Reading 381
Peter E.J. Bols, ‘How Andreas Vesalius Inspired Early Veterinary Authors’, in R. van
Hee (ed.), In the Shadow of Vesalius (Antwerp & Apeldoorn: Garant Publishers,
2020) 249-265
Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed
Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last
13,000 Years (London: Vintage, 1998)
Ferruh Dinger, ‘An Analytical Approach to the Veterinary Knowledge of the Islamic
Period’, in F. Dinger (ed.), Veterinary Medicine - Historical Approaches (Ankara:
Ankara University Press, 2002) 177-194
‘Some Notes on the Treatment of Human and Animal Diseases in the Folklore of
Turkey and Balkan Countries’, Deutsche tierdrztliche Wochenschrift 98 (1991)
179-180
Angela von den Driesch and Joris Peters, Geschichte der Tiermedizin: 5000 Jahre
Tierheilkunde, 2nd ed. (Munchen: Schattauer, 2003)
Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (New York: Vintage
Books, 2017) 94-96, 182-186, 194-196
Anita Guerrini, The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015)
Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003)
Anita Guerrini and Domenico Bertoloni Meli, ‘Introduction: Experimenting with
Animals in the Early Modern Era’, Journal of the History of Biology 46 (2013)
167-170
Robert Hoyland, ‘Theonmestus of Magnesia, Hunayn ibn Ishaq and the
Beginnings of Islamic Veterinary Science,’ in Hoyland and P. Kennedy (eds.),
Islamic Reflections, Arabic Musings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
150-169
Pamela Hunter, Veterinary Medicine: A Guide to Historical Sources (London:
Routledge, 2016)
J.H. Lin and R. Panzer, ‘Use of Chinese Herbal Medicine in Veterinary Science:
History and Perspectives’, Revue scientifique et technique (International Office of
Epizootics) 13 (1994) 2: 425-432
Anne McCabe, A Byzantine Encyclopedia of Horse Medicine: The Sources,
Compilation and Transmissions of the Hippiatrica (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007)
Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental
Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century, 3rd ed. (Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2007)
G. Mazars, ‘Traditional Veterinary Medicine in India’, Revue scientifique et technique
(International Office of Epizootics) 13 (1994) 2: 443-451
Ruth I. Meserve, ‘Chinese Hippology and Hippiatry: Government Bureaucracy and
Inner Asian Influence,’ Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenldndischen Gesellschaft
148 (1998) 2: 277-314
‘The Terminology for the Diseases of Domestic Animals in Traditional Mongolian
Veterinary Medicine,’ Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 49
(1996) 335-358

382 Further Reading
Alan Mikhail, ‘Unleashing the Beast. Animals, Energy, and the Economy of Labor in
Ottoman Egypt’, The American Historical Review 118 (2013) 317-348
Vivian Nutton, ‘Logic, Learning, and Experimental Medicine’, Science, New Series
295 (February 2002) 801
David Ramey, Kaoru Tomoyoshi, Dan Sherer, and Katja Triplett, Horses: Their Care
and Keeping in Muromachi Japan (includes reproduction and translation of
historical manuscript on horse medicine). Hong Kong, forthcoming, 2022
Wilhelm Rieck, ‘Das Veterinar-Instrumentarium im Wandel der Zeiten und seine
Forderung durch die Instrumentenfabrik H. Hauptner’, in H. Hauptner
Instrumentenfabrik fur Veterinarmedizin Jubildums-Katalog 1932 (Berlin: H.
Hauptner Instrumentenfabrik, 1932) 1-64
Dagmar Schafer and Han Yi, ‘Great Plans: Song Dynastic (970-1279) Institutions for
Human and Veterinary Healthcare,’ in Roel Sterckx, Martina Siebert, and Dagmar
Schafer (eds.), Animals through Chinese History: Earliest Times to 1911
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) 160-180
Calvin Schwabe, Cattle, Priests and Progress in Medicine (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1973)
Hosni Alkhateeb Shehada, Mamluks and Animals: Veterinary Medicine in Medieval
Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2012)
Alan Shotwell, ‘The Revival of Vivisection in the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of the
History of Biology 46 (2013) 171-197
J.F. Smithcors, Evolution of the Veterinary Art: A Narrative Account to 1850 (Kansas
City, MO: Veterinary Medicine Publishing Co, 1957)
Jasmine Dum Tragut, ‘Medieval Equine Medicine from Armenia’ (Intech Open Online
First, 2020). doi:10.5772/intechopen.91379
Nukhet Varlik, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The
Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)
2. Animal Healing in Trade and Conquest, 1700-1850s

Abdurahim Aloud, ‘Ibn al-Nafis and the Discovery of the Pulmonary Circulation’, The
Southwest Respiratory and Critical Care Chronicles 5 (2017) 71-73
Karl Appuhn, ‘Ecologies of Beef: Eighteenth-Century Epizootics and the
Environmental History of Early Modern Europe’, Environmental History 15
(2010) 2: 268-287
Tulay Artan, ‘Ahmed I and Tuhfet’ul-muluk ve’s-Selatm: A Period Manuscript on
Horses, Horsemanship and Hunting,’ in Suraiya Faroqhi (ed.), Animals and People
in the Ottoman Empire (Instanbul: Eren, 2010) 315-332.
Albano Beja-Pereira, Phillip R. England, Nuno Ferrand, et al. ‘The African Origins of
the Domestic Donkey’, Science 304 (2004) 1781
Jeremy Bentham, ‘Introduction’ to Ch. XVII, An Introduction to the Principles of
Morals and Legislation (London: Payne, 1789)
Nsekuye Bizimana, Traditional Veterinary Practice in Africa (Eschborn, Germany:
Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit, 1994)
Karen Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle (Eds.), Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock
Economies, and the Globalization of Veterinary Medicine (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 2010)

Further Reading 383
William Bynum, The History of Medicine: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
Miguel Cordero del Campillo, Miguel A. Marquez, and Benito Madariaga de la Campa,
Albeytena, MariscaUa y Veterinaria (Ongenes y perspectiva literaria) (Leon:
University of Leon, 1996)
Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural
Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1972)
Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
Louise Hill Curth, The Care of Brute Beasts: A Social and Cultural Study of Veterinary
Medicine in Early Modern England (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010)
Jim Downs, Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery and War Transformed
Medicine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021.
Jacalyn Duffin, History of Medicine: A Scandalously Short Introduction, 2nd ed.
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010)
Saraiya Faroqi, Animals and People in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul: Erren, 2010)
George Fleming, Animal Plagues: Their History, Nature and Prevention (London:
Chapman and Hall, 1871)
Travels on Horseback in Mantchu Tartary: Being a Summer’s Ride beyond the
Great Wall of China (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1863) (Cambridge Library
Collection - Travel and Exploration in Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010). doi:10.1017/CBO9780511709531
Henrico N. Franco, ‘Animal Experiments in Biomedical Research: A Historical
Perspective’, Animals 3 (2013) 238-273
Wilma Gijsbers and Peter A. Koolmees, ‘Food on Foot. Long-Distance Trade in
Slaughter Oxen between Denmark and the Netherlands (14th-18th Century)’,
Historia Medicinae Veterinariae 26 (2001) 115-127
Robert E. Harrist Jr., ‘The Legacy of Bole: Physiognomy and Horses in Chinese
Painting’, Artibus Asie 57 (1997) 1/2: 135-156
Constant Huygelen, ‘The Immunization of Cattle against Rinderpest in Eighteenth
Century Europe’, Medical History 41 (1997) 182-196
Susan D. Jones, Death in a Small Package: A Short History of Anthrax (Baltimore,
MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010)
D. Karasszon, A Concise History ofVeterinary Medicine (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1988)
Amanda Kluveld, Mensendier. Verbonden sinds de zesde dag. Cultuurgeschiedenis van
een wonderlijke relatie (Amsterdam, De Arbeiderspers: 2009)
Charles C. Mann, 1493: How Europe’s Discovery of the Americas Revolutionized
Trade, Ecology and Life on Earth (New York: Granta Books, 2012)
Nicholas Malebranche, De la recherche de la verite, in (Evres de Malebranche, vol. 2
(Paris: Charpentier (1842 [1674]).
William Hardy McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor, 1976)
Michel de Montaigne, tr. Charles Cotton (1686). ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond,’
Essays, Book 2, Chapter 12, paragraph 63.
Mireille Mousnier (Ed.) Les animaux maladies en Europe occidentale (VIе-XIX siecle)
(Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2003)
Leon Z. Saunders, Biographical History of Veterinary Pathology (Lawrence: Allen
Press, 1996)

384 Further Reading
‘Virchow’s Contributions to Veterinary Medicine: Celebrated Then, Forgotten Now’,

Veterinary Pathology 37 (2000) 199-207
Frederick Smith, The Early History of Veterinary Literature (2 vols.) (London:
Bailliere, Tindall and Cox, 1919, 1933)
R. Somvanshi, ‘Veterinary Medicine and Animal Keeping in Ancient India’, Ancient
Agri-History 10 (2006) 2: 133-146
Clive A. Spinage, Cattle Plague: A History (New York: Kluwer Academic / Plenum
Publishers, 2003)
Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England,
1500-1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983)
Sam White, ‘A Model Disaster: From the Great Ottoman Panzootic to the Cattle
Plagues of Early Modern Europe’, in Nukhet Varlik (ed.), Plague and Contagion
in the Islamic Mediterranean (Kalamazoo and Bradford: ARC Humanities Press,
2017) 91-116
Lise Wilkinson, Animals and Disease: An Introduction to the History of Comparative
Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Abigail Woods, ‘Doctors in the Zoo: Connecting Human and Animal Health in British
Zoological Gardens, c. 1828-1890’, in Abigail Woods, Michael Bresalier, Angela
Cassidy, and Rachel Mason-Dentinger (eds.), Animals and the Shaping of Modern
Medicine: One Health and Its Histories (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
27-70
3. Formal Education for Animal Healing: From Riding Schools

to Veterinary Schools, 1700-1850
J.M. Arburua, ‘History of Veterinary Medicine in the United States’, Journal of the
American Veterinary Medical Association 85 (1934) 4: 10-38
Charles Julian Bishko, ‘The Peninsular Background of Latin American Cattle
Ranching’, The Hispanic American Historical Review 32 (November 1952) 4:
491-515
Philippe Blom, Encyclopedie, The Triumph of Reason in an Unreasonable Age
(London: Fourth Estate, 2004)
Peter E.J. Bols, E. Dumas, J. Op de Beeck, and H.M.F. De Porte, ‘De Marechal-
veterinaire in de Grande Armee van Napoleon (1805-1815)’, Vlaams
Diergeneeskundig Tijdschrift 84 (2015) 333-342
Peter E.J. Bols, ‘Is Modern-Day Veterinary Medicine a Product of the Age of
Enlightenment?’, Sartoniana 32 (2019) 229-244
Francesca Bray, ‘Where Did the Animals Go? Presence and Absence of Livestock in
Chinese Agricultural Treatises,’ in Roel Sterckx, Martina Siebert, and Dagmar
Schafer (eds.), Animals through Chinese History: Earliest Times to 1911
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) 118-138
Miguel Codero del Campillo, ‘Medical and Veterinary Reports from Colonial Latin
America’, in Ferruh Dinger (ed.), Veterinary Medicine - Historical Approaches
(Ankara: Ankara University Press, 2002) 143-157
‘On the History of Veterinary Knowledge in the Old and New Worlds’, Argos 30
(2004) 457-469

Further Reading 385
Ernest Cotchen, The Royal Veterinary College London: A Bicentenary History

(London: Barracuda Books Ltd, 1990) 11-13
P. Cottereau and J. Weber-Godde, Claude Bourgelat. Un Lyonnais fondateur des deux
premieres ecoles veterinaires du monde (1712-1779) (Lyon: La Maison Chirat, 2011)
Astrid von Cramon-Taubadel, Weltkatalog der Veterinarmedizinischen Lehranstalten
nach dem Stand von 1976/77 (Hanover: Tierarztliche Hochschule, 1977)
Margaret Elsinor Derry, Horses in Society: A Story ofAnimal Breeding and Marketing,
1800-1920 (Toronto, Buffalo, London: Toronto University Press, 2006)
Robert H. Dunlop, ‘Bourgelat’s Vision for Veterinary Education and the Remarkable
Spread of the Veterinary “Meme”’, Journal of Veterinary Medical Education 31
(2004) 310-322
Guljah Eser, ‘The Role of the Military School in the Development of Veterinary
Medicine in Turkey’, in R. Tamay Basagag Gul (ed.), Some Essays on Veterinary
History (Ankara: Ankara University Press, 2012) 103-116
Suraiya Faruqhi (Ed.) Animals and People in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul: Eren,
2010)
Marleen Felius, P. Koolmees, B. Theunissen, and J. Lenstra, ‘On the Breeds of Cattle -
Historic and Current Classifications’, Diversity 3 (2011) 660-692
John R. Fisher, ‘The European Enlightenment, Political Economy and the Origins of the
Veterinary Profession in Britain’, Argos 12 (1995) 45-51
Reinhard Froehner, Kulturgeschichte der Tierheilkunde: ein Handbuchfnr Tierarzte
und Studierende. Band 2: Geschichte des Veterinarwesens im Ausland (Konstanz:
Terra, 1952)
Caroline C. Hannaway, ‘Veterinary Medicine and Rural Health Care in Pre
revolutionary France’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 51 (1977) 431-447
Kit Heintzman, ‘A Cabinet of the Ordinary: Domesticating Veterinary Education,
1766-1799’, The British Journal for the History of Science 51 (2018) 239-260
‘History of Veterinary Medicine’, Iowa State University Veterinarian 2 (1939) 1:
6-10
Ronald Hubscher, Les maitres des betes. Les veterinaires dans la societe frangaise
(XVIIIe-XXe siecle) (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999)
Dominik Hunniger, ‘Policing Epizootics: Legislation and Administration during
Outbreaks of Cattle Plague in Eighteenth Century Northern Germany as
Continuous Crisis Management,’ in Karen Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle (eds.),
Healing the Herds. Disease, Livestock Economies, and the Globalization of
Veterinary Medicine (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010) 76-91
Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration
in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)
Osamu Katsuyama, ‘Veterinary Folk Remedies’, Revue scientifique et technique
(International Office of Epizootics) 13 (1994) 2: 453-463
И.С. Колесниченко [I.S. Kolesnichenko], История ветеринарии [Veterinary
History], in Russian (Moscow 2010). Ebook, https://1lib.us/book/3082785/
1bb9ae?id=3082785&secret=1bb9ae. Accessed April 10, 2021
Peter A. Koolmees, ‘The Professionalization of Medical Professions in the Netherlands
1840-1940’, in Johann Schaffer (ed.), Domestication of Animals, Interactions
between Veterinary and Medical Sciences (Giessen: Deutsche
Veterinarmedizinische Gesellschaft, 1999) 54-64

