From 1945, Zebu cattle living on the Indian sub-content were exhaustively identified, enumerated and evaluated by officials working for the newly created Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations (UN). These indigenous, humped-backed cattle (Bos Indicus) provided crucial sources of draught power, food, and income to the area's human inhabitants. Surveying them was a lengthy and painstaking process that took seven years to complete. It was disrupted by political events such as the partition of India, the creation of Pakistan, and the end of British rule in 1947, which impacted on the provision of agricultural services and the presence of technical experts able to attend to the Zebu. It was made more difficult by the Zebu themselves. Numbering over 100 million in India alone (which held nearly half of the world's population), their living conditions, locations, and roles within agrarian systems varied greatly, as did their physical state. Investigators identified at least twenty-eight distinct breeds, whose diverse sizes, shapes and productive capacities reflected their adaptation to particular climates and environments. Many were burdened by chronic infections, parasites, and malnutrition, which undermined their health and limited their abilities to fulfil their human-designated roles. 1 The Zebu attracted attention at this time due to the findings of the FAO's first World Food Survey. Reporting in 1946, it anticipated a growing food crisis across much of the world: production was below prewar levels, famine had just devastated Bengal, and millions of people were unable to meet their basic calorie requirements. With the world's population predicted to increase exponentially, the situation would only deteriorate. 2 The Zebu survey formed one facet of the FAO's response. It sought to identify those cattle with the greatest potential to develop more productive bodies, and to enrol them in a campaign to combat human hunger. This campaign extended beyond India to Latin America, Africa, and much of Asia, and enlisted not only cattle but also buffalo, chickens, pigs and others. However, the recognized importance of milk for child growth and development, and the vitamin, mineral and protein deficiencies that it helped to address, meant that cattle played a central role. This role was not entirely new. The twin challenges of improving human nutrition through increased milk consumption, and developing agriculture through improvements in livestock health and production, had preoccupied nations, colonies and the League of Nations during the inter-war years, culminating in calls to 'marry food and agriculture.' 3 However, it was only after the war, under the aegis of the FAO and the World Health Organisation (WHO), that these two agendas became truly integrated. In framing healthy, productive cattle as essential to the production of healthy, wellnourished humans, these organisations encouraged experts in human and veterinary medicine to transcend the institutional and disciplinary boundaries that had grown ...

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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 non-standard 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.

Abstract. 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.

Abstract. In 1960, American parasitologist Don Eyles was unexpectedly infected with a malariaparasite isolated from a macaque. He and his supervisor, G. Robert Coatney of the National Institutes of Health, had started this series of experiments with the assumption that humans were not susceptible to ''monkey malaria.'' The revelation that a mosquito carrying a macaque parasite could infect a human raised a whole range of public health and biological questions. This paper follows Coatney's team of parasitologists and their subjects: from the human to the nonhuman; from the American laboratory to the forests of Malaysia; and between the domains of medical research and natural history. In the course of this research, Coatney and his colleagues inverted Koch's postulate, by which animal subjects are used to identify and understand human parasites. In contrast, Coatney's experimental protocol used human subjects to identify and understand monkey parasites. In so doing, the team repeatedly followed malaria parasites across the purported boundary separating monkeys and humans, a practical experience that created a sense of biological symmetry between these separate species. Ultimately, this led Coatney and his colleagues make evolutionary inferences, concluding ''that monkeys and man are more closely related than some of us wish to admit.'' In following monkeys, men, and malaria across biological, geographical, and disciplinary boundaries, this paper offers a new historical narrative, demonstrating that the pursuit of public health agendas can fuel the expansion of evolutionary knowledge.