Animal roles and traces in the history of medicine, c1880-1980

This paper argues for the need to create a more animal-centred history of medicine, in which animals are considered not simply as the backdrop for human history, but as medical subjects important in and of themselves. Drawing on the tools and approaches of animal and human–animal studies, it seeks to demonstrate, via four short historical vignettes, how investigations into the ways that animals shaped and were shaped by medicine enables us to reach new historical understandings of both animals and medicine, and of the relationships between them. This is achieved by turning away from the much-studied fields of experimental medicine and public health, to address four historically neglected contexts in which diseased animals played important roles: zoology/pathology, parasitology/epidemiology, ethology/ psychiatry, and wildlife/veterinary medicine. Focusing, in turn, on species that rarely feature in the history of medicine – big cats, tapeworms, marsupials and mustelids – which were studied, respectively, within the zoo, the psychiatric hospital, human–animal communities and the countryside, we reconstruct the histories of these animals using the traces that they left on the medical-historical record

From healthy cows to healthy humans: Integrated approaches to world hunger, c. 1930-1965

This chapter is concerned with diseased and under-nourished dairy cattle, and how they came to be perceived simultaneously as threats to agriculture and as contributors to world hunger and malnutrition. Moving from inter-war Britain and its empire, to the post-war international stage, it explores how developments in nutritional science and veterinary medicine combined with economic depression, war-time food shortages, and the aftermath of war, drew attention to the undernourished, unhealthy bodies of both cows and humans, and suggested connections between them. Enrolled by the United Nations and its agencies in their campaign against hunger in the developing world, cows inspired the formation of new health structures that aimed to tackle their unproductive bodies. Within them, experts in human health, veterinary medicine and agricultural science came together to survey the situation, and plan interventions that would create new bovine bodies and new experts capable of supporting their provision of health and nutrition to humans

Introduction to "Working Across Species"

Comparison between different animal species is omnipresent in the history of science and medicine but rarely subject to focussed historical analysis. The articles in the ‘‘Working Across Species’’ topical collection address this deficit by looking directly at the practical and epistemic work of cross-species comparison. Drawn from papers presented at a Wellcome-Trust-funded workshop in 2016, these papers investigate various ways that comparison has been made persuasive and successful, in multiple locations, by diverse disciplines, over the course of two centuries. They explore the many different animal features that have been considered to be (or else made) comparable, and the ways that animals have shaped science and medicine through the use of comparison. Authors demonstrate that comparison between species often transcended the range of practices typically employed with experimental animal models, where standardised practises and apparatus were applied to standardised bodies to produce generalizable, objective data; instead, comparison across species has often engaged diverse groups of nonstandard species, made use of subjective inferences about phenomena that cannot be directly observed, and inspired analogies that linked physiological and behavioural characteristics with the apparent affective state of non-human animals. Moreover, such comparative practices have also provided unusually fruitful opportunities for collaborative connections between different research traditions and disciplines

Outdoor dance performance by SB Dance at neighborhood block party [02]

"The photos depict a performance on 15 Aug 2020 by SB Dance (https://sbdance.com/) on East Roosevelt Ave., between 21st and 22nd E, in Salt Lake City, for our socially distanced summer block party.

Outdoor dance performance by SB Dance at neighborhood block party [01]

"The photos depict a performance on 15 Aug 2020 by SB Dance (https://sbdance.com/) on East Roosevelt Ave., between 21st and 22nd E, in Salt Lake City, for our socially distanced summer block party.