Animals, Disease and Human Society: Human-Animal Relations and the Rise of Veterinary Medicine (review)

Joanna Swabe. Animals, Disease and Human Society: Human-Animal Relations and the Rise of Veterinary Medicine. Routledge Studies in Science, Technology and Society, no. 2. London: Routledge, 1999. vii + 243 pp. $U.S. 85.00; $Can. 128.00.

Degrees of dependency between humans and their (largely domesticated) fellow beings are legion. They are also very complex and have become increasingly so over the centuries, ever since paleolithic nomadic hunters began to grow crops, to use dogs as hunting companions, and finally to domesticate useful animals in settled communities. In recent decades the rise of "animal rights" movements in an increasingly sociology-conscious world has encouraged the appearance of a considerable literature by writers of medical and veterinary history, who today count more and more sociology graduates among their numbers.

Joanna Swabe's book is based on--is in fact all but identical, except for its title and a few minor corrections, to--her Ph.D. thesis, published by the University of Amsterdam in 1997 under the title The Burden of Beasts. It is much to her credit that Swabe presents her subject, which is often prone to controversial interpretations, in measured and dispassionate language. Her own statement in the introduction makes her position clear: "This book is about the serious repercussions that humankind has had to face as a consequence of its ever-increasing and intensifying exploitation of animals. When I speak of animal exploitation, I do not intend it in any kind of derogatory or moralistic sense: this book is most definitely not about animal rights or human wrongs" (p. 7). The result is a book that, as her chapter headings indicate, covers animal-human relations in their manifold aspects in historical context: the results of domestication in terms of dependency, and also in terms of control of diseases, spreading within herds and occasionally transmitted to their human keepers. Bovine tuberculosis is a prime example of a disease dangerous to humans; cattle plague (rinderpest), on the other hand, which made such inroads in cattle populations throughout Europe during the eighteenth century, and caused a fear of contamination through the eating of tainted meat, is not transmissible to humans (although its virus is closely related to those of measles and distemper).

Spreading her net wider, Swabe then explores the creation and development in Europe, from the latter half of the eighteenth century, of veterinary education. She describes the gradual replacement of largely self-taught "cow-leeches" and "horse doctors" by a new veterinary profession--what she calls the "veterinary regime"--whose initial concerns were the prevention and control of disease among the larger domesticated animals. Only later in the following century did the keeping of pets become an important and accepted part of social life, and their health--"small animal practice"--consequently a part of daily life and duties in veterinary surgeries.

Throughout this work Swabe cites mostly secondary sources; that said, she uses them well, weaving together historical facts and sociological observations and interpretations to present an integrated picture of the degree of dependence both of humans and of their animals (whether livestock or pets) on the accelerating progress of veterinary science and medicine over the past century and a half. Even animal experimentation--a major source of controversy, from the beginnings of the nineteenth-century antivivisection movements to today's extreme animal rights manifestations--had its origins in attempts to improve the health of animals themselves: from the earliest rabies experiments in Germany and France, via Koch's work on anthrax, to Pasteur's no less important vaccine developments.

A final chapter in the form of an "epilogue" weighs the risks in the increasing and diversifying use of animal products that influence human daily life, not least through modern developments in the biotechnology industry. Inevitably, BSE crises, DNA technology, transgenic animals, and xenotransplantation loom large among the risk factors...