Introduction: Centring Animals Within Medical History (original) (raw)

In a recent handbook on the history of medicine, authors Robert Kirk and Michael Worboys argued that 'In no body of scholarship is it more obvious, puzzling and true to say that "animals disappear."' 1 Literally, of course, this is not the case, for as Etienne Benson points out, to a limited but important extent, writing about human history is alwaysalready writing about animals … Humans are a kind of animal that (like all kinds of animal) has been and continues to be profoundly reshaped by its interactions with other kinds of animals … All history is animal history, in a sense. However, Benson acknowledges the difference between scholarship that incorporates the impact of animal life on humans but is essentially focused on humans, and that which aims 'to explore the history of nonhuman animals as subjects in their own right and for their own sakes'. 2 Nearly all medical history scholarship falls into the former category. While animals do feature in it, and to an increasing degree since the turn of the twentyfirst century, 3 they are usually shadowy, marginal creatures, 'mere blank CHAPTER 1