386 Further Reading
Robert Kreiser, ‘“La cendrillon des sciences”: Toward the Professionalization of

Veterinary Medicine in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France’, Proceedings
Consortium on Revolutionary Europe 1750-1850 13 (1984) 180-197
Emmanuel Leclainche, Histoire de la Medicine Veterinaire (Toulouse: Office du Livre,
1936)
Franklin M. Loew, ‘Animals and People in Revolutionary France: Scientists, Cavalry,
Farmers and Veterinaires’, Anthrozoos 4 (1991) 1: 7-13
A. Mathijsen (Ed.) The Origins of Veterinary Schools in Europe -A Comparative View
(Utrecht: Veterinair Historisch Genootschap, 1997)
L.A. Merillat and D.M. Campbell, Veterinary Military History of the United States
(Chicago: Veterinary Magazine Corp., 1935)
Alan Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014)
Tatsuya Mitsuda, ‘Entangled Histories: German Veterinary Medicine, c. 1770-1900’,
Medical History 61 (2017) 1: 25-47
Jacques Nicolet, ‘La Faculte de Medecine veterinaire de Berne: une vieille histoire’,
Schweizer Archiv fur Tierheilkunde 146 (2006) 1: 33-40
Rahsan Ozen and Abdullah Ozen, ‘Veterinary Education in Turkey’, Journal of
Veterinary Medical Education 33 (2006) 2: 187-196
Zeynel Ozlu, ‘An Evaluation on Veterinary Medicine in the Ottoman Empire towards
the End of the 19th Century’, Belleten (Turk Tarih Kurumu) 76 (March 2012)
238-247
Roy Porter, Blood & Guts: A Short History of Medicine (London: Penguin Books,
2002)
Filip van Roosbroek, ‘Caring for Cows in a Time of Rinderpest: Non-Academic
Veterinary Practitioners in the County of Flanders, 1769-1785’, Social History of
Medicine 32 (2017) 3: 502-522
Housni Alkhateeb Shehada, ‘Arabic Veterinary Medicine and the “Golden Rules” for
Veterinarians according to a Sixteenth-Century Treatise’, in Suraiya Faraqhi (ed.),
Animals and People in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul: Eren, 2010) 315-332
Francois Vallat, Les bumf's malades de la peste: La peste bovine en France et en Europe
(XVIIIe-XIXe siecle) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009)
Karol K. Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of 18th-Century St.
Domingue (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006) Chapter 5
Lise Wilkinson, ‘Glanders: Medicine and Veterinary Medicine in Common Pursuit of a
Contagious Disease’, Medical History 25 (1981) 363-384
4. Veterinary Institutions and Animal Plagues, 1800-1900

E. Aalbers and Bent Christensen, Short History of the World Veterinary Association
1863-2005. WVA website: www.worldvet.org/about.php?sp=history. Accessed
April 10, 2021
Erwin Ackerknecht, ‘Anti-contagionism between 1821 and 1867’, International
Journal of Epidemiology 38 (2009) 7-21; reprinted from Bulletin of the History of
Medicine 22 (1948) 562-593
loana Cristina Andronie, Dumitru Curca, and Viorel Andronie, ‘General MD Carol
Davila Founder of the Human-Veterinary Medical and Pharmacy Education in

Further Reading 387
Bucharest-Romania’, in R. Tamay Basagag Gul (ed.), Some Essays on Veterinary

History (Ankara: Ankara University Press, 2012) 51-62
Sare Aricanli, ‘Reconsidering the Boundaries: Multicultural and Multilingual
Perspectives on the Care and Management of the Emperors’ Horses in the Qing,’
in Roel Sterckx, Martina Siebert, and Dagmar Schafer (eds.), Animals Through
Chinese History: Earliest Times to 1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2019) 199-216
Martine Barwegen, ‘For Better or Worse? The Impact of the Veterinary Service on the
Development of the Agricultural Society in Java (Indonesia) in the Nineteenth
Century’, in Karen Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle (eds.), Healing the Herds: Disease,
Livestock Economies, and the Globalization of Veterinary Medicine (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 2010) 92-107
William Beinart, ‘Vets Viruses and Environmentalism. The Cape in the 1870s and
1880s’, Paideuma, Journal of Research 43 (1997) 227-252
William Beinart and Saul Dubow, The Scientific Imagination in South Africa, 1700 to
the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021)
Natalia Ye. Beregoy, ‘The Fight against Cattle Plague in Russia, 1830-1902: A Brief
Overview of Methodological Approaches’, Studies in the History of Biology (St.
Petersburg) 4 (2012) 3: 94-100
Jean Blancou, History of the Surveillance and Control of Transmissible Animal
Diseases (Paris: Office International des Epizooties, 2003)
Elpidio Gonzalo Chamizo Pestana, Jose Manuel et al., ‘A Century of Veterinary
Education in Cuba (1907-2007)’, Journal of Veterinary Medical Education 37
(2007) 2: 118-125
Paul F. Cranefield, Science and Empire: East Coast Fever in Rhodesia and the
Transvaal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
A. Cunningham and B. Andrews (Eds.) Western Medicine as Contested Knowledge
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997)
Dumitru Curca, loana Cristina Andronie, and Viorel Andronie, ‘From the History of the
Romanian Scientific Societies of Veterinary Medicine’, Scientific Papers, Series
C: Veterinary Medicine LVIII (2011) 3: 1124+. http://veterinarymedicinejournal
.usamv.ro/pdf/vol.LVIII_3/Art10.pdf. Accessed January 12, 2021
Diana K. Davis, ‘Brutes, Beasts and Empire: Veterinary Medicine and Environmental
Policy in French North Africa and British India’, Journal of Historical Geography
34 (2008) 242-267
Janet Davis, The Gospel of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern
America (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 2016)
Ferruh Dinger, ‘100 Years of Veterinary Microbiological Institutes in Turkey,’ in F.
Dinger (ed.), Veterinary Medicine - Historical Approaches (Ankara: Ankara
Daniel F. Doeppers, ‘Fighting Rinderpest in the Philippines 1886-1941’, in Karen
Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle (eds.), Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock
Kari T. Elvbakken, ‘Veterinarians and Public Health: Food Control in the
Professionalization of Veterinarians’, Professions & Professionalism 7 (2017) 2.
http://doi.org/10.7577/pp.1806

388 Further Reading
John R. Fisher, ‘To Kill or Not to Kill: The Eradication of Contagious Bovine Pleuro
Pneumonia in Western Europe’, Medical History 47 (2003) 314-331
Anne Fowler la Berge, ‘The Paris Health Council, 1802-1848’, Bulletin of the History
of Medicine 49 (1975) 339-352
Daniel Gilfoyle, ‘Veterinary Research and the African Rinderpest Epizootic: The Cape
Colony, 1896-1898’, Journal of Southern African Studies 29 (March 2003) 1:
133-154
Vincent Goosseart, ‘Animals in Nineteenth-Century Eschatological Discourse,’ in Roel
Sterckx, Martina Siebert, and Dagmar Schafer (eds.), Animals through Chinese
History: Earliest Times to 1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)
181-198
Constant Huygelen, ‘The Early Years of Vaccinology: Prophylactic Immunization in
the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Sartoriana 10 (1997) 79-110
Susan D. Jones, Valuing Animals: Veterinarians and Their Patients in Modern America
(Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003)
Edward F. Keuchel, ‘Chemicals and Meat: The Embalmed Beef Scandal of the Spanish-
American War’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 48 (1974) 2: 249-264
Peter A. Koolmees, ‘The Development of Veterinary Public Health in Western Europe,
1850-1940’, Sartoniana 12 (1999) 153-179
‘Veterinary Inspection and Food Hygiene in the Twentieth Century’, in D.F. Smith
and J. Phillips (eds.), Food, Science, Policy and Regulation in the Twentieth
Century: International and Comparative Perspectives (London & New York:
Routledge, 2000) 53-68
‘Veterinarians, Abattoirs and the Urban Meat Supply in the Netherlands 1860-1940’,
in Marjatta Hietala and T. Vahtikari (eds.), The Landscape of Food: The Food
Relationship of Town and Country in Modern Times (Tampere: Finnish Literature
Society, 2003) 17-29
‘Epizootic Diseases in the Netherlands, 1713-2002: Veterinary Science, Agricultural
Policy, and Public Response’, in Karen Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle (eds.), Healing
the Herds: Disease, Livestock Economies, and the Globalization of Veterinary
Medicine (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010) 19-41
Gary Marquardt, ‘Water, Wood and Wild Animal Populations: Seeing the Spread of
Rinderpest through the Physical Environment in Bechuanaland, 1896’, South
African Historical Journal 53 (2005) 73-98
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday
Innovation in Zimbabwe (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014) Chapter 4
Berfin Melikoglu, ‘A Forgotten Album: Ecole Veterinaire Civil’, in R. Tamay Bajagag
Gul (ed.), Some Essays on Veterinary History (Ankara: Ankara University Press,
2012) 245-255
‘Osman Nuri Eralp’ in “Bakteriyoloji dersleri” adli kitabinin veteriner hekimligi
tarihi agisindan degerlendirilmesi’. Ph.D. dissertation (The Graduate School of
Health Sciences of Ankara University: Ankara, Turkey 2007)
Saurabh Mishra, Beastly Encounters of the Raj: Livelihoods, Livestock and Veterinary
Health in North India, 1790-1920 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2015)

Further Reading 389
David A.A. Mossel and Karl E. Dijkmann, ‘A Centenary of Academic and Less
Learned Food Microbiology Pitfalls of the Past and Promises for the Future’,
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek 50 (1984) 641-663
Turel Ozkul and R. Tamay Basagag Gul, ‘The Collaboration of Maurice Nicolle and
Adil Mustafa: The Discovery of the Rinderpest Agent’, Revue de Medecine
Veterinaire 159 (2008) 243-246
Richard Perren, ‘The Manufacture and Marketing of Veterinary Products from 1859 to
1914’, Veterinary History 6 (1989) 43-61
Terrie Romano, Making Medicine Scientific: John Burdon Sanderson and the Culture
of Victorian Science (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)
Chapter 3
Samanta Samiparna, ‘Cruelty Contested: The British, Bengalis, and Animals in
Colonial Bengal, 1850-1920’. Ph.D. dissertation (Tallahassee: Florida State
University, 2012)
Laxman D. Satya, Ecology, Colonialism and Cattle: Central India in the Nineteenth
Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
Calvin W. Schwabe, Veterinary Medicine and Public Health, 3rd ed. (Baltimore:
Williams & Wilkins, 1984)
Johann Schaffer, ‘The Veterinary Historical Museum at the Hannover School of
Veterinary Medicine - History, Conception, Duties and Problem’, Deutsche
tierarztliche Wochenschrift 101 (1994) 8: 326-330
James Serpell, In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships
Thaddeus Sunseri, ‘The African Rinderpest Panzootic, 1888-1897’, in Oxford
Research Encyclopedia of African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2018)
‘The Entangled History of Sadoka (Rinderpest) and Veterinary Science in Tanzania
and the Wider World, 1891-1901’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 89 (2015)
92-121
Joanna Swabe, Animals, Disease and Human Society: Human-Animal Relations and
the Rise of the Veterinary Regime (London: Routledge, 1999)
Sandra Swart, Riding High: Horses, Humans and History in South Africa
(Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2010)
H. Tadjbakhsh, ‘Veterinary Medicine in Iran’, in H. Selin (ed.), Encyclopaedia of the
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures
(Dordrecht: Springer). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_8913
Philip M. Teigen, ‘William Osler and Comparative Medicine’, Canadian Veterinary
Journal 25 1984) 10: 400-405
Peter Verhoef (Ed.) ‘Strictly Scientific and Practical Sense’: A Century of the Central
Veterinary Institute in the Netherlands, 1904-2004 (Rotterdam: Erasmus
Publishing, 2005)
Keir Waddington, The Bovine Scourge: Meat, Tuberculosis and Public Health,
1850-1914 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006)
A. Wijgergangs and Ivan Katic, Guide to Veterinary Museums of the World
(Copenhagen and Utrecht 1997), also published as Historia Medicinae
Veterinariae 21 (1996) 1-4: 1-77

390 Further Reading
Lise Wilkinson, Animals and Disease: An Introduction to the History of Comparative

Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Michael Worboys, Spreading Germs: Disease, Theories and Medical Practice in
Britain, 1865-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
5. Veterinary Medicine in War and Peace, 1900-1960

David Anderson, ‘Kenya’s Cattle Trade and the Economics of Empire, 1918-1948’, in
Karen Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle (eds.), Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock
Peter Atkins and Ian Bowler, Food in Society: Economy, Culture, Geography (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2001)
Karen Brown, ‘Tropical Medicine and Animal Diseases: Onderstepoort and the
Development of Veterinary Science in South Africa 1908-1950’, Journal of South
African Studies 31 (2005) 3: 513-529
C.H. Calisher and M.C. Horzinek (Eds.) 100 Years of Virology: The Birth and Growth
of a Discipline (Vienna: Springer, 1999)
William G. Clarence-Smith, ‘Diseases of Equids in Southeast Asia, c. 1800 - c. 1945’,
in Karen Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle (eds.), Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock
‘Horses, Mules and Other animals as a Factor in Ottoman Military Performance,
1683-1918’, Presented at War Horses of the World, conference, SOAS, University
of London, May 3-4, 2014. www.soas.ac.uk/history/conferences/war-horses-
conference-2014/
‘Trypanosoma evansi (surra) in camels,’ Presented at The Camel Conference, SOAS,
University of London, May 23-25, 2011. www.soas.ac.uk/camelconference2011/
Bryan D. Cummins, Colonel Richardson’s Airedales - The Making of the British War
Dog School 1900-1918 (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises Ltd, 2003)
Diana K. Davis, ‘Prescribing Progress: French Veterinary Medicine in the Service of
Empire’, Veterinary Heritage 29 (2006) 1: 1-7
Janet M. Davis, ‘Where Gasoline Can’t Go: Equine Patriotism and the American Red
Star Animal Relief Campaign during World War I,’ Presented at War Horses of the
World, conference, SOAS, University of London, May 3-4, 2014. www.soas.ac
.uk/history/conferences/war-horses-conference-2014/
Alanna Demers, ‘They Kill Horses, Don’t They? Peasant Resistance and the Decline of
the Horse Population in Soviet Russia’. Thesis (Bowling Green, Ohio: Graduate
College of Bowling Green State University, 2016)
R.L. DiNardo and Austin Bay, ‘Horse-Drawn Transport in the German Army’, Journal
of Contemporary History 23 (1988) 129-142
Emmanuel Dumas, ‘Les veterinaires morts pour la France pendant la guerre de
1914-1918’, Bulletin de la Societe frangaise d’histoire de la medecine et des
sciences veterinaires 8 (2008) 123-143
Andrew Gardiner, ‘“The Dangerous Women” of Animal Welfare: How British
Veterinary Medicine Went to the Dogs’, Social History of Medicine 27 (2014)
3: 466-487

