Introduction: Centring Animals Within Medical History (original) (raw)
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Animal roles and traces in the history of medicine, c.1880–1980
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.
Veterinary History Comes of Age
Social History of Medicine, 2014
Introduction to a special virtual issue on Veterinary History, published in Social History of Medicine. The article takes a long-term view of developments within related fields, explores reasons for its neglect within colonial settings, and points towards new avenues for research.
Animal assisted interventions in historical perspective.pdf
Although every topic has its own unique history that can be explored, analyzed and interpreted, the limits of historical inquiry are inevitably bound by the quantity and quality of surviving documents and artifacts. Unfortunately, surviving historical accounts of people's relationships with animals are both unusual and sketchy, and the little documentary evidence that exists tends to refer to the lives of the rich and famous. Our knowledge of how ordinary people in the past related to animals, or made use of their companionship, remains indistinct and largely speculative. Even where the historical evidence is relatively complete, there is a danger of overinterpreting it-of attributing values, attitudes, and sentiments that make sense to us from a modern perspective, but which would not necessarily have possessed any meaning for our historical predecessors. All of this demands that we treat historical evidence with an appropriate degree of caution.
Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 2022
The welcome development of the veterinary humanities, and veterinary anthropology specifically, raises the question of its potential relationship with the now well-established field(s) of the medical humanities, and of medical anthropology. Although there are national variations, the term “medical humanities” generally refers to either the tapping of the humanities to improve medical education by developing, through engagement with the humanities like literature and visual art, skills in empathy, visualization and expressivity, or alternatively, it refers to the application of humanities approaches of cultural critique to the presumptions, practices and institutions of the human medical world to denaturalize the ideologies of knowledge that contemporary human medicine professions depend upon. This article reflects on the potential impact that the development of a veterinary medical humanities could have on the field of (human) medical humanities and vice versa. Could such a developm...
Subjected to Parliament: Experimental medicine and the animal body
In 'Sacrifice and the Transformation of the Animal Body into a Scientific Object ' Michael Lynch (1988) explores how the animal body is transformed into a scientific object in the laboratory. How did the laboratory become a (relatively) closed space in which scientists, the experts, were delegated the task of negotiating and transforming the interpretative sense of the animal -from sentient beings to analytic objects -as tools in a scientific machinery? By exploring a parliamentary controversy on experimental medicine at the turn of the 20th century I argue that this depended on a reworking of the status of the animal body, as well as the status of the laboratory. Crucial to this was social theory; specifically, utilitarian reasoning. Thus, what we need to study -this paper argues -is not simply the ways in which the practices of annual experimentation were met with opposition and critiques, but also how these practices came to be culturally and politically accepted, and what this implied for science -society relations. In analysing this controversy, the author attends to recent turn to politics in STS and argue for the significance of studying conventional political sites such as 'Parliament' and the role that social theory plays in renegotiating and remaking sites and objects.