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2009).

      Comparative anatomy was consolidated as a medical practice by the surgeon, John Hunter (1728–1793). He established his own menagerie, and spent hours each day dissecting and experimenting upon animals. He incorporated their bodies into his museum, which numbered over 500 species with 13,000 specimens at the time of his death in 1793 (Chaplin, 2008). Hunter’s influence on the field of surgery and its growing profile kept animals at the forefront of medical research in subsequent years (Lawrence, 1996). It was one of his pupils, Edward Jenner, who showed in 1796 that cowpox inoculation could protect humans from smallpox (Fisher, 1991).

      Enter the Vets

      The connections outlined above reveal that in many ways, pre-modern medicine really was ‘one’. So how did the creation of the veterinary profession impact this situation? The first schools were established in Lyon (1762) and Alfort (1777). By 1791 they existed throughout much of Europe: in Dresden, Freiburg, Karlsruhe, Berlin and Munich in Germany; Turin, Padua and Parma in Italy; as well as Vienna, Budapest, Copenhagen, Sweden and London (Cotchin, 1990). Historical accounts often portray their creation as a significant break with the past which led to a newly enlightened approach to animal healing (Wilkinson, 1992; Swabe, 1998). However, this interpretation is deeply flawed, for as shown above, animal bodies and their treatment in health and disease had already attracted substantial attention from medical doctors.

      It is perhaps more accurate to view the veterinary schools as an expression of pre-existing medical interest in animals, because although circumstances varied from school to school, doctors often played important roles in driving and shaping veterinary education. The doctors’ commitment to studying the health and medicine of animals is shown by the fact that they did not automatically cede this field to the new veterinary profession. Rather, as shown below, they intensified their investigations during the first half of the 19th century and drew on vets as collaborators. Therefore, although in time the connections between human and animal health lessened, this was not an immediate or inevitable consequence of the veterinary profession’s formation (A. Woods, 2020, unpublished).

      In the 1780s, against the wishes of founder Claude Bourgelat, the physician Vic d’Azyr refashioned the Alfort veterinary school into a research institution and assumed the chair of comparative anatomy. Teaching was extended to human fracture care and midwifery to enable vets to offer extended services in rural communities. For political reasons, these changes were reversed in 1788 (Hannaway, 1977, 1994). However, from the 1790s, a number of Alfort veterinary and medical staff (including Francois Magendie in the 1820s) engaged in the systematic vivisection of horses, making this one of the first contexts for development of experimental physiology in France (Elliott, 1987). The subsequent expansion of this field within Germany, France and, later in the century, to Britain (in the face of anti-vivisectionist opposition) considerably enhanced the use of animals as experimental tools within medicine (Bynum, 1994). For proponent Claude Bernard these uses were entirely justified, for ‘to learn how man and animals live, we cannot avoid seeing great numbers of them die’ (Bernard, 1957, p. 99).

      In London, surgeons and (less commonly) physicians acted as governors for the Veterinary College (established in 1791), ran examinations for students, and were well represented on the student body: 130 surgeons had qualified as vets by 1830. Edward Coleman, principal of the College from 1796 to 1839, was also a surgeon, appointed on the strength of his research on animals and ability to teach farriery. He modelled veterinary education on that of human surgery. Veterinary students were encouraged to attend lectures in the London medical schools, while medical students had the opportunity to attend lectures on veterinary topics. However, little research was undertaken at the College. This drew criticisms from the medical press, which campaigned with disaffected vets for the reform of the school. In 1844, vets displaced doctors in the control of student examinations. Concurrently, reforms in medical education restricted the courses on offer. These shifts enhanced the institutional separation of the professions (A. Woods, 2020, unpublished).

      However, as shown by the many reports on animal health issues that appeared in the medical press, doctors retained their interest in this topic, to the extent that veterinary surgeons sometimes accused them of stealing their patients. Doctors also conducted numerous investigations into animal disease pathology and epidemiology. Their infrequent use of the term ‘comparative’ to describe such investigations suggests that they regarded them as part of mainstream medicine. Their aims were to document animal diseases, to describe their analogies with human diseases, and to learn about the nature of disease in general. These investigations featured a remarkable and formerly unrecognized degree of collaboration between doctors and veterinary surgeons. Vets drew doctors’ attentions to interesting cases and outbreaks, facilitated their access to live animals and dead bodies, and offered personal insights based on clinical experience. Less frequently, doctors assisted vets in their animal disease investigations. Grass-roots collaboration between the professions was therefore important to the development of mid-19th-century understandings of human and animal disease (A. Woods, 2020, unpublished).

      Medical interest in animals was promoted further by two key scientific developments. First, investigations during the 1830s suggested that glanders in horses, rabies in dogs, and anthrax in animals were causally connected to the equivalent diseases in humans (Wilkinson, 1992). Secondly, there emerged a Romantic or philosophical form of comparative anatomy which suggested that humans and animals were formed on the same general plan. In their efforts to comprehend this plan, doctors compared the anatomy and pathology of the bodies and embryos of multiple animal species (Jacyna, 1984; Hopwood, 2009). Humans and animals were thereby brought together in ways that are usually attributed to Darwinism and the germ theory, 30 years later. This finding reveals that contrary to popular belief, the latter events did not spell a complete break with the past. Rather, they formed part of an ongoing process of making and remaking links between human and animal bodies, and diseases.

      Veterinary education emerged later in North America than in Europe. While some of the earliest qualified vets were European émigrés, physicians were also extremely active. In the period 1820–1870 they investigated and reported on livestock diseases, campaigned for veterinary education, and established and taught at early veterinary schools that were mostly short lived (Smithcors, 1959). In 1863, Scottish vet Duncan McEachran founded the Montreal Veterinary College. Believing that veterinary medicine was a branch of human medicine, he modelled teaching on that of the McGill medical school. One of his best known collaborators was William Osler, a former student of Virchow’s and lecturer in medicine at McGill, 1874–1884. Osler taught veterinary students, undertook research (mostly unpublished) into diseases of animals, and asserted the value of comparative medicine to medical audiences. Although today he is often heralded as a figurehead of One Health, he was not unusual at the time. His predecessors and successors at McGill also taught veterinary students, and several, such as J.G. Adami, produced more extensive and significant research in comparative medicine (Teigen, 1984, 1988).

      Following the 1859 publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species which claimed that all living organisms

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