Further Reading 391
Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous

History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948)
Daniel Gilfoyle, ‘Veterinary Immunology as Colonial Science: Method and
Quantification in the Investigation of Horse sickness in South Africa,’ Journal of
the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 61 (2006) 1: 26-65
Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008)
Katherine C. Grier, Pets in America: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2015)
Jose Manuel Gutierrez Garcia, ‘Meat as a Vector of Transmission of Bovine
Tuberculosis to Humans in Spain: A Historical Perspective’, Veterinary Heritage
29 (2006) 1: 25-27
E. Guzman and M. Montoya, ‘Contributions of Farm Animals to Immunology,’
Frontiers in Veterinary Science 5 (2018) 307
Floor Haalboom, Negotiating Zoonoses: Dealings with Infectious Diseases Shared by
Humans and Livestock in the Netherlands 1898-2001. Ph.D. dissertation (Utrecht:
Utrecht University, 2017)
Lotte Hughes, ‘They Give Me Fever: East Coast Fever and Other Environmental
Impacts of the Maasai Moves’, in Karen Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle (eds.),
Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock Economies, and the Globalization of
Veterinary Medicine (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010) 146-162
Susan D. Jones, ‘Scientific Debates and Popular Beliefs: A Historical Study of Bovine
Tuberculosis,’ Argos 27 (2002) 313-318
‘A History of Veterinarians and Biological Weapons during the World Wars,’
Revista de Colegio des Medicos Veterinarios del Estado Lara (Venezuela) 3 (June
2013) 1. http://revistacmvl.jimdo.com/suscripci6n/volumen-5/world-wars/
‘Defining the Threat: American Veterinarians and Bovine Tuberculosis Eradication
in the World War II Era’, Veterinary Heritage 28 (2005) 2: 33-37
Diana Murphy Jordan, ‘Hog Cholera: A Historical Review’, Veterinary Heritage 21
(1998) 1: 1-8
John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Vintage Books, 1994)
Emily R. Kilby, ‘The Demographics of the U.S. Equine Population’, in D.J. Salem and
A.N. Rowan (eds.), The State of the Animals 2007 (Washington, DC: Humane
Society Press, 2007) 175-205
Peter A. Koolmees, ‘Meat in the Past: A Bird’s-Eye View on Meat Consumption,
Production and Research in the Western World from Antiquity to 1945’, in W.
Sybesma, P.A. Koolmees, and D.G. van der Heij (eds.), Meat Past and Present:
Research, Production, Consumption (Zeist, Netherlands: TNO Nutrition and Food
Research Institute, 1994) 5-32
‘The Role of Veterinary Medicine in the Development of Factory Farming’, in
Francien de Jonge and Ruud van den Bos (eds.), The Human-Animal
Relationship: Forever and a Day (Assen: Royal Van Gorcum, 2005) 249-264
‘From Stable to Table: The Development of the Meat Industry in the Netherlands,
1850-1990’, in Yves Segers, Jan Bieleman, and Erik Buyst (eds.), Exploring the
Food Chain: Food Production and Food Processing in Western Europe,
1850-1990 (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2009) 117-137

392 Further Reading
‘Veterinary Medicine in The Netherlands, 1940-1945’, in Johann Schaffer (ed.),

Veterinarmedizin im Dritten Reich (Giessen: Deutsche Veterinarmedizinische
Gesellschaft, 1998) 262-275
‘From the Marshall Plan to Present Day Prosperity: Veterinary Medicine in the
Netherlands 1945-2000’, Schweizer Archiv fur Tierheilkunde 144 (2002) 24-31
‘Bovine Brucellosis and Post-War Dutch Veterinary Medicine’, in Johann Schaffer
(ed.), Geschichte der Gynakologie und Andrologie der Haustiere (Giessen:
Deutsche Veterinarmedizinische Gesellschaft, 2008) 198-203
Peter Koolmees and Charlotte Hartong, ‘Dierenartsen en chemische wapens in
Nederland, 1914-1940,’ Argos: Bulletin van het Veterinair Historisch
Genootschap 64 (2021) 131-142
Milton Leitenberg, ‘Biological Weapons in the Twentieth Century: A Review and
Analysis’, Critical Reviews in Microbiology 27 (2001) 267-320
Amanda Kay McVety, The Rinderpest Campaigns: A Virus, Its Vaccines, and Global
Development in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge and London: Cambridge
Berfin Melikoglu, R. Tamay Basagag Gul, and T. Ozkul, ‘Paul Ambroise Remlinger:
A Pasteurien in Turkey and His Studies on Rabies’, Revue Medecine Veterinaire
160 (2009) 7: 374-377
Everett B. Miller, United States Army Veterinary Service in World War II (Washington,
DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961)
Shaun N. Milton, ‘Western Veterinary Medicine in Colonial Africa: A Survey,
1902-1963’, Argos 18 (1998) 313-322
Martin Monestier, Les animaux-soldats: Histoire militaire des animaux, des origines a
nos jours (Paris: Cherche Midi, 1996)
Stephen A. Morse, ‘Historical Perspectives of Microbial Bioterrorism’, in B. Anderson,
H. Friedman, and M. Bendinelli (eds.), Microorganisms and Bioterrorism (New
York: Springer, 2006) 15-29
Arthur W. Moss and Elizabeth Kirby, Animals Were There: A Record of the Work of the
R.S.P.C.A. during the War of 1939-1945 (London, New York, Melbourne,
Sydney, Cape Town: Hutchinson & Co., 1946)
Rita Pemberton, ‘Animal Disease and Veterinary Administration in Trinidad and
Tobago, 1879-1962’, in Karen Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle (eds.), Healing the
Herds: Disease, Livestock Economies, and the Globalization of Veterinary
Medicine (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010) 163-179
Robert John Perrins, ‘Holding Water in Bamboo Buckets: Agricultural Science,
Livestock Breeding, and Veterinary Medicine in Colonial Manchuria’, in Karen
Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle (eds.), Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock
Roger Roffy, A. Tegnell, and F. Elgh, ‘Biological Warfare in a Historical Perspective’,
Clinical Microbiology and Infection 8 (2002) 450-454
Leon Z. Saunders, Veterinary Pathology in Russia, 1860-1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
Boria Sax, Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats and the Holocaust (New York
& London: Continuum, 2000)

Further Reading 393
Johann Schaffer (Ed.) Veterinarmedizin im Dritten Reich (Giessen: Deutsche

Veterinarmedizinische Gesellschaft, 1998)
Veterinary Medicine and National Socialism in Europe: Status and
Perspectives of Research (Giessen: Deutsche Veterinarmedizinische
Gesellschaft, 2018)
James Serpell, In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships
John Singleton, ‘Britain’s Military Use of Horses 1914-1918’, Past and Present 139
(1993) 178-203
Ole H.V. Stalheim, The Winning of Animal Health: 100 Years of Veterinary Medicine
(Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995)
Veterinary Conversations with Mid-Twentieth Century Leaders (Hoboken, NJ:
Wiley-Blackwell, 1997)
James H. Steele, ‘A Personal History of Veterinary Public Health’, Veterinary Heritage
21 (1998) 1: 9-11
Norman Stone, World War One: A Short History (New York: Basic Books, 2009)
Sandra Swart, ‘Horses in the South African War, c. 1899-1902’, Society and Animals
18 (2010) 348-366
Joel A. Tarr and Clay McShane, ‘The Horse as an Urban Technology’, Journal of
Urban Technology 15 (2008) 1: 5-17
Philip M. Teigen, ‘Nineteenth-Century Veterinary Medicine as an Urban Profession’,
Veterinary Heritage 23 (2000) 1-6
‘Counting Urban Horses in the United States’, Argos 26 (2002) 267-276
F.M.L. Thompson, Horses in European Economic History: A Preliminary Canter
(Reading: British Agricultural History Society, 1983)
Ulrike Thoms, ‘Travelling Back and Forth. Antibiotics in the Clinic, Stable and Food
Industry in Germany in the1950s and 60s’, in Ana Romero, Christoph Gradmann,
and Maria Santemases (eds.), Circulation of Antibiotics: Journeys of Drug
Standards, 1930-1970 (Madrid and Oslo: European Science Foundation, 2010)
81-121
Naudy Trujillo Mascia, ‘Aportes para la Historia de la Historiograffa Medico
Veterinaria Venezolana’, Revista Electronica de Veterinaria 11 (2010) 3. www
.historiaveterinaria.org/update/aportes-hist-vet-venez-1457101406.pdf
Y. Zhang, L. Colli, and J. S. F. Barker, ‘Asian Water Buffalo: Domestication, History
and Genetics’, Animal Genetics 51 (2020) 2: 177-191. https://doi.org/10.1111/age
.12911
6. Food, Animals, and Veterinary Care in a Changing World,

1960-2000
Katinka K.I.M. de Balogh, ‘De rol van de (vrouwelijke) dierenarts in Africa’, Argos 23
(2000) 132-137
Raziye Tamay Bajagag Gul, Turel Ozkul, Aytac Akgay, and Abdullah Ozen,
‘Historical Profile of Gender in Turkish Veterinary Education’, Journal of
Roscoe Bell, editorial, American Veterinary Review 21 (1897) 595-596

394 Further Reading
Hanna E.N. Buenot, ‘Temoignages de femmes veterinaires en France de 1950 a nos

jours’. Ph.D. dissertation (Alfort: Ecole Nationale Veterinaire d’Alfort, 2011)
Martin Brumme (Ed.) Veterinarmedizin im Sozialismus (Giessen, Deutsche
Veterinarmedizinische Gesellschaft, 1995)
Robert Bud, Penicillin: Triumph and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
Angela Cassidy et al., ‘Animal Roles and Traces in the History of Medicine,
c.1880-1980’, British Journal for the History of Science (2017) 2: 11-33
Ana Rodnguez Castano, ‘La veterinaria en femenino: pioneras en Espana y evolucion
profesional en la Comunidad de Madrid’. Thesis (Madrid: Faculty of Veterinary
Medicine, Complutense University, 2015)
Committee to Assess Current and Future Workforce Needs, Workforce Needs in
Veterinary Medicine (Washington, DC: The National Academies of Sciences
Press, 2013)
Angela von den Driesch, ‘Ethnoveterinary Medicine - An Aspect of the History of
Veterinary Medicine’, in F. Dinger (ed.), Veterinary Medicine, Historical
Approaches (Ankara: Ankara University Press, 2002) 131-141
Ronnie G. Elmore, ‘The Lack of Racial Diversity in Veterinary Medicine’, Journal of
the American Veterinary Medical Association 222 (2003) 24-26
Lisa Emmett et al., ‘Feminization and Stress in the Veterinary Profession: A Systematic
Diagnostic Approach and Associated Management’, Behavior Sciences 9 (2019)
11. doi:10.3390/bs9110114
John R. Fisher, ‘Cattle Plagues Past and Present: The Mystery of Mad Cow Disease’,
Journal of Contemporary History 33 (1998) 215-228
Leslie Irvine and Jenny R. Vermilya, ‘Gender Work in a Feminized Profession. The
Case of Veterinary Medicine’, Gender & Society 24 (2010) 1: 56-82
Japan Veterinary Medical Association, ‘Overview of Veterinary Medicine in Japan.’
Tokyo: JVMA, 2013. Available at https://news.vin.com/apputil/image/handler
.ashx?docid=8609537. Accessed April 15, 2021
Susan D. Jones, ‘Gender and Veterinary Medicine: Global Historical Perspectives’,
Argos 23 (2000) 119-123
‘Bringing Veterinary History and History of Science Together: Recent Developments
in the English-Language Literature’, Argos 53 (2016) 94-99
Tjeerd Jorna, ‘The World Veterinary Association (WVA) and the Role of the
Veterinarian on a Global Level’, in R. Tamay Bajagag Gul (ed.), Some Essays on
Veterinary History. Proceedings of the XXXIX International Congress of the
WAHVM and the III National Symposium of the TAHVME (Ankara: Ankara
Rebecca Kaplan, ‘Cows, Cattle Owners and the USDA: Brucellosis, Populations and
Public Health Policy in the United States’. Ph.D. dissertation (University of
California-San Francisco, 2013)
Ivan Katic, “Pioneer Female Veterinarians,’ Medical Sciences 37 (2012) 137-168
Muhammad A. Kavesh, Animal Enthusiasms: Life Beyond Cage and Leash in Rural
Pakistan (Abingdon, New York: Routledge, 2021)
Sujoy Khanna, Maneka Sanjay Gandhi, Meenakshi Awasthi, Gaushala. Ebook
available at www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/gaushala.pdf. Accessed April 10, 2021
Claus Kirchhelle, ‘Pharming Animals: A Global History of Antibiotics in Food
Production (1935-2017),’ Palgrave Commununications 4 (2018) 96. https://doi
.org/10.1057/s41599-018-0152-2

Further Reading 395
Peter A. Koolmees, ‘Feminization and Veterinary Medicine in the Netherlands,’ Argos

23 (2000) 125-131
Ozgul Kugukaslan, Raziye Tamay Bajagag Gul, and Aytag Unsal, ‘The First Female
Academicians in Turkish Veterinary Education,’ Ankara Universitesi Veteriner
Fakultesi Dergisi 64 (2017) 255-260
Phyllis Hickney Larsen, Our History of Women in Veterinary Medicine: Gumption,
Grace, Grit, and Good Humor (Littleton, CO: Association for Women
Veterinarians, 1997)
Kaitlyn Mattson, ‘Veterinary Colleges Committed to Anti-Racism, Say Black Lives
Matter,’ Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 257 (2020) 4:
348-352
Dennis M. McCurnin and Joanna M. Bassert, Clinical Textbook for Veterinary
Technicians, 6th ed. (St. Louis, Missouri: Elsevier Saunders, 2006)
Т.Н. Минеева [T.N. Mineeva], История ветеринарии [Veterinary History], in
Russian (Moscow: LAN Publishing, 2005).
Petrissa Rinesch, ‘Pioneer Women Veterinarians in European Society’, Journal of the
American Veterinary Medical Association 212 (1998) 182-184
Marianne Sackmann-Rink, ‘Vermeintliche und vereitelte Anfange des Frauenstudiums
an der veterinar-medizinischen Fakultat der Universitat Zurich’, Schweizer Archiv
fur Tierheilkunde 127 (1985) 793-798
Philip M. Teigen, ‘Henry Stockton Lewis, Sr. (1858-1922): An Early African
American Veterinarian’, Veterinary Heritage 25 (2002) 1: 5-6
William H. Waddell, The Black Man in Veterinary Medicine (Honolulu, HI: published
by the author, 1969, 1982)
Wycliffe Wanzala, ‘A Survey of the Management of Livestock Ticks and Other Aspects
of Animal Ethno Health in Bukusu Community, Western Kenya’, Livestock
Research for Rural Development 24 (2012) article #173. www.lrrd.org/lrrd24/10/
wanz24173.htm. Accessed March 22, 2021
Andrea Wiley, ‘Growing a Nation: Milk Consumption in India since the Raj,’ in
Mathilde Cohen and Yoriko Otomo (eds.), Making Milk: The Past, Present, and
Future of Our Primary Food (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) 41-61
Abigail Woods, A Manufactured Plague: The History of Foot and Mouth Disease in
Britain (London: Earthscan, 2004)
‘Is Prevention Better than Cure? The Rise and Fall of Preventive Veterinary
Medicine, c. 1950-1980’, Social History of Medicine 26 (2013) 1: 113-131
7. Veterinary Medicine and Animal Health, 2000-2020

Laure Bonnaud and Nicolas Fortane, ‘Being a Vet: The Veterinary Profession in Social
Science Research’, Review of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Studies
(April 2020). doi:10.1007/s41130-020-00103-1
‘Booming Growth of Small-Animal Practice in China,’ DVM 360 (February 28, 2014).
www.dvm360.com/view/booming-growth-small-animal-practice-china. Accessed
April 14, 2021
Alicia Davis and Jo Sharp, ‘Rethinking One Health: Emergent Human, Animal and
Environmental Assemblages’, Social Science & Medicine 258 (2020). doi:10
.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113093

