Animals and Disease
An Introduction to the History of Comparative Medicine

An analysis of the origins and development of the study of infectious, epidemic diseases in animals and man.

Lise Wilkinson (Author)

9780521018449, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 22 August 2005

284 pages, 22 b/w illus.
23 x 15.5 x 1.5 cm, 0.4 kg

"...traces the history of veterinary medicine from antiquity through virological research in animal pathology conducted at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in the twentieth century...a valuable contribution. It is also topical in the brave new world of baboon liver transplants and speculation about the primate origins of AIDS." Susan E. Lederer, ISIS

Man's attempts to learn about aspects of the human body and its functions by observation and study of animals are to be found throughout history, especially at times and in cultures where the human body was considered sacrosanct, even after death. This book describes the origins and later development, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of comparative medicine and its interrelationship with medicine and veterinary medicine and the efforts of its practitioners to understand and control outbreaks of infectious, epidemic diseases in humans and in domestic animals. In the nineteenth century their efforts and increasing professionalism led to the creation of specialised institutes devoted to the study of comparative medicine. This book sheds much new light on the medical and veterinary history of this period and will provide a new perspective on the history of bacteriology. Historians of science will find the book of great value.

1. Attitudes to animal health and disease in the ancient world
2. From the dark ages to the dawn of enlightenment
3. Impact of cattle plague in the early eighteenth century
4. Cattle plague in England and on the European continent 1714–80
5. The first veterinary schools and their corollary: veterinary science in the making
6. Patterns of veterinary education and professional achievement in England 1750–1900
7. From transmissibility of Rabies and Glanders to the Bacteridium of Anthrax 1800–70
8. Putrid intoxication, animate contagion, and early epidemiology
9. Establishing professional comparative medicine in nineteenth century France: policies and personalities
10. British comparative pathology after 1870
11. The Brown Animal Sanatory Institution
12. Nineteenth century developments in comparative medicine on the European continent
13. From European nucleus to world-wide growth of Institutes of Comparative Medicine.

Subject Areas: History of science [PDX], Veterinary medicine [MZ], History of medicine [MBX], Medicine [M]