Animals and the Shaping of Modern Medicine: One Health and Its Histories ed. by Abigail Woods et al.

Reviewed by: Animals and the Shaping of Modern Medicine: One Health and Its Histories ed. by Abigail Woods et al. Susan D. Jones Abigail Woods, Michael Bresalier, Angela Cassidy, Rachel Mason Dentinger, eds. Animals and the Shaping of Modern Medicine: One Health and Its Histories. Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. xviii + 280 pp. $31.00 (978-3-319-64336-6). In the 2010s, the concept of "One Health" (OH) has been increasingly "invoked as a potential solution to a complex set of problems cutting across several disciplinary domains" (p. 223), including medicine, veterinary medicine, and public health. Animals and the Shaping of Modern Medicine, the result of a several-years scholarly collaboration led by Abigail Woods, traces the tangled roots of today's OH in Western biomedicine and writes histories of medicine through the lens of human-animal interactions. But it accomplishes much more: it works to center animals as historical actors, critiques the anthropomorphic bases of OH, and points to new approaches in the histories of medicine and veterinary medicine by seeing animals as "creatures with their own histories and the unintended capacity to effect historical change" (p. 5). The introduction sets the stage well by providing an excellent summary of the "animal turn," including theoretical frameworks that help us to understand how animals and their humans have shaped each other. In re-envisioning OH historically, the authors have taken seriously Etienne Benson's contention that historical evidence about animals is composed of "material-semiotic remnants" or "traces" of the animals themselves and their relationships with other animals and humans.1 [End Page 160] Such remnants—the sufferings of an ill rhino—open Abigail Woods' chapter on caring for zoo animals in nineteenth-century Britain. Zoo animals were at once medical subjects, recalcitrant to control; representatives of colonialism; and critical sources of information for the developing medical sciences of pathology, physiology, and bacteriology. Nutrition and diet, drug administration and the demeanor (therefore compliance) of patients all shaped doctors' "cage-side" manner. Zoos functioned as vast laboratories in which animals and their doctors shaped each other's lives and practices—and the "multi-species dimensions of British medicine" (p. 60). In the next chapter, Woods similarly demonstrates how the medical needs of animals drove multidisciplinary investigations that bridged natural history and medicine. The interactions between sheep, their parasites, and their microorganisms drove scientists' attempts to link field to laboratory research and, by not responding to scientists' manipulations as expected, these organisms opened a space in which novel practices could be developed and veterinarians could "promote" their special expertise (p. 99). Sheep had the "power to make a difference to research structures, practices and participants" (p. 105). Michael Bresalier continues this theme in the next chapter, analyzing the roles of cattle and international agencies (such as the Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO]) in influencing the battle against world hunger after World War II. Healthy cattle meant healthy humans, FAO scientists reasoned; therefore, the bodies of the developing world's "unproductive" cattle (p. 121) needed to be altered to provide better human nourishment. However, FAO scientists quickly realized that "particular livestock bodies and cultures" (p. 144) would not respond to a one-size-fits-all, standardized strategy. This argument could be further developed with more attention to specific local examples (such as the Zebu). Nonetheless, this chapter establishes that, by linking animal to human health, these scientists and their like-minded contemporaries created the international networks that helped to shape "one medicine" and "one health." Rachel Mason Dentinger introduces us to one of the developers of this integrative tradition, the veterinary parasitologist Calvin Schwabe, who built on his own global research to frame what he called "one medicine" in the 1960s–1980s. Schwabe, whose early career included mentoring by some of the scientists mentioned in the preceding chapter, followed the traces of a parasite, Echinococcus granulosus, which he "regarded as an animal," not just a pathogen (p. 185). This cognitive shift enabled him to understand the "interspecies pathways exploited by E. granulosus" in creating complex ecologies of animal-human disease (p. 180). This caused him to "challenge the very validity of species boundaries in biology...