396 Further Reading
Margo DeMello, Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2012)
Douwe Fokkema and Frans Grijzenhout, Nederlandse cultuur in Europese context.
Rekenschap 1650-2000 (Den Haag, SDU Uitgevers, 2001) 347-351
Jean-Paul Gaudilliere and Ulrike Thoms (Eds.) The Development of Scientific
Marketing in the 20th Century (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015)
Edward C. Green, ‘Etiology in Human and Animal Ethnomedicine’, Agriculture and
Human Values 15 (1998) 127-131
Harold Herzog, ‘The Impact of Pets on Human Health and Psychological Well-Being:
Fact, Fiction, or Hypothesis?’, Current Directions in Psychological Science 20
(2011) 236-239
Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and
Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)
Susan D. Jones, ‘Framing Animal Disease: Housecats with Feline Urological
Syndrome, Their Owners, and Their Doctors’, Journal of the History of Medicine
and Allied Sciences 52 (1997) 202-235
Susan D. Jones and Anna A. Amramina, ‘Entangled Histories of Plague Ecology in
Russia and the USSR’, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (2018)
3: 1-21
J.M. Kagira and P.W.N. Kanyari, ‘Questionnaire Survey on Urban and Peri-urban
Livestock Farming Practices and Disease Control in Kisumu Municipality,
Kenya’, Tydskrif van die Suid-Afrikaanse Veterinere Vereniging 81 (2010) 2:
82-86
Joanna de Klerk, Melvyn Quan, and John D. Grewar, ‘Socio-economic Impacts of
Working Horses in Urban and Peri-urban Areas of the Cape Flats, South Africa’,
Journal of the South African Veterinary Association 91 (2020). https://doi.org/10
.4102/jsava.v91i0.2009 . Accessed March 22, 2021
Peter Koolmees, ‘Changing Perspectives: World Association for the History of
Veterinary Medicine, 1969-2019’, in Johann Schaffer (ed.), Future Needs a Past,
the Importance of Historical Research for Veterinary Medicine (Giessen:
Deutsche Veterinarmedizinische Gesellschaft, 2020) 27-59
Mara Miele et al., ‘Animal Welfare: Establishing a Dialogue between Science and
Society’, Animal Welfare 20 (2011) 103-117
Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers, Zoobiquity: The Astonishing
Connection between Human and Animal Health (New York: Vintage, 2013)
Tom Regan, The Case of Animal Rights (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1983)
Harriet Ritvo, ‘History and Animal Studies’, Society and Animals 10 (2002) 403-406
‘On the Animal Turn’, Daedalus 136 (2007) 118-122
Peter Roeder and Karl Rich, The Global Effort to Eradicate Rinderpest, White Paper
(Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute, 2009)
Bernard E. Rollin, An Introduction to Veterinary Medical Ethics: Theory and Cases
(Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1999)
Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, and Anna Rosling Ronnlund, Factfulness: Ten Reasons
We’re Wrong about the World - And Why Things Are Better than You Think (New
York: Flatiron Books, 2019)
Matthew Salois, ‘Fundamental Shifts in Consumer Behavior: What’s Next?’, DVM360
(April 2021) 14-15

Further Reading 397
Arvind Sharma, Catherine Schuetze, and Clive J.C. Phillips, ‘The Management of Cow
Shelters (Gaushalas) in India, Including the Attitudes of Shelter Managers of Cow
Welfare,’ Animals 10 (2020) 211-243. www.mdpi.com/journal/animals.
doi:10.3390/ani10020211
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New
York: HarperCollins, 1975)
Bernard Vallat, ‘Speech by the Director General of the World Organization for Animal
Health (OIE)’, Cape Town, South Africa, October 14, 2011
VetSurvey. Survey of the Veterinary Profession in Europe ([Brussels]: Federation of
Veterinarians of Europe, 2019
Rene van Weeren, ‘Horses and Humans: A Special Bond throughout the Ages’, Argos
56 (2018) 205-211
Michael S. Wilkes, Patricia A. Conrad, and Jenna N. Winer, ‘One Health-One
Education: Medical and Veterinary Inter-Professional Training’, Journal of
Abigail Woods, Michael Bresalier, Angela Cassidy, and Rachel Mason-Dentinger,
Animals and the Shaping of Modern Medicine: One Health and Its Histories
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
K. Yamanouchi, ‘Scientific Background to the Global Eradication of Rinderpest’,
Veterinary Immunology and Immunopathology 148 (2012) 1-2: 12-15
Jakob Zinsstag, Esther Schelling, Kaspar Wyss, and Mahamat Bechir Mahamat,
‘Potential of Cooperation between Human and Animal Health to Strengthen
Health Systems’, Lancet 366 (2005) 9503: 142-145
Jakob Zinsstag, E. Schelling, D. Waltner-Toews, and M Tanner, ‘From “One Medicine”
to “One Health” and Systematic Approaches to Health and Well-Being’,
Preventative Veterinary Medicine 101 (2011) 3-4: 148-156

Index
abattoirs. See slaughterhouses al-Bakhsh! al-Halabl, Muhammad, 26

Abbas the Great, 48 al-baqar disease, 26
Abildgaard, Peter Christian, 113, 142 albeitares, 6, 26, 95-97, 119
Abil-ilisu, 20 Albrant, Meister, 28, 92
abortion, 224 Alembert, Jean d’, 89
Abu Bakr al-Baytar, 26-27 Alembo (bovine babesiosis), 348-349
Abul-Abbas (Asian elephant), 19 Alexander, Raymond, 223
Academie d’Equitation, 99 Alfonso di Vestea, 220
acupuncture, 17, 51, 59, 79, 343 Alfort, Ecole Veterinaire d’. See Ecole
Adami, Paul, 116 Veterinaire d’Alfort (France)
Adges, Edinwaldo, 120 Algeria, 264
Afghanistan, 245 Algonquian peoples, 51
Africa. See also specific countries Alkhateeb Shehada, Hosni, 26
American ecological exchange, 42-43 allergies, 219
animal power in, 211 Alvarez de Salamiellas, Juan, 8
French colonialism in, 129 American Red Star Relief, 234
parasitic diseases in sub-Saharan, 301 American Veterinary Medical Association,
rinderpest in sub-Saharan, 146-148 317, 319-320
rinderpest vaccine development in, 265-266 analgesics, 81-84, 336
women in veterinarian medicine, 320-321 anaplasmosis, 268
Zulu disease causation theories, 63-64, 180, anatomy. See also comparative anatomy
373 early Greco-Roman knowledge of, 24
African horse sickness, 220, 223, 268 in Ayurvedic knowledge, 18
African swine fever, 267-268 Anatomy of the Horse, The (Stubbs), 34
agriculture. See also factory farming Andrewes, Christopher, 222
agricultural societies, 113 anemias, 268
twentieth c Green Revolution, 357-358 anesthesia, 159, 192
twentieth c innovations, 212-215 anesthetics, 29, 81-84, 351
mechanization of, and horses’ decline in, Angola, 321
209-212, 256 animal behaviors, 2
physiocracy and, 90-91, 104 protections for, 337-338
postwar, 258-261 self-healing, 9-10
prehistoric, 3-4 animal economy. See also herd health; horse
small-scale organic farms, 309, 359 economy
Aha-Nakht, 20 Enlightenment age, 57
Ahmad ibn al-Hasan, 7 globalization of, 287-300
AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome), modernization and, 203-204
362 World War I and its aftermath, 234-239, 242
Akbar, 45-47 animal feed
Akhal-Teke horses, 127-128 antibiotics and other additives, 163, 263,
al -Baytar (veterinarian), 26 277, 283, 297-300
Al-as ibn Wa’il, 20 disease spread through, 287, 291, 293-294
398

Index 399
globalization of, 358 Asia. See also specific countries

postwar recovery, 258-259 meat production in, 278
production increases, 138, 213 parasitic diseases in, 301
wartime shortages, 248, 257 women in veterinary medicine, 318-321
animal husbandry, 206, 259, 346 Association of American Veterinary Medical
twentieth c improvements in, 213 Colleges (AAVMC), 320
African, 43 Astley, John, 99
Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our atom-theory, 218
Treatment of Animals (Singer), 337 Augustine of Hippo, 52
Animal Machines (Harrison), 337 Australia, 158, 215
animal owners as healers, 91-97 Austria, 254
animal protein consumption automobiles, 208
nineteenth c increase in, 138 Avars, 77
postwar focus on, 259-261 Averroes (Ibn Rushd), 26
animal welfare avian influenza, 221, 265, 362
companion animals and, 271, Avicenna (Ibn S!na), 25
339-340 ayer asem, 154
factory farming and, 278 Ayllu (Inca community), 15
late eighteenth-nineteenth c, 54-55 Ayurvedic healing, 25, 59, 80
late twentieth c politicization and regulation eighteenth century, 127
of, 335-338 historical overview, 18-20
nineteenth-twentieth c, 194-195, 231, surgical practices, 79
233-234 Vedic period, 5-6
Ansel, Merver, 315 Azara, Felix de, 120
anthrax, 73-76 Aztec empire, 15
as a biological weapon, 250
etiology of, 186-187 babesiosis, 268
vaccine for, 187-188 Babylonia, 21
anthropomorphism, 331-333, 347 Bacillus anthracis, 76, 186-187
antibiotics Bacitracin, 263
as feed supplements, 163, 263, 277, 283 bacteriology, 9, 219, 362
regulations, 297-300 development of, 181-188
resistance, 263, 277, 297-300, 359-360 Koch as founder of, 185-187
anti-contagionism, 178-181 microbiology and, 216-219
antimicrobials, 258, 261-264, 282-283 naming and classifying conventions, 182
antiquity, 4-6, 21-25, 76 badaw! (Bedouins), 20
antisepsis, 158-159 Bakteriyolojijdne-i Baytari, 159
anti-vivisectionists, 194-196, 336-337 balance
antrax. See anthrax Chinese theories of, 15-18, 59
aphthae epizooticae. See foot and mouth in Ayurvedic medicine, 59
disease in Hippocratic medicine, 22-23
apprenticeships, 36, 80 Balkan Wars, 230-231
Apsyrtos, 6, 21, 74 Balogh, Katinka de, 320
arboviruses, 268, 301 Bang, L.F. Bernhard, 224
archaeological sources, 4, 21, 97 Bang’s disease. See brucellosis
Argentina, 215 barber-surgeons, 97
Aristotle, 23-24, 26, 52 Bates, Thomas, 68
Ars veterinaria (Pelagonius), 24 Bay, Austin, 246
arsenic, 56 Bayle, Pierre, 53
Art de la cavalerie, l’ (Saunier), 100 baytar (surgeon of animals), 6
Art of Riding, The (Astley), 99 Baytara, 45
Artis veterinariae sive mulomedicinae beas_ts of burden, 1, 3, 19, 98
(Flavius), 29 Bedouins, 20
Aselli, Gasparo, 194 Behring, Emil von, 162, 218
Ashoka the Great, 5 Beijerinck, Martinus Willem, 220

400 Index
Belgium, 300 books

Ben Cao Gang Mu (Li Shih-Zhen), 16 Colonial American, 44
Bengal Veterinary College, 157 influence of, in the nineteenth c, 154
Benivieni, Antonio, 59 on horsemanship and horse medicine,
Bentham, Jeremy, 53-54, 195 98-100
benzimidazoles, 264 Borneo, 145
Bergeyre, Eugene, 120 Borrel, Amedee, 220
beriberi, 160 Borustedt, Airi, 314
Bernard, Claude, 58, 163, 183 Bouley, Henri, 190
Bernhard, Inkeri, 314 Bourgelat, Claude, 88-90, 103-109, 114, 180
Berlin, Henri-Leonard, 103-106 bovine babesiosis, 348-349
Besnard, Julio, 157 bovine somatotropin (BST), 299
Besnoit, Charles, 292 bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE),
Betrachtung uber das Studium der 291-296
Vieharzneykunde (Erxleben), bovine tuberculosis, 170, 373
111 in Colonial America, 63
Bichat, Xavier, 189 nineteenth c, 139
biodiversity, erosion of, 358 persistence of, 267
biological and chemical warfare, 77, 241, prehistoric, 4
250-254 relationship to human tuberculosis,
biologicals, 162, 164 191
biotechnologies, 345 twentieth c research, 218, 225-227, 243-244
birds, 280, 341-342, See also poultry Brambell, Roger, 337
avian influenza, 221, 265, 362 Branford, William, 172
falconry books on, 30 Brassley, Paul, 357
bitar (surgeon of animals), 6 Brauell, Friedrich, 186
Black Death, 29-30 Braun, Otto Philipp von, 120
Black veterinarians, 173-174, 319-320 breeding
blacksmithing, 78 cloning and, 352-353
bladder worm. See Echinococcus genetic modification, 283
Blake, William, 120 of horses, 206
blistering, 36 pedigree companion animals, 332, 339
blood postwar programs, 259-261
bloodletting, 27, 36, 94, 128 prehistoric, 4
circulation of, 55-56 reproduction technologies, 282
immunological advances, selective, 283
218-219 warhorses, 228-229
research development, 182 Bresalier, Michael, 258
Blue Cross, 234, 239, 249 British East India Company (EIC), 127-128
bluetongue, 268 British National Institute for Medical Research,
Blundeville, Thomas, 99 272
bodily functions. See physiology British Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
водобоязнь. See rabies Animals, 55
Boer War, 227-229 Brower Etchecopar, Julio, 157
Boerhaave, Herman, 57 Brown, Karen, 264
Boers, 154 Bruce, David, 63, 224
Boissiere, Charles de, 240 Brucella abortus, 224
Bojanus, Ludwig Heinrich, 117 brucellosis, 218, 223-225, 244, 373
Bojkic, Jelka, 315 Brugnoni, Carlo Giovanni, 111
Bollinger, Otto, 220 Brumme, Martin, 111
Bols, Peter, 125 BSE. See bovine spongiform encephalopathy
Bonomo, Giovanni Cosimo, 175 bubonic plague (Black Death), 29-30
Bonsdorff, Gabriel, 112 Buchner, Hans, 218
booklets on healing, early printed, Budapest (Hungary), 111
92-94 Buddhism, 6, 18

Index 401
buffalo contagious bovine pleuropneumonia

slaughter rates, 279 (CBPP), 149-151
Bujwid-Jurgielewicz, Helena, 314 East Coast Fever, 349
Bukusu community (Kenya), 348 foot and mouth disease, 71-72
Bulgaria, 241 introduction to the Americas, 119
Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI), 150, nagana disease, 63-64, 223
319 rabies in, 152
control of, through WW II, 216 rinderpest. See rinderpest
establishment of, 160-161 sacred, in India, 5, 127
politicization of, 212 slaughter rates, 279
swine fever research, 222 trade. See trade
TB eradication program, 243-244 Cattle Acts, 153, 167
Burma, 240 cattle-doctor (a.zu gu.hi.a), 21
Burnet, Frank MacFarland, 293 Causae et Curae (Hildegard von Bingen), 30
Bursa of Fabricius, 219 cauterization, 36, 72, 80, 94, 97, 128, 152
butchers and butcheries cavalry, 77-78, 98, See also military horses
scientific contributions of, 61 Cavendish, William, 99
unhygienic conditions of, in the nineteenth c, cellular communications, 346
138-139 cellular immunity, 218
Byzantine empire, 7-8, 25, 31 Centanni, Eugenio, 221
Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 259
Calmette, Albert, 226 Central America, 42, 119, 245, 303
camels, 20, 236 Cerviensis, Theodoricus, 28
Camper, Petrus, 75 Chabert, Philibert, 108, 125, 179
Campylobacter, 182, 308 Chain, Ernst Boris, 262
can. See glanders Chakana (three universes), 15
Canada Chamberland, Charles, 219
horse trade, 235-236 chang-ta, 128
veterinary education in, 156 charbon. See anthrax
canine distemper, 223, 272 chariot racing, 24
canine morbillivirus, 223 Chauveau, Jean-Baptiste Auguste, 58, 61, 180,
cannibalism, 296 187, 190, 373
Cape Colony (British South Africa), 147, 154, Chelle, Paul-Louis, 292
172-174 chemical and biological warfare, 241, 250-254
Caracciolo, Pasquale, 29 chemistry, 56
carache (llama mange), 42 Chicago meat industry, 140-141
Caro, Cristobal, 119 China
Carre, Henri, 222 companion animal veterinary services in,
Carson, Rachel, 361 343-344
Case for Animal Rights, The (Regan), 337 early modern period, 48-50
Casserius, Julius, 35 European imperialism in, 128-129
castration, 4, 24, 79, 83, 272 horse breeding in, 206
cats Pacific War, 245
diseases of, 153 pet-keeping in, 343-344
early domestication of, 4 traditional medicine, 15-18, 59, 79-80
in Ancient Egypt, 21 traditional medicine in twenty-first c
cats, companion, 194-195, 334, See also practices, 337-343
companion animals veterinary education in, 155
cattle. See also cows Chloramphenicol, 263
African knowledge on, 43-44 Chlortetracycline, 263
anthrax. See anthrax Cho Yong-Seok, 96
bovine babesiosis, 348-349 cholera, 185, 219, 221
bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), Christian theology, 34-36, 52
291-293 chronic wasting disease (CWS), 296-297
bovine tuberculosis. See bovine tuberculosis Cincinnati (USA) meat industry, 140

