Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (review)

In this introductory survey of the history of human and animal experimentation from antiquity to the present, Guerrini does not attempt a complete history so much as "a subjective look at what [she] consider[s] to be significant and telling events in that history [of animal and human experimentation] in the Western world" (x). Taking an interdisciplinary approach, she combines the methods of intellectual and cultural history with those of sociology, ethics, and anthropology to trace Western societies' changing attitudes toward, and practices in relation to, humans and animals, and science and medicine. She tracks shifts in the meanings and nature of experimentation, notions of acceptable risk, and the human-animal relationship over time. Guerrini effectively uses contemporary philosophical, medical, and scientific texts to identify whether, how, and why humans and animals were used in experiments, and works of fiction to understand popular reactions. Although interdisciplinary in her approach, Guerrini uses few anthropological sources or techniques, and chooses sociological methods already well established in the tool kit of the history of science.

Though reference to secondary sources is limited to a one-page historiographical review in the preface, the occasional footnote, and a brief bibliographical essay suggesting further reading at the end of the book, Guerrini does an impressive job of situating the history of animal and human experimentation within recent literature in the history and sociology of science. Placing power at the center of her analysis, Guerrini seeks to examine "animal-human relationships through a Foucauldian lens." Building on recent work in the sociology of science, Guerrini conceptualizes human and animal experimental subjects as "[b]oundary objects [which] overlap intersecting social worlds and realms of knowledge" (x). Citing human and animal subjects in smallpox inoculation during the eighteenth century, in the development of anesthesia and the rabies vaccine during the nineteenth century, and in polio vaccine research during the mid-twentieth century, Guerrini shows that notions about the experimental subject changed in different historical contexts, as well as for different audiences at any one time. As a (soft) social constructivist, Guerrini uses these particular episodes and contemporary social attitudes to reinforce the notion that "the values of science are the values of the society it inhabits" (xi).

Well-written, highly accessible, and highlighting the major trends, events, and people in the history of Western medicine, experimental biology, and physiology, Experimenting with Humans and Animals is an excellent introductory text in the history of science or medicine.