Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock Economies, and the Globalization of Veterinary Medicine

by Brown, Karen

• ISBN13: 9780821418857
• ISBN10: 0821418858
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-04-01
• Publisher: Ohio Univ Pr

Summary

Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock Economies, and the Globalization of Veterinary Medicine offers a new and exciting comparative approach to the complex interrelationships of microbes, markets, and medicine in the global economy. It draws upon fourteen case studies from the Americas, western Europe, and the European and Japanese colonies to illustrate how the rapid growth of the international trade in animals through the nineteenth century engendered the spread of infectious diseases, sometimes with devastating consequences for indigenous pastoral societies. At different times and across much of the globe, livestock epidemics have challenged social order and provoked state interventions, which were sometimes opposed by pastoralists. The intensification of agriculture has transformed environments, with consequences for animal and human health. But the last two centuries have also witnessed major changes in the way societies have conceptualized diseases and sought to control them. The rise of germ theories and the discovery of vaccines against some infections made it possible to move beyond the blunt tools of animal culls and restrictive quarantines of the past. Nevertheless, these older methods have remained important to strategies of control and prevention, as demonstrated during the recent outbreak of foot and mouth disease in Britain in 2001. From the late nineteenth century, advances in veterinary technologies afforded veterinary scientists a new professional status and allowed them to wield greater political influence. In the European and Japanese colonies, state support for biomedical veterinary science often led to coercive policies for managing the livestock economies of the colonized peoples. In western Europe and North America, public responses to veterinary interventions were often unenthusiastic and reflected a latent distrust of outside interference and state regulation. Politics, economics, and science inform these essays on the history of animal diseases and the expansion in veterinary medicine.

Author Biography

Karen Brown is a senior research officer at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine in Oxford, England. She has published a number of articles in journals of African studies, environmental studies, and the history of science.

Daniel Gilfoyle specializes in veterinary history in Africa and has published a number of articles on veterinary medicine in South Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He works at the National Archives in London.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Epizootic Diseases in the Netherlands, 1713-2002: Veterinary Science, Agricultural Policy, and Public Response	p. 19
The Now-Opprobrious Title of "Horse Doctor": Veterinarians and Professional Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century America	p. 42
Breeding Cows, Maximizing Milk: British Veterinarians and the Livestock Economy, 1930-50	p. 59
Polking Epizootics: Legislation and Administration during Outbreaks of Cattle Plague in Eighteenth-Century Northern Germany as Continuous Crisis Management	p. 76
For Better or Worse?: The Impact of the Veterinarian Service on the Development of the Agricultural Society in Java (Indonesia) in the Nineteenth Century	p. 92
Fighting Rinderpest in the Philippines, 1886-1941	p. 108
Diseases of Equids in Southeast Asia, c. 1800-c. 1945: Apocalypse or Progress?	p. 129
"They Give Me Fever": East Coast Fever and Other Environmental Impacts of the Maasai Moves	p. 146
Animal Disease and Veterinary Administration in Trinidad and Tobago, 1879-1962	p. 163
Nineteenth-Century Australian Pastoralists and the Origins of State Veterinary Services	p. 180
Holding Water in Bamboo Buckets: Agricultural Science, Livestock Breeding, and Veterinary Medicine in Colonial Manchuria	p. 195
Sheep Breeding in Colonial Canterbury (New Zealand) A Practical Response to the Challenges of Disease and Economic Change, 1850-1914	p. 215
Animal Science and the Representation of Local Breeds: Looking into the Sources of Current Characterization of Bororo Zebu	p. 232
Kenya's Cattle Trade and the Economics of Empire, 1918-48	p. 250
Conclusion	p. 269
Appendix	p. 275
Select Bibliography	p. 281
Contributors	p. 287
Index	p. 293
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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