402 Index
circus animals, 24, 338 comparative physiology

Citizen and Countryman’s Experienced and pathology, 60
Farrier, The (Markham), 34, 44 early form of, 58
CJD and vCJD. See Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease complementary and alternative veterinary
classical swine fever (CSF), 222, 243, medicine (CAVM), 311-312
266-267, 279-288 computerized axial tomography (CT scanning),
clavelization, 73 345, 350
climate Congo, 321
and anthrax, 74 Connelly, Ethel, 320
desert, camels and, 236 Constantinople (Ottoman empire), 7-8, 25, 30,
in Hippocratic medicine, 22 117
cloning, 352-353 contagion
Clostridium botulinus, 166 nineteenth c contagionism and anti-
coccidiosis, 282 contagionism theories, 178-181
cocks, fighting, 341-342 of foot and mouth disease, 72
Coleman, Edward, 114 of rinderpest, 65
collections, natural history, 90 contagious abortion. See brucellosis
College of Veterinary Medicine from Seoul contagious bovine pleuropneumonia (CBPP),
National University (South Korea), 148, 160, 162, 216, 220, 235
318-321 Contagious Disease (Animal) Acts, 167
Colonial America, 40-44, 119 contagious equine pleuropneumonia, 261
colonialism, European, 39-44, 118, 137, contagium vivum fluidum, 220
143-144, 151, 177-178 contagium vivum/contagium animatum,
food regimes emerging from, 213-214 181
World War I and, 240-241 Copenhagen (Denmark), 111
Columbia Veterinary College and School of cordons sanitaires, 64-65, 143, 147, 192
Veterinary Medicine (USA), 191 Cornell University (USA), 156-157
Columbus, Christopher, 40, 119 cosmopolitan knowledge, 88, 90
Columella, 24 Cours d’hippiatrique, ou traite complet de la
companion animals medecine des chaveaux (Lafosse), 107
cloning, 352-353 COVID-19, xvi, 276, 330, 364
criticism of industry surrounding, 339-340 cows
demographic rise in, 332-334 cow leeches, 80
goods and services for, 331-333 growth hormones used in, 299
history of pet-keeping, 193-197 sacred, 18-20
mistreatment of, 340 trepanation of skull, prehistoric, 4
species distribution, 332-334 Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) and (vCJD),
veterinary practices for, 270-273, 322, 326, 293-296
341-344 Crimean War, 199, 224
comparative anatomy Crosby, Alfred, 39, 147
and pathology, 60 cross breeding
collections for studying, 90 nineteenth c research on, 163
in Renaissance Europe, 31-36 prehistoric, 4
comparative medicine Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act in 1822 (Great
in Egypt, 131-132 Britain), 54
in France, 60-61 CSF. See classical swine fever
in nineteenth c laboratory research, 166 Cuille, Jean M., 292
in Renaissance Europe, 31, 34-36 cull and slaughter strategies, 68-69, 225, 264,
One Health framework, 362-365 266-267, 290
Pasteur Institute and, 185, 187-188 FMD epizootic and, 290-291
serotherapy development, 162 late twentieth c, 288-289, 297-298
surgical developments, 79-84 cuneiform tablets, Syrian, 21
comparative pathology Curtice, Cooper, 172, 373
European development of, 58-62 Cust, Aleen, 314
nineteenth c, 189-193 Cysticercus inermis, 175

Index 403
cytology, 182 pharmaceutical development, 261-264

Czechoslovakia, 241 twentieth c developments in, 216-227,
243-244
Da el-Bakar (cow sickness), 74 vaccines and testing, 264-267
Dadd, George, 154 disease eradication programs
dalak ategi. See anthrax late twentieth c, 354-356
Danish State Serum Institute, 164 dissection, anatomical, 31-32
Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), 349 Dobrovoljskaja, V., 313
Darwin, Charles, 189 dogs
Davaine, Casimir, 186 early domestication of wolves and, 4
Davila, Carol, 116, 191 Echinococcus infections, 303-305
Davis, Diana K., 129 hunting, 30
Dawkins, Richard, 109 military, 237-238, 248, 332
Dawson, Pearl Howard, 313 population control, 152-153
DDT, 268, 360-361 rabid, in antiquity, 4-5
De abdibis morborum causis (Benivieni), 59 rabies autopsied in humans, 60
De formato foetu (Fabricius), 35 rabies vaccination campaigns, 268-270
De humani corporis fabrica (Vesalius), 32 rabies, nineteenth c theories and treatments,
De medicina equorum (Ruffo), 8, 28 151-154, 184-185
decolonization, 255, 276, 286 rabies, twentieth c discoveries, 220
Decret imperial sur 1’enseignement et dogs, companion, 195, See also companion
1’exercice de Гart veterinaire, 126 animals
Delafond, Henri M.O., 163, 186 cloned (Mira), 352
Dell’Anatomia et dell’Infirmita del Cavallo mistreatment of, 340
(Ruini), 32-34 pedigree, 339
Delprato, Pietro, 221 Domagk, Gerhard, 261
Denmark, 122, 215 domestication
dentists, 79 and zoonotic diseases, 62
Descartes, Rene, 53 defined, 3
Detmers, Heinrich J., 156 early, 3-4
dharma, 5 in Colonial America, 40-44
diagnostic testing, 264-265, 345, 351 Donker-Voet, Jeannette, 315
Dick, William, 115, 156 donkeys, 76-77, 124, See also military horses
Diderot, Denis, 89 Dorset, Marion, 222, 266
digital technology, 345-348 doshas, 18-20, 81
DiNardo, Richard, 246 draft animals, 205-209, See also beasts of
diphtheria, 162, 219 burden; military animals
disease causation theories Draganescu, Zoe, 314
categories, 8-11 Driesch, Angela von den, 374
contagionism and anti-contagionism, Dubos, Rene, 363
178-181 Dubroca, Daniel, 117
environmental theories, 177-178 Duffin, Jacalyn, 58
germ theories, 181-188 Dunkin, G.W., 222, 272
nineteenth c evolution of, 171-193 Dunlop, Robert, 109
parasitology, 174-177 Dutch East Indies, 145-146
prion disease, 296-297 Dutch Indian Veterinary School at Buitenzorg
disease ecology, 267-270 (Java), 145
disease eradication programs. See also under
specific diseases E. coli, 182
DIVA (Differentiating Infected from East African Veterinary Research Organization
Vaccinated Animals), 290 (Kenya), 265
for parasites, 301-305 East Coast Fever (ECF), 349
International cooperation on, 242 East Germany, 266
late twentieth c, 287-291, 301-305 Eber, Ruth, 314
nineteenth c model for, 162 Echinococcus infection, 303-305

404 Index
Ecole de cavaleri (La Gueriniere), 100 elephants

Ecole Veterinaire d’Alfort (France), 90, 105, Akbar’s war elephants, 45-47
107-108, 125, 313 early treatises on, 5
Ecole Veterinaire de Lyon (France), 86, in South Asian medicine, 19, 127
104-105, 108, 356 embryology, comparative, 35
ecological exchange Emmert, Carl Friedrich, 115
Americas, Africa and Europe, 40-44 empirical healing, 9-10, 167
and pathology, 58-62 encephalitis, 268, 301
and physiology, 55-58 Encyclopedie, ou Dictionnaire raisonne des
and surgical development from warfare, sciences, des arts et des metiers, 89
77-84 Enlightenment period
Asia, Middle East and Europe, 46-51 in France, 53-54, 86-91
defined, 39 physiology research in, 57, 196
disease causation and, 62-77, See also veterinary education’s change during, 86-91
specific diseases veterinary schools established during,
of human-animal beliefs, 51-55 100-115
ecological imperialism entertainment, Greco-Roman, 24-25
defined, 40 environmental disease causation theories,
environmental disease theories and, 177 177-178
rinderpest’s role in, 65, 147 environmental health, 360-361, 364
economics. See also animal economy; horse enzootic diseases, 64, 268, See also names of
economy specific diseases
companion animal costs, 342-343 epizootic diseases. See also names of specific
disruptions from the Great Depression and diseases
world wars, 215, 243-244 and ecological exchange, 62-63
GDP and meat consumption, 277-278, and sheep pox, 73
307-310 comparative studies of, 190
global economy and sustainability, control and eradication. See disease
356-361 eradication programs
of companion animals, 331-333 glossanthrax, 76
physiocracy, 90-91 late twentieth c response to, 297-300
postwar growth, 258 nineteenth c innovations in treating,
social and technological inequalities, 135-136
344-354 social effects, 70
Edinburgh (Scotland) veterinary educational veterinary education and, 101
model, 115, 156, 158 equerries, 95, 106
Edwards, J.T., 221 eradication campaigns. See disease eradication
Eecke, Joost van, 160 programs
Effendi, Hamdi, 220 Eritrea, 146
eggs, 213, 259, 263, 278, 283, 326 Erxleben, Johann Christian Polycarp, 111
Egypt, 236, 321 Escherich, Theodor, 182
famines in, 138 Escherichia coli, 182
French veterinary model in, 129-132 Escola Militar Veterinari, 112
Mamluk Sultanate, 7, 25-27 Escuela de Expertos Agropecuarios y
Old Kingdom, 21 Practicos en Sanidad Animal, 245
rinderpest in, 146 Etchegoyen Montane, Francisco, 157
Ehrlich, Paul, 162, 218 ethics
Eijkman, Christiaan, 160 early modern cosmologies, 51-55
electromagnetism, 218 late twentieth c debates, 335-338
Elemens d’hippiatrique (Bourgelat), 88, 104, Ethiopia, 146, 321, 349
107 ethnoveterinary medicine, 9-11, 312
Elemens de l’art veterinaire, zootomie ou Ayurvedism as, 19, See also Ayurvedic
anatomie comparee, a l’usage des eleves healing
des ecoles veterinaires (Bourgelat), 104 during World War I, 240-241
elements (in Hippocratic medicine), 22-23 in Africa, 348-350

Index 405
in Europe, 91-97 FMD. See foot and mouth disease

persistence of, in the nineteenth c, 154-155 fodder. See animal feed
rinderpest remedies, 70 folk medicine. See ethnoveterinary medicine
Europe. See also colonialism, European; Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO),
Enlightenment period; European Union; 169, 257-259, 278, 286, 354-356
specific countries and regions food production and safety. See also livestock
American colonialism, 39-44 production; meat; meat hygiene and
Asian interactions, 49 inspection; milk and milk products
horse economy, 206, 209-210, 236 antimicrobials and, 261-264
imperialism, eighteenth-nineteenth consumer habits and, 309-310
centuries, 126-132 early domestication and, 3-4
Renaissance scholarship in, 8, 30-36 early modern, 30
World War I and its aftermath, 215, 230-245 globalization of, 287-300
World War II, 245-255 in the global economy, 356-361
European Association of Establishments for in World War I, 239-240
Veterinary Education (EAEVE), 311 in World War II, 248-249
European Union (EU) laboratories associated with, 164-166
animal welfare in, 336-337 legislation, 167
eradication policy, 297-298 meat production, late twentieth c statistics,
food inspection and safety, 307-310 278-279
non-vaccination policy, 290-291 nineteenth century, 137-141
swine fever outbreak, 279-288 postwar strategies, 258-261
women veterinarians in, 316-317 regulations, 295
Evans, Alice Catherine, 224, 225 twentieth c changes in, 212-216, 307-310
Evans, Griffith, 156, 223 veterinary public health and, 305-307
Every Man his Own Farrier, 92 foot and mouth disease (FMD), 71-72, 100,
evolutionary theory, 189 154, 214, 221
eradication programs, 289
Fabricius, Hieronymus, 35 non-vaccination policy and epizootic,
factory farming, 213, 259, 277-278, 282-284 290-291
criticism and reevaluation of, 297 vaccine, 221, 289
safety and quality controls, 308 fower chiefest offices belonging to
twenty-first c concerns, 356-361 horsemanshippe, The (Blundeville), 99
falconry, 30 fowl cholera, 219, 221
FAO. See Food and Agriculture Organization fowl plague, 221
farcin du boeuf, 160 Fracastoro, Girolamo, 72, 178
farcy. See glanders Fragonard, Henri, 90
farriers, 78, 80, 105-106, 114 France
as proto-veterinarians, 95 abbatoirs in, 140
military, 125 comparative medicine in, 60-61
use of term, 24 Enlightenment period, 53-54, 86-91
Fasciola hepatica, 175 Napoleonic Wars, 124-126
fast food, 309 physiological research in, 58
fermentation, 57, 183 Revolution of 1789, 108
Ferris, R. D., 265 seventeenth c philosophy, 53
fevers, 187 veterinary education established in, 103-109
filterable viruses, 220-221 veterinary model and influence, 109-115,
firers, 79 130
Fisher, John, 142 Frashёri, Rifat-Bey, 220
Flavius (Vegetius Renatus), 29 French bulldogs, 339
fleas, 264, 268 Frenkel, Herman Salomon, 221, 266
Fleming, Alexander, 262 frenulum, 152
Fleming, George, 128-129 Frosch, Paul, 220
flies, 268, 301-303 Fuchs, Christian Joseph, 186
Florey, Howard, 262 Funk, Kazimierz, 160

