Pioneers in the Victorian provinces: veterinarians, public health and the urban animal economy

Abstract

From the 1850s in Britain, concerns were growing about the role of animals in transmitting disease to man, whether through the food chain or through infection. While London is often seen as providing a model for public health reform, it was the great provincial cities that initiated veterinary involvement in public health in the closing years of the century. The emergence of this new strand of public health activity is the subject of this paper.

One Health: the theory and practice of integrated health approaches

“…The late-19th century saw a number of important developments within science and medicine that had mixed implications for the history of One Health (Wilkinson, 1992;Hardy, 2002). The 1859 publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species claimed that all living organisms descended by evolution from a common ancestor.…”

“…2 They gained some ground towards the end of the century, in inspecting meat at slaughterhouses and regulating the supply of clean milk. However, the nature and extent of these roles varied considerably between and within nations (Schmaltz, 1936;Koolmees, 2000;Hardy, 2002;Jones, 2003;Orland, 2003;Brantz, 2005;Waddington, 2006;Berdah, 2014).…”

Fear of animal foods: A century of zoonotics

“…Glanders and farcy, two variants of a bacterial horse disease, were also a source of what, in retrospect, seems to have been exaggerated public fear. According to Anne Hardy, the deaths in London of two ostlers' wives in 1892 from the human form of glanders caused 'public panic' and were the spur for its eradication as a public health risk (Hardy, 2002). The fear was generated by media attention and a content analysis of newspapers such as The Times would show an increasing trend over the last 150 years in the reporting of zoonotic food scares.…”

Taking Stock: Perspectives on British Urban History

“…36 The sheer numbers of horses, cows, chickens, and pigs in the nineteenth-century city, and of wild birds in continental European cities, together with the growth of veterinary science, are topics that urban historians have so far neglected. 37 In modern times, this phenomenon and the psychological dimensions of pets in cities has not been explored, far less the commercial aspect of the processing of pet food and the modern paraphernalia of pet-keeping. 38 If natural habitats provide a rich arena for future urban research so, too, do man-made ones.…”