406 Index
Gadjusek, Carlton, 293, 296 foot and mouth disease epizootic, 290-291
Galen, Claudius, 24, 26, 31, 55, 74 horsemanship in, 99-100
Galtier, Pierre-Victor, 153 meat trade, 215
Gamgee, John, 156, 168-169, 172 nineteenth c animal protection movement,
gangrene, 80 195
Garcilaso de la Vega, 42 professionalization model, 121
Garsault, Frangois, 34 spongiform encephalopathy outbreak,
Gemmell, Michael A., 304 291-293
gender equality, 322 veterinary associations in, 122
germ theories, 181-188 veterinary education in, 113-115
German Southwest Africa, 147 veterinary educational model, 156-157
German Veterinary Medical Association, 254 World War I field hospitals, 233
Germany, 122 World War II, 248
parasitology in, 174-177 Greco-Roman scholarship, 6, 21-25, 98
research in, 243 Grignard, Victor, 241
Tierschutzpartei (Animal Protection Party), Grijns, Gerrit, 160
336 Grisone, Federico, 99
veterinary education in, 111-112, 256 growth hormones, 277, 283, 299-300
veterinary educational model, 155-156 Guangzhou (China), 343
World War I, 234-235, 237 Guerin, Camille, 226
World War II, 246-247, 251 guilds, farrier, 95, 106
Gestner, Conrad, 29 Gul, Tamay Ba^agag, 314
Giedion, Sigfried, 202 gunpowder-based weapons, 80
gladiator-animal fighting, 24 Gutierrez, Fernan, 119
glanders, 100, 114, 125, 199-200 Gyuka Satsuyo, 67
causation theories, 179-180
mallein test, 190 Haarseil, 93
Glasgow (Scotland), 115 Haber, Fritz, 241
Global South, 136, 177, 223, 243, 268, 301, Hadlow, William J., 293
359, 373 haemorrhagic septicaemia, 160
globalization, 1-8, 39-40, 356-361, See also Haiti, 118
colonialism. European; ecological Haller, Albrecht von, 56-57, 75, 196
exchange; imperialism; international Hamont, Pierre Nicolas, 118, 130
cooperation; trade haptic technology, 352
Gloria del Cavallo, La (Caracciolo), 29 Harper, Robert F., 319
glossanthrax, 75 Harrison, Ruth, 337
GMOs (genetically modified organisms), 346 Harvey, William, 35, 56, 60, 194
goats, 3-4, 267, 279, 285, 293, 301, 303 Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point
Godlewsky (eighteenth c German veterinarian), (HACCP), 308
117 Helmanis, Kristaps, 190
Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), 308 hemorrhagic fevers, 268
Good Veterinary Practices (GVP), 308 henbane, 29, 83
government services, 265, 321 Henle, Friedrich G.J. (Jacob), 73, 171, 185
Gram, Hans Christian, 182 herbal medicine. See also materia medica;
Grandin, Temple, 336 plants, medicinal
Great Britain Ayurvedic, 80
Asian imperialism, 127-129 Chinese, 16-17, 80
Boer War, 227-229 early modern period, 29
Boers in Cape Colony, 154 herd health
bovine spongiform encephalopathy late twentieth c, 285-287, 345
outbreak, 293-296 postwar role of, 259-261
British Army Veterinary Corps (BAVC), Hernquist, Peter, 111
233-234 Herriot, James, 372
cattle plague of the 1860s, 142 Hertwig, Carl Heinrich, 114, 163
Contagious Diseases (Animals) Acts, 142 hexachloroethane, 264

Index 407
Higher School of Veterinary Medicine proto-veterinarians, 91-97

(Bucharest, Romania), 191 recreational and sporting, 24, 97, 334-335
Hildegard von Bingen, 30 serotherapy development in, 162
Hippiatrica, 7, 17-18, 24, 27, 45 surra infections, 235
hippiatros (horse-doctor), 6, 21, See also horse texts on, 21, 26-29, 32-34, 92-93, 97-100
doctors veterinary education and, 101-102,
hippiatry, 21, 78, 99, 104, 106 124-126, 204-205
Hippocrates, 22, 26, 74, 80 horseshoeing, 78, 93, 95, 105-106, 108, 113,
Hippocratic medicine, 22-23, 369 129
hippology, 92, 97, 99 Hua T’uo, 83
hippometer, 89 huang lian (Coptis chinensis), 80
hipposandals, 78 huang qm (Scutellaria baicalensis), 80
histological techniques, 182 Hufschmiede. See farriers
Historia animalium (Gestner), 29 human medicine. See also comparative
history, lessons of, 2, 5-6 medicine and related disciplines
HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), 362 anthrax, 186
Hodgson, J.T., 156 education, 115
hog cholera. See classical swine fever (CSF) influenza, 222
holistic medicine, 15, 22, 41, 311, 369 kuru disease, 293
homeopathic medicine, 127 medieval period, 29
Homme machine, L’ (La Mettrie), 56 One Health framework and, 362-365
hooves, care of, 78 physiology, Galen’s model of, 55
hormones, synthetic, 277, 283, 299-300 prion diseases, 296-297
horse-doctors professionalization of, 121
Chinese and East Asian, 17-18, 49-50, rabies vaccination campaigns, 268-269
128-129 tuberculosis. See human tuberculosis
Greek (Ппатгр6$), 6, 21 veterinary education and, 105
Spain, 6, 26, 97, 119 human tuberculosis, 170, 179, 185
horse economy, 204-205 relationship to bovine tuberculosis, 191
global warhorse economy, 228-229 vaccine development, 225-227
twentieth c decline of, 205-212 human-animal relationships, 1-2, 369, See
World War I’s effect on, 235-236 also comparative medicine and related
horse marshals, 95, 106 disciplines
horses. See also military horses companion animals and, 271, 330-335
African knowledge on, 43 Darwinian theory and, 189-190
Akhal-Teke, 127-128 dharma and, 5
as pets, 332, 334 early modern cosmologies, 51-55
breeding, 206, 228-229 in Islamic scholarship, 25
Chinese knowledge on, early modern period, in World War I, 233
48-50 in World War II, 249-251
demographic shifts in, 204-209 modernization’s effect on, 203-204
early domestication of, 3-4 Renaissance thought on, 31, 34-36
East Asian, 17-18 World War I and, 238-239
economic value. See horse economy humans, percentage of life as, 282
engineering of, 205-209 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 112
experimentation with, 218 humoral immunity, 218
farriers. See farriers humoral theory, 22-24, 26, 36, 52, 55, 74, 81,
glanders disease. See glanders 93
horsepower, 206 Hungary, 116
horsepower’s postwar decline, 256 Hunter, John, 113-114
in surgical history, 77-84 hunting, 25, 30, 97, 119, 194
introduction to the Americas, 119 Hurtrel d’Arboval, Louis, 73
Islamic beliefs, 52 Hutcheon, Duncan, 173
physiocracy and, 91 Hutyra, Ferenc, 222
proportions of, 88-89 hydatid disease, 303-305

408 Index
hydrophobia. See rabies instinctive healing, 9-10

Hygiene Institute (Amsterdam, The Institute for Experimental Medicine, St.
Netherlands), 164 Petersburg, Russia (IEM), 190
Instruction du roy, en I’exercice de monter a
iatrochemists, 56 cheval, l’(Pluvinel), 99
iatrophysicists, 56 instruments, early veterinary, 24, 81
Iberia (medieval Spain and Portugal), 6 Integrated Quality Control (IQC), 308
Ibn AkhT Hizam, Muhammad ibn Ya‘qub, 7 integrative veterinary medicine, 311-312
Ibn al-Mundhir, 26 _ Inter-African Bureau of Epizootic Diseases,
Ibn al-Nafis, 55-56, 373 265
Ibn al-Qosh, 20 International Conference of Epizootic Diseases
Ibn Battuta, 45 of Domestic Animals, 242
Iceland, 304 International Congress on Tropical Diseases,
ignis sacer, 74 170
imbalance. See balance International Congresses on Tuberculosis, 170
immunization, 71, 349 International Congresses on Hygiene and
immunology, 202, 216, 218-219 Demography, 170
Imperial Bacteriological Laboratory (Izatnagar, international cooperation
India), 221 among veterinary associations in the
Imperial Camel Corps, 237 nineteenth c, 166-170
Imperial Institute of Veterinary Research in parasite eradication, 303-304
(India), 157 on research and disease control after World
imperialism War I, 241-245
defined, 126 on vaccine development, 264-265
educational models spread through, 155-159 postwar organizations, 257-259
eighteenth-nineteenth centuries, 126-132 rinderpest campaigns and, 354-356
rinderpest and, 143-151 International Sanitary Conferences, 170
implants, 3D printed, 351 International Veterinary Congress, 168-169,
Inca empire, 14-15, 42 See also World Veterinary Congress
India Internet, 345-348
Ayurvedic practices. See Ayurvedic healing Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
British colonialism in, 127-128 Legislation, An (Bentham), 53
historical overview, 18-20 Introduction to Veterinary Medical Ethics:
Mughal empire, 45-48 Theory and Cases, An (Rollin), 337
rinderpest in, 144-145 invasive species, 41
Vedic period, 5-6 Iran, 244
veterinary education in, 156-157 Islamic veterinary medicine
World War I, 240 early modern period, 44-48
indigenous healers. See ethnoveterinary influence, 95-97
medicine medieval, 7-8, 25-28, 52-53
Indonesia, 145-146, 265 on blood circulation, 55-56
industrialization Ivanovsky, Dmitri Iosifovich, 220
1900-1960, 202-212
veterinary professionalization and, 120-124 Japan, 17, 50-51, 79
infectious epithelioses, 220 anti-rabies campaign, 269
inflammation, 80 biological weapon program, 251-253
influenza, 222, 232, 362, 364 companion animal veterinary services in,
information campaigns, 265 344
inoculation postwar food production in, 260
African knowledge on, 44 rinderpest in, 67
early experiments with, 71-73 Russo-Japanese War, 229-230
for rabies, 153 veterinary colonialism in Manchuria, 245
for rinderpest, 149, 183 veterinary education in, 155, 321
insect control, 264 Japanese Veterinary Medical Association, 344
insecticides, 268, 360-361 Java, 145, 160, 240

Index 409
Jeffries, George, 44 laboratory animals

Jenner, Edward, 71, 113 nineteenth c, 163
Jewish scholarship, 25 protections and regulations, 336-337
Jia Sixie, 48 reducing the number of, 352
Jordan Valley, 236 twentieth c discoveries through, 218-219
Laennec, Rene, 189
k. k. Pferde-Curen- und Operationsschule Lafosse, Etienne Guillaume, 106
(Vienna, Austria), 111 Lafosse, Philippe Etienne, 106-109, 111, 115
k.k. Thierspital (Vienna, Austria), 111 Laidlaw, Patrick P., 222, 272
Kabete veterinary laboratory (Kenya), 223 Laine, Honore, 157
Kagira, J.M., 350 Lameris, Jacobus, 145
Kalnins, Oto, 190 Lancisi, Giovanni Maria, 68-69
Kampelmacher, Dan, 305 Latvia, 241
Kant, Immanuel, 54 Law, James, 156
Kanyari, P.W.N., 350 Lawrence, John, 195
Kapcevic, Marija, 313 League of Nations (LoN), 242
Kaplan, Martin, 257, 259, 270, 304 Leclainche, Emmanuel, 242
Karacabey Stud, 211 Lederle Laboratories, 272
Kashif or Al-Kitab al-Nasir (Abu Bakr al- legal texts, early modern, 30
Baytar), 26-27 Leonardo, da Vinci, 31
kaviraj, 1_27 Leuckart, Rudolph, 175-176
Kendall, William Tyson, 158 Lewis, Henry Stockton, Sr., 319
Kenya, 148, 321, 348-350 Lewis, Paul, 222
Kharkov University (Ukraine), 117 Li Shi, 17
Khoikhoi knowledge, 154 Li Shih-Zhen, 16
Kilborne, Fred, 172, 373 Liautard, Alexandre, 156
Kisumu (Kenya), 348-350 Libro de Albeitena, El (Suarez de Peralta), 44
Kitab al-Baitara (Ahmad ibn al-Hasan), 7 Libro de Albeyteria (Reina), 95
Kitab al-Furusiyya wa ‘l-Baytara (Ibn AkhT libro de menescalcia et de albeyteria, El
Hizam), 7 (Alvarez de Salamiellas), 8
Kitasato, Shibasaburo, 162, 218 Lisbon, Portugal, 112
Kitt, Theodor, 219 Lister, Joseph, 159, 192
Knapp, Albert, 55 liver fluke, 30, 175, 264
knights, 98 livestock. See also cattle; disease causation
knowledge exchange, 2, 8, 27-29, See also theories; disease eradication programs;
ecological exchange herd health; individual species and
cosmopolitan knowledge, 88, 90 diseases
imperialism and, 8, See also imperialism antimicrobial use in, 263
Kobe, Karl, 221 as pets, 332
Koch, Robert, 182, 185-187, 191, 226 Bedouin, 20
Koray, Abide, 315 breeding programs, 259-261
Korea, 17, 67, 79, 206 bubonic plague and, 30
Krabbe, Harald, 304 Greco-Roman period, 24
Kuchenmeister, Friedrich, 175 humane treatment of, 336
kuduz. See rabies laboratories established to research diseases
kuru, 293, 296 of, 159-166
modernization’s effect on, 202-203
La Gueriniere, Frangois de, 99 parasitic diseases, 301-305
La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 53, 56 physiocracy and, 91
laboratories prehistoric, 3
colonial and national, 159-162 trade. See trade
early use of, 56 livestock production. See also food production
for food hygiene, 164-166 and safety
nineteenth c development of, nineteenth c increases in, 138
159-166 twentieth c improvements in, 213, 307-310

410 Index
livestock production. (cont.) Markus, O.T., 315

digital and technological developments in, Marshall Plan, 258
346 marshals, horse, 95
genetic and genomic technologies in, 352 materia medica, 16, 43, 83, 94, 110, 116, 163,
globalization of, 287-300 See also herbal medicine; plants,
late twentieth c expansion of, 287 medicinal
Marshall Plan and, 258 materialism, 59-60
population statistics, 280-281, 282 Maui (horse-doctors), 18
statistics, 287-288 McCall, James, 113-115
twenty-first c sustainability, 356-361 McEachran, Duncan, 156, 191
veterinary public health and, 305-307 McFadyean, John, 220
Livre de chasse (Phebus), 30 McNeill, William, 330
llamas, 15, 42 meat
Locke, John, 53 canned, military needs for, 199
Loffler, Friedrich, 185, 220 consumption, nineteenth c, 138
London Veterinary College (England), consumption, twentieth c, 213, 277-278
113-115 exporting countries, 140-141
Louis, Pierre, 189 meat hygiene and inspection, 61-62, 75, 135,
Lowe, Cornelius Vanderbilt, 319 See also food production and safety
Lucaci, Vasile, 191 at U.S. Bureau of Animal Industry, 156
Luo Qingsheng, 155 laboratories associated with, 160-161,
Lushington, Augustus Nathaniel, 319 164-166
Lyon, France modernising, 307-310
Ecole Veterinaire de Lyon, 86, 104-105, nineteenth c, 138, 140
108, 356 parasitic infections, 174-177
Royal Academy of Equitation, 103 poisoning research, 166
lyssavirus, 151, See also rabies mechanical medical principles, 56-57
Mechanization Takes Command (Giedion), 202
Maasai peoples (Kenya, Tanzania), 146, 180 media reporting on food safety, 297, 309-310
mad cow disease, 291-293 Medical University of South Africa
Madrid (Spain) veterinary educational model, (MEDUNSA), 321
157 medicine. See human medicine
Magendie, Frangois, 153, 163 medicus equarius (horse-doctor), 24
magical healing. See mystical healing; sacred meme, veterinary, 109, 130
societies; and specific forms menageries, 24, 60
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 345, 350 mercury, 56
Maimonides, 25 Metchnikov, Ilya Ilich, 162, 218
Maister-Piece (Markham), 34 Metrodoros, 6, 21
malaria, 361, 373 Mexico City (Mexico), 120
Malaysia, 322 Mexico, screwworm eradication in, 301-303
Malebranche, Nicolas, 53 Meyer, Karl Friedrich, 269, 305, 363
mallein test, 190 miasma theory, 22, 26, 131-132, 148, 177
Malleus. See glanders microbiology
Malta fever. See brucellosis development of, 160, 181-188
Mamluk Sultanate (Egypt), 7, 25-27 milestones in, 193, 217
Manchuria, 245, 251-253 origins of, 174
mandrake, 29, 94 Pasteur’s importance in, 183-185
manitou (spiritual life force), 51 Micrococcus melitensis, 224
Mantovani, Adriano, 305 microscopes, 218, 344
manure and greenhouse gas emissions, 358 microscopic pathology, 62
marechaux veterinaires (veterinary marshals), Middle Ages, 6-8, 13-30, 74, 98
126 Middle East, 20-21
marechaux-ferrant. See farriers archaeological findings in, 4
Marescalcia (Rusius), 8 domestication’s origins in, 3
Markham, Gervase, 34, 44 early veterinarians in, 5, 20

Index 411
parasitic diseases in, 301 morve. See glanders

rinderpest in, 143 mosquitos, 268, 361
midges, 268 Mozambique, 321
Mikhail, Alan, 119, 130 Mughal empire, 45-48
military animals mules, 76, 78, 124, 211, See also military
and surgical history, 77-84 horses
camels, 236 Mulomedicina (Cerviensis), 28
dogs of war, 237-238, 248, 332 mulomedicus, 6, 24
early domestication and, 3-4 Mustafa, Adil-Bey, 221
elephants, 45-47 Mustafa, ‘Adil, 159
World War I, 232, 234-239 Mycobacterium tuberculosis, 166, 191, 226
World War II, 246-249 Mycoplasma, 162
military horses Mycoplasma mycoides, 148
early twentieth c, 227-236 mystical healing, 9-10, 14, See also sacred
East Asian, 17-18 societies and specific forms
historical role, 77-78
Mughal, 47-48 nagana disease, 63-64, 223
Napoleonic Wars and, 124-126, 143-198 Nakamura, Junji, 354
nineteenth c, 198-200, 227 nalbantlar, 78
veterinary education and, 97-100, 124 Namibia, 147
World War I, 232-236 Naples riding school, 99
World War II, 248 Napoleon I, Emperor of France,
miljan/myalzan. See rinderpest 124-126, 129
milk and milk products. See also food National Food Acts, 166
production and safety National Serum Institute (The Netherlands),
brucellosis from, 224 164
growth hormones in, 299 Native American Veterinary Association, 320
hygiene, 139 Native Americans, 34, 41-42, 44, 51, 320
in sacred societies, 18 natural history tradition, 87-91
increased consumption of, in the nineteenth naturalism, 22-23
c, 136-137 Nazi Party, 251, 254
inspection, 135, 138-139 Negri, Adelchi, 220
late twentith c technological changes, 283 Neitz, Wilhelm, 223
on prehistoric farms, 3 nenta/krimpsiekte, 173-174
pasteurization. See pasteurization Netherlands, The, 122, 123, 143, 215
Millis, John, 44 female veterinarians in, 322
Milzbrand. See anthrax Partij voor de Dieren (Party for the
Mishra, Saurabh, 144 Animals), 336
Mitchell, Graham, 158 pet-keeping in, 334
mite infections, 175, 264 neurodegenerative diseases, 296-297
mobile phones, 346 New York City, horses in, 208
Modern Cattle Doctor, The (Dadd), 154 New York College of Veterinary Surgeons and
Modern Horse Doctor, The (Dadd), 154 Comparative Medicine (USA), 191
molecular genetic techniques, 345 New Zealand, 215
Monfallet, Daniel, 157 Newcastle disease, 221, 283
Mongolia, 256 Newton, Isaac, 56
Mongols, 8 Nicolle, Maurice, 221
monkeys, 362 Nigeria, 321
Montaigne, Michel de, 52 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine,
Montreal Veterinary College (Canada), 156, 293-294
191 Nocard, Edmond, 162, 220, 226
Moorcroft, William, 113, 128 Noppen, Karel van, 299
More, Henri, 53 Norwegian School of Veterinary Sciences, 245
Morel, Charles, 292 nosology, 58-59
Morgagni, Giovanni Batista, 189 nuclear science, 345

412 Index
Numan, Alexander, 58, 116 parfaite connaissance des chevaux, La

nutrition, 137-138 (Saunier), 100
Paris Council for Public Hygiene (France), 139
obesity epidemic, 309 Pasha, Ahmet, 117
Odiham Agricultural Society (England), 113 Pasteur Institutes, 159, 184, 187-188, 190
Oebschelwitz, L.W.F. van, 92 Pasteur, Louis, 57, 153, 182-185, 187-188,
offal, 293-294, 296 219, 268
Office International d’Hygiene Publique, 214 Pasteurella multocida, 219
Office International des Epizooties (OIE), 214, pasteurization, 182-183, 224, 226
242, 286-288, 355-356 Pathological Laboratory of the Deli Land
Ohio State University School of Veterinary Cultivation Company (India), 160
Science (USA), 156, 319 pathology
OIE. See Office International des Epizooties derivation of term, 58
On Anatomy and Disease of the Horse (Ruini), European development of, 58-62
32-34 prion theory, 294
On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 189 pathos (suffering), 58, See also pathology;
Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute (South suffering
Africa), 223, 265, 321 Pattison, I.H., 293
One Health framework, 362-365, 374 Pearson, Leonard, 158, 191, 206
One Medicine (OM), 189-193, 362 Pelagonius, 24
Ontario Veterinary Association (Canada), 158 penicillin, 262-263
Ontario Veterinary College (Canada), 156 percussion hammers, 189
ophthalmoscopes, 189 Perroncito, Edoardo, 219
opium, 94 Persian scholarship, 19, 22, 25-26, 28, 48
Ordini di cavalcare (Grisone), 99 Peru, 119
Orfila, Mateo, 164 peste bovine. See rinderpest
organic chemistry, 218 pet food industry, 271, 296
organic food markets, 309 pets. See companion animals
Organization for European Economic phagocytes, 218
Cooperation (OECC), 258 pharmaceutical industry, 262, 265
Osler, William, 156, 191 companion animals and, 272-273
Ostertag, Robert von, 166 late twentieth c, 311
Ottoman empire, 129, 143, 241, See also Egypt pharmaceuticals
Our Dumb Friends League operating under the food production and, 284
sign of the Blue Cross, 231, 234 laboratories established, 162-164
Owen, Richard, 176 late twentieth c advancements, 351, 353
oxen, 210-211 postwar, 258
Oxytetracycline, 263 postwar development, 261-264
regulation of, 298-300
Pacific War, 1939-1945, 245 Phebus, Gaston, 30
pain relief Philippines, 235
in eighteenth c surgery, 81-84 rinderpest in, 150-151
twentieth-twenty-first c interest in, 336 rinderpest vaccine developed, 243
Pakistan, 341-342 philosophy of human-animal relationship. See
Palestine, 143, 235-236 human-animal relationship
Pan American Health Organization, 304 physicians
panzootic, rinderpest. See rinderpest veterinarians and, 364
Papua New Guinea, 293 veterinarians compared to, 150
papyrus, Egyptian, 21 women as, in Russia, 316
Paracelsus, 56, 373 physics, 56-57
parasitic diseases, 264, 268, 301-305, 362 physiocracy, 90-91, 104
parasitology, 174-177 physiology
para-veterinarians, 240 European development of, 55-58
Pare, Ambroise, 81 integrated, 57
parfait mareschal, Le (Solleysel), 99 pigeons, 341-342

Index 413
pigs private practices, 265

African swine fever, 267 professionalization of veterinary medicine. See
early anatomical studies, 31 veterinary professionalization
experimentation with, 219 protein, animal, 138
factory farming, 283-284 proto-veterinarians, 91-97
slaughter rates, 279 protozoans, 264
swine fever, 222, 266-267, 279-288 Prusiner, Stanley, 294
swine influenza, 222, 362 public health, 61, 137, See also disease
Pilger, Martin, 117 eradication programs; food production
pinnadapan, 74 and safety; veterinary public health (VPH)
piroplasmosis, 160 public opinion
Pitman Moore, 272 on disease-spreading production practices,
Planetary Health, 365, 374 295-297
plants, medicinal. See also herbal medicine; on food safety, 309-310
materia medica PubMed, 347
African knowledge on, 43-44, 154 pullorum disease, 282
Asian-British influences, 128 Punjab Veterinary College (India), 157
early modern era, 36 Pure Food and Drugs Act (USA), 163
in laboratory research, 163 purging, 27, 36, 94, 128
Incan, 42 Purple Cross Service’, 233
medieval, 26-27 puschima. See rinderpest
Native American, 34
plants, toxic, 174 qi (life force), 16, 59, 79, 81
pleuropneumonia, 100, 235 Qimin yaoshu (Jia Sixie), 48
Plowright, Walter, 265, 354 Qing Dynasty (China), 49-50
Pluvinel, Antoine de, 99 quarantines, 100, 143, 146
pneuma (spirits), 55 controversy over, 171
police, veterinary, 64-65 derivation of the term, 171
Pollender, F.A.A., 75, 186 economic costs, 289
polymerase chain reaction (PCR), 345 for dogs, 153
Ponce de Leon, Juan, 41 standardization of, 170
poppy, 29 Quesnay, Frangois, 91
population growth, late twentieth c, 277-287
Porter, Roy, 363 rabies
poultry autopsy of, 60
avian influenza, 221, 265, 362 in antiquity, 4-5, 152
census statistics on, 280 nineteenth c theories and treatments,
diseases identified in, 221-222 151-154
experimentations with, 218-219 Pasteur’s work on, 184-185
factory farming, 282-283 twentieth c discoveries, 220
fowl plague, 221 vaccination campaigns, 268-269
slaughter rates, 279 racism, 251-255
prana (vital energy), 18 radioactivity, 218
prehistory, veterinary activities in, 3-4 radiography, 344, 350
preservatives, food, 166 rage. See rabies
Pretot, Auguste, 118 railroads, 208
preventive veterinary medicine Ras Shamra-Ugarit, Syria, 21
companion animals and, 272 Rayer, P.F.O., 186
discoveries leading to, 183 Red Cross dogs, 239
postwar focus on, 241, 265 Redi, Francesco, 174
Principles for an International Regulation for reductionism, 179-180, 369
the Extinction of the Cattle Plague, 169 redwater (bovine babesiosis), 348-349
printed books. See books Regan, Tom, 337
printing, invention of, 29 Regiemens pour les Ecoles Royales
prion diseases, 296-297, 362 Veterinaires de France (Bourgelat), 105

414 Index
regulations Rotz. See glanders

animal welfare activism and, 335-338 roundworms, 264
dog licensing and vaccinations, 270 Roux, Emile, 162, 220, 268
on animal feed, 295 Royal Army Veterinary Corps (RAVC), 248
on livestock production, 297-298, 360 Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons
trade, 242-243, 286 (England), 314
Reid, Isabelle Bruce (Belle), 314 Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Reina, Francisco de la, 95 Animals (RSPCA), 234
religion Royal Veterinary College (England), 114, 156
ancient rituals, 5-6 ruan. See glanders
and rinderpest, response to, 67 Ruffo, Giordano, 8, 28
religious healing. See mystical healing; Ruini, Carlo, 32-34
sacred societies; and specific forms Rush, Benjamin, 54
Remlinger, Paul, 220 Rusius, Laurentius, 8
Renaissance scholarship, 8, 30-36 Russia, 116-117, 122
Republic of South Africa, 147 horse population, 204
res cogitans, 53 Napoleon’s campaign in, 125-126
Research Institute (Island of Riems), 221 Russo-Japanese War, 229-230
restraint of animals in surgery, 83 Russian Federation
riding schools, 98-100 natural focus theory of disease transmission,
Rift Valley fever, 268 362
Rin Tin Tin, 239, 270 women veterinarians in, 316
rinderpest Russo-Japanese War, 229-230
1700-1850s, 65-71, 100, 142 Rwanda, 298
1860-1900, 141-151, 160
1900-1960, 216, 235, 242 Sackmann-Rink, Marianne, 313
as a biological weapon, 250 sacred animals. See also specific types of
Balkan Wars and, 231 animals
controlling, 70-71, 100-101, 142-143, 145, in Buddhism, 18
147-148, 242 in Vedic India, 5-6, 19
eradication campaigns (The Rinderpest Incan, 15
Pathway ), 354-356 sacred societies, 13-38
history of, 65-67 Americas, 14-15
in Africa, sub-Saharan, 146-148 Asia, East, 15-18
in Dutch East Indies, 146 Asia, South, 18-20, 127
in Great Britain, 142-143 early modernization in, 29-36
in India, 144-145 Islamic scholarship, 7-8,
in Ottoman empire, 143 25-29
in Russia, 116 values of, 51-52
in the USA, 150-151 saddles, horse, 77
Lancisi’s principles, 68-69 sadoka, 146, See also rinderpest
misinformation on, 164 Saint-Hilaire, Etienne Geoffroy, 130
vaccine, 221, 265-266 Salerno (Italy), 31
viruses identified, 221 Salmon, Daniel Elmer, 157, 160-161, 182,
ring-culling, 288-289 245
Rio Ferrer, Francisco del, 157 Salmonella, 161, 166, 182, 307-308
Rips, W., 261 salvarsan, 261
Rivolta, Sebastiano, 221 Sanderson, John Burdon, 180
Robert Koch Institute (Germany), 159 sanitarians, 140
Rodnguez, Wilhelm von, 112 Sarira Sthana (anatomy), 18
roles, animal, 2, 24-25, 338-339 SARS, 276
Rollin, Bernard, 337 Saunier, Gaspar de, 34, 99-100
Roman empire. See Greco-Roman scholarship Savonuzzi, Ezio, 221
Romania, 122 scabies, 175
Roslin Institute (Scotland), 352 Schvartz, Erzsebet, 315

Index 415
Schwabe, Calvin, 304-305, 363 smuggling, 214

Schweinitz, Emile Alexander De, 222 Snape, Andrew, 34
Scotland, 115, See also Edinburgh (Scotland) Soares, Antonio Filipe, 112
veterinary educational model social historians, 2
Scotti, Ludovico, 111 Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
scrapie, 292-293 Animals, 231, 271
screwworm infection, 301-303 Soga, Jotello Festiri, 173-174, 240, 321
seafood consumption, 279 solipeds
seasons in Hippocratic medicine, 22 glanders disease, 199-200
self-healing theories, 9-10 Solleysel, Jacques de, 99, 180
Semmer, Eugen, 221 Somalia, 146
Senegal, 147 soul (spirit), 52-53, 57
sentimentality, 196, 208, 271, 324, 331, South Africa, 154
341-342 Boer War, 227-229
serotherapies, 162-163 veterinary medicine in, 172-174, 265
Servetus, Michael, 56 World War I, 240
seton, 93 South America
sexual discrimination, 323, 341 screwworm eradiction in, 302-303
Shalihotra Samhita, 19 veterinary education in, 157, 245
shalya-chikitsa, 79 South Korea, 318
shamanism, 51 postwar food production in, 260
Shanghan lun (Zhang), 16 Soviet Union, 362
sheep veterinary education model, 256
cloned (Dolly), 352 women veterinarians in, 316
experimentation with, 219 World War II, 247-248
liver fluke, 30, 175 Spain, 6, 95-97, 120, 122, 157
scrapie, 292-293 spiritual healing. See sacred societies and
sheep pox, 72-73, 100, 180, 220, 267 specific practices, eg, Ayurvedic healing
slaughter rates, 279 Sri Lanka, 322
shipping fever (pleuropneumonia), 235 St. Domingue (Haiti), 118
shoeing-smiths, 95-96, 106, 124, 126 St. Petersburg, Veterinary Division of the
Shope, Richard E., 222 Medico-Chirurgical Academy (Russia),
Si mu an ji ji (Li Shi), 17 116
Sicily, 28 stamping out policy, 143-144, 149-150, 183
Silent Spring (Carson), 361 State Serum Institute (Vienna), 164
Sin pyeon jip seong ma ui ban (Korean text), 18 State Veterinary Research Institute (The
Sinai Peninsula, 236 Netherlands), 221
Singer, Peter, 337 State Veterinary Services (South Africa), 167
Sivatattvaratndkara, 19-20 Steele, James, 259, 305, 363
Sjoberg, Agnes Hildegard, 314 steppe murrain, 65, 142, See also rinderpest
Skara (Sweden), 111 sterilization, 182, 192, 302-303
slaughterhouses stethoscopes, 189
animal welfare and, 336 Stewart, James Douglas, 158
as observational sites, 61 stirrups, horse, 77
conditions of, in the nineteenth c, 139-141 Streptomycin, 263
European safety regulations, 308-309 Stribolt, V., 224
meat poisoning studied in, 166 Stubbs, George, 34
Specified Risk Materials in, 295 Suarez de Peralta, Juan, 44, 120
sleeping sickness, 223 Sudan, 245
slow food movement, 309 suffering
Sluijs, Dirk van der, 165 and eighteenth c surgical practices, 81-84
smallpox, 71, 162, 355 Enlightenment thought on, 57
Smith, Andrew, 156, 158 pathology as the science of, 58-62
Smith, Theobald, 172, 191, 226, 373 twentieth-twenty-first c focus on, 336
Smith, Wilson, 222 sugar, 27

416 Index
sulfonamides, 258, 261-262, 265, 282-283 Toronto/Ontario Veterinary School (Canada),

Sumatra, 145 158
suramin, 243 Toussaint, Jean Joseph Henri, 184, 187-188,
surgery, veterinary 190
and warfare, 77-84 toxic disease causation theory, 173-174
goals of, 79 toxicology
late twentieth c advances, 351 in animals, research developed on, 164-165
nineteenth c advances, 158-159, 192 tractors, 209-212, 256
specialists, 79-80 trade. See also ecological exchange;
surra, 154, 223, 235, 237, 243 imperialism; warfare
Sushruta Samhita, 79 anthrax and, 73-76
swine influenza, 222, 362 cordon sanitaire and, 64-65
Switzerland, 122 foot and mouth disease and, 71-72
glanders and, 76-77
tachi. See rinderpest globalization, late twentieth c, 287-300
Taenia echinococcus, 175 Japanese restrictions on, 50-51
Taenia saginata, 175 regulations and standards, 242-243, 286
Taenia solium, 175 rinderpest and, 65-71, 235
tamarind, 154 sheep pox and, 72-73
Tanzania, 146, 321, 349 twentieth c growth and interruptions to,
taoun. See rinderpest 213-215
tapeworms, 175-176, 264 warhorse, 228-229
technological developments Zulu disease and, 63-64
for military horses, 77-78 Traite de la Clavelee (Hurtrel d’Arboval), 73
late twentieth-early twenty-first c, 344-354 transmissible spongiform encephalopathy
premodern, 3 (TSE), 296-297
Teigen, Philip, 208 transportation
temperaments, 22-23 twentieth c mechanization,
Terramycin, 263 208, 246-247
tetanus antitoxin, 162 early domestication and, 3
Texas cattle fever, 161, 268, 373 treatises. See texts, early veterinary;
texts, early veterinary, 2, 4-5 Hippiatrica
Colonial American, 44 Tregardt, Louis, 63
East Asian, 17-18 trepanation, 4, 80, 93
East-West exchanges of, 6-8 Tribunal del Protoalbeyterato, 95
on horse medicine, 97-98, 107 Trichina spiralis, 62
on horsemanship, 98-100 trichinosis, 139, 160, 166, 214, 264, 373
translations, 24-25, 27-29, 99 Trichter, Valentin, 34
Thailand, 322 Trinidad and Tobago, 240, 244
Theiler, Arnold, 173, 228 tropical actinomycosis, 160
Theiler, Max, 223 trypanosome diseases, 223
thermodynamics, 218 trypanosomiasis, 154, 160, 173, 235, 261, 301
thermometers, 189, 344 TSE. See transmissible spongiform
thiamine/vitamin B-1 deficiency, 160 encephalopathy
Thiroux d’Arconville, Genevieve, 81 tsetse flies, 63-64, 154
Thomas, Algernon, 175 tuberculosis
Thomas, Aquinas, Saint, 52 bovine, 4, 63, 139, 218, 243-244, 267, 373
ticks and tick-borne diseases, 43, 237, 268, human, 179, 185
348-349 human-bovine relationship, 170, 191,
Titian, 32 225-227
Toit, Petrus du, 223 Tuhfet’ul-muluk ve’s-selatm, 78
Tollwut. See rabies Turin, Italy, 111
Tolnay, Sandor, 116 Turkey, 211, 241, 314-315
tomb relief, Egyptian, 21 Tuskegee University College of Veterinary
tongue-cancer, 75 Medicine (USA), 320

Index 417
U.S. Bureau of Animal Industry. See Bureau of live-virus, 289

Animal Industry (BAI) rabies, 153, 184-185, 268-269
U.S. Public Health Service, Veterinary Public rinderpest, 243, 265-266
Health Division, 259 twentieth c developments, 219, 221,
U.S. Rockefeller Institute, 222 261-264
Uganda, 321 virological research on, 222-223
undulant fever. See brucellosis vaccinia, 61
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Vallat, Bernard, 356
Administration (UNRRA), 257 variola ovina, 72
United States variolisation, 70
ethnic and racial diversity in veterinary vector-borne diseases, 268, 301, 362-363, 373
medicine, 319-320 vedas (Sanskrit texts), 18
horse economy, 207-209, 235-236 Vegetius, 6, 26
Meat Inspection Acts, 135 Venezuela, 245
meat trade, 215 Vesalius, Andreas, 31-32, 56
professionalization model, 121 vesicular diseases, 72, 100, See also foot and
public health initiatives in, 140 mouth disease
rinderpest in, 150-151 veterinarians
screwworm eradication, 301-303 ancient use of term, 6
veterinary associations in, 122 antibiotic use by, 298-299
veterinary education established in, 156 as herd health experts, 285-287
veterinary education in comparative companion animal practices, 196-198,
medicine, 191 270-273, 322, 326, 341-344
veterinary education, twentieth c competition among proto-veterinarians,
government control, 216 91-97
veterinary education, declining enrollment, demographics, 370
212 digital technology and, 345-348
women veterinarians in, 316-317 earnings, 322-325
World War I, 235-236 ethical issues, 251-255
World War II veterinary activities, 249 food production and, 137-141, 282
University of Melbourne (Australia), 158 group practices, 310
University of Padua (Italy), 35 in the Napoleonic wars, 126
University of Pennsylvania Veterinary School late twentieth-early twenty-first c
(USA), 158, 191, 319 technological developments, 344-354
University of Sydney (Australia), 158 military, nineteenth c, 198
University of Turku (Finland), 112 military, early twentieth c, 228
urbanization, 205-209, 270, 341, 371-372 military, in World War I, 233-235, 239-241
ustad (pigeon masters), 341-342 military, in World War II, 248-249,
Utrecht (The Netherlands), 124 251-255
part-time work, 324
vaccination programs physicians and, 150, 364
DIVA (Differentiating Infected from postmodern challenges, 369-374
Vaccinated Animals), 290 postwar changes, 256
effectiveness, 264-267 woman as. See women in veterinary
EU’s non-vaccination policy, 290-291 medicine
foot and mouth disease, 289 veterinarius, 6, 24
for companion animals, 339 veterinary associations
rabies, 268-269 nineteenth c growth of, 166-170
vaccines objectives of, 122
anti-anthrax, 187-188 Veterinary College of Helsinki (Finland), 323
brucellosis, 223-225 veterinary education (1700-1850)
early development of, 71 British, 113-115
foot and mouth disease, 279-289 disease outbreaks and, 100-102, 108
for distemper, 272 Enlightenment’s effect on, 86-91
for swine fever, 267 French model in Western Europe, 110-115

418 Index
veterinary education (1700-1850) (cont.) veterinary public health (VPH), 305-307

French models, 103-109 Veterinary Public Health Division (WHO),
French models and the veterinary meme, 286, 304
109, 130 veterinary research
funding, 110, 113 digital technology and, 347
horses’ importance in, 101-102, 124-126 globalization, 264-265
in Egypt, 321 rinderpest and, 143, 145-146
in Russia and Baltic region, 116-117 Veterinary Surgeons Act (United Kingdom),
in the New World, 119-120 167
in Turkey, 117-118 veterinary surgery. See surgery, veterinary
military’s importance in, 108, 124-126 veterinary, derivation of word, 1
professionalization and, 120-124 veterinum, 1
riding schools as precursors to, 98-100 Vial de Saint Bel, Charles, 113-114, 373
veterinary education (1800-1900), 155-159 Viborg, Erik, 77, 180, 373
comparative medicine model in, 191 Vienna, Austria, 111
women admitted to veterinary schools, Villa, Carvalho, 112
312-313 Virchow, Rudolf, 61-62, 164, 176, 179, 185,
veterinary education (1900-1960), 215-216, 189, 362
242, 244-245 virology, 9, 180, 219-223, 362
certifications in clinical practice, 286-287 vitalism, 57-58, 60
ethical and political issues, 255 vitamins, 160
herd health in, 285 vivisection, 194-196
horses’ importance in, 204-205 early concern over, 57
pets added to the curricula, 272 in seventeenth-eighteenth c, 56
postwar, 256 public criticism of, 163
women admitted to veterinary schools, Vlimmen, Doctor, 372
313-316 Von den Miasmen und Kontagien und von den
veterinary education (1960-2000) miasmatisch-kontagiosen Krankheiten
herd health in, 286 (Henle), 185
integrative veterinary medicine (IVM),
311-312 Waldmann, Otto, 221
women in veterinary schools, 316-317, Wanzala, Wycliffe, 348
323-324 warfare. See also military animals; military
veterinary education (2000-2020) horses; names of specific wars
Africa, 321 biological and chemical,
alternative modalities in, 360 241, 250-254
Asian countries, 318-321 early twentieth c, 227-231
Chinese-U.S. collaboration, 343-344 mechanization of, 246-247
students’ challenges, 370-371 Napoleonic wars, 124-126
women in veterinary schools, 317 nineteenth c, 198-200
veterinary education (pre-modern), 1, 5-6, 29, spread of diseases and, 7, 100-102
86 surgical development and, 77-84
veterinary hospitals veterinarians in employed for,
for companion animals, 342 124-125
of WWI, 233-234 World War I, 230-241, 314
veterinary medicine, defined, 1 World War I’s aftermath, 241-245
veterinary professionalization, 84, See also World War II, 245-255
veterinary associations water buffalo, 210-211, 241, 244
comparative medicine and, 191-192 Watt, James, 206
French model, 107 Webb, Alfreda Johnson, 319
in the industrial era, 120-124 Wells, G., 291
late twentieth c, 311 West Nile disease, 301
national comparisons, 122-124 Western Africa, 42-43
phases of, 122-123 whipworms, 264
sociology of, 122 WHO. See World Health Organization

Index 419
wild animals Yamanouchi, Kazuya, 354

census statistics on, 280 Yi-ma (Chinese horse doctor),
chronic wasting disease, 296-297 49-50, 128-129
declining populations, 361 yin and yang, 16, 48, 129
disease eradication in, 356 Yi-yuan (small animal hospitals),
disease spread from, 267-270 343
wild animals, disease spread from, 267 Young, Stewart, 296
wild game, meat produced from, 279 Yu, Ben-Heng, 16, 48
Wilkinson, Lise, 60 Yu, Ben-Yuan, 16, 48
Willems, Louis, 148, 149 Yu, Jie, 48
Williams, Beth S., 296 Yu, Ren, 48
Wilson, D.R., 292 Yuan Heng liao ma ji xuan shi (Ben-Yuan and
Wohler, Friedrich, 57 Ben-Heng Yu), 16, 48
Wolstein, Johann Gottlieb, 109, 111 Yugoslavia, 241
wolves, 4
women healers, eighteenth c, 81 Zalduegni Gabilondo, Maria Luz, 315
women in veterinary medicine, 158, 312-317, Zambia, 321
320-326 Zammit, Themistocles, 224
discrimination, 323-326, 341 Zenker, Friedrich A. von, 176
early pioneers, 312-316 Zhang Zhongjing, 16
explanations for increases in, 322-323 zhangqi, 16
glass ceiling and, 325 ZTbah (tumorous anthrax), 74
Women’s Veterinary Medical Association, 319 Zigas, V., 293
Woods, Abigail, 60, 290-291 Zimbabwe, 321
Worboys, Michael, 181 Zinsstag, Jakob, 364
World Animal Health Information System zoonotic diseases. See also names of specific
(WAHIS), 287-288 diseases
World Association of Veterinary Food and domestication, 62
Hygienists, 305 and sheep pox, 73
World Health Organization (WHO), 169, control and eradication. See disease
258-259, 286 eradication programs
World Organization for Animal Health, 242 glanders, 77, 114
World Veterinary Association (WVA), 169, 311 in Middle Ages, 7
World Veterinary Congress, 169 influenza’s early identity, 222
World Veterinary Year, 356 laboratory research development,
World War I, 215, 230-241, 314 164-166
World War II, 215, 245-255 nineteenth c innovations in treating,
World War II, postwar era (1945-1960), 135-136
255-273 One Health framework and, 362-365
Worshipful Company of Farriers (England), 95 pathologists’ studies of, 190
Wundenmann (Wounds man), 82 prion diseases, 296-297
Wundenpferd (Wounds horse), 83 twentieth c, 218
zoopharmacognosy, 10
Xenophon, 98 zoos, 60, 338
xenotransplantation studies, 219 Zulu people (southern Africa),
Xiao-zhen-suo (small animal clinics), 343 63-64, 180, 373


Jones S. A Concise History of Veterinary Medicine 2022

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Jones S. A Concise History of Veterinary Medicine 2022

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Jones S. A Concise History of Veterinary Medicine 2022

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

A Concise History of

From Ayurvedic texts to botanical medicines to genomics, ideas and expertise

susan d. jones is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Other Books in the Series

Susan D. Jones and Peter A. Koolmees, A Concise History of Veterinary Medicine

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

List of Illustrations page vi

Introduction: Human-Animal Relationships and the Need for

Appendix A Spread of Veterinary Educational Institutions

Published online by Cambridge University Press

1.1 Diagram with acupuncture points on the body of the horse.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

eighteenth Century Collection: Asian Collection.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

3.5 The competitors: Claude Bourgelat (1712-1779) and

Published online by Cambridge University Press

5.1 Graph showing horse population (in million) in Britain*,

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

7.1 Position of pets in postmodern society. Mark Ulriksen,

Published online by Cambridge University Press

3.1 Phases of the professionalization process of educated

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Translations from the following languages, into English, were completed by

Published online by Cambridge University Press

In 2010, as members of the World Association for the History of Veterinary

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354929.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354929.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354929.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

a manager of huge cattle populations on feedlots, a wildlife conservationist,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354929.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Early Animal Healing

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354929.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Traces of Veterinary Medicine in Antiquity: Keeping

We define these early veterinary activities broadly as keeping animals healthy

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354929.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354929.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

veterinary activities arose in a sacred society where early veterinary and

Veterinary Activities in the Middle Ages: Translation and Exchange

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354929.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

healing). Today we understand that the centers of intellectual development did

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354929.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Theories of Disease and Types of Healing

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354929.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

processes of disease in different ways at different times. The way we under­

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354929.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354929.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

world is still done by laypeople and professionals using traditional methods.

How to Use This Book

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354929.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

veterinary medicine in Europe, which we explore in Chapter 3. Some ques­

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354929.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Animals in Medieval and Early Modern Sacred Societies

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354929.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

processes of disease in different ways at different times. The way we under

veterinary medicine in Europe, which we explore in Chapter 3. Some ques

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Japanese government restricted con