Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 2 (2006), p. 354

This book is not entirely about agricultural history as it is partly focused on animal disease and public health. The main actors in the story are the scientists, doctors, vets, politicians and health reformers involved in the long fight against tuberculosis, and not farmers. In the late nineteenth century there was, according to the author, more than a general anxiety about the relationship between food and disease, an important part of which centred on the relationship between this disease in cattle and man. Most studies of human tuberculosis have concentrated on the transmission of the bovine form in the milk supply. But the disease can also be visibly present in the organs and lymph nodes, though not in the muscle tissue, of infected animals slaughtered for meat. As butchers removed any obvious signs of tuberculosis before sale, its presence was invisible to the customer. There was intense debate about the threat of human infection from such meat, and whether cooking made it safe to eat.

Precise detection of the disease in animals and man became possible after the isolation of the tubercule bacillus by Robert Koch in 1882, but effective methods of control were slow to emerge. They depended on the agreement by scientists and acceptance by the public that the disease in animals could infect humans. For the next twenty years there was general acceptance that this was so. However, Koch challenged this interpretation in his speech to the International Medical Congress in London in 1901 when he expressed the view that bovine tuberculosis rarely caused the disease in humans. If this were so, it reduced the urgency to eliminate the disease in cattle and to reform the food industry, as well as providing an excuse for those who did not want the expense of either. The question was settled finally in 1911 by the report of the Royal Commission on Tuberculosis, which established its own scientific laboratories to examine the matter with controlled experiments.

At the same time as the scientific debate raged, central and local government were engaged in trying to reduce the serious mortality from pulmonary tuberculosis. The situation facing those trying to impose effective controls was, as is demonstrated by the author, one of complete muddle and confusion. As there was little general agreement among the scientific community because thinking was subject to change and revision, civic authorities and food reformers could have no clear plan of action. Part of their effort was devoted to cleaning up the milk supply, but even this was not always easy. Although urban authorities inspected local cowsheds and eventually banned the sale of milk from animals showing obvious signs of the disease, they had far less control over milk sent in by rail. Controlling the meat supply was even more difficult as most butchers had their own small private slaughterhouses, where inspection was difficult and concealment of the disease was easy. Attempts to control it at its source were also frustrated. Even after tuberculin testing of milk was able to detect the disease in cattle that showed no symptoms, such testing was not compulsory. In addition, the absence of compensation for slaughtered livestock made it difficult to do anything much to reduce its farm incidence before the Second World War. A conservative estimate, made in 1942, was that 65,000 people in England and Wales still died from milk-borne bovine tuberculosis between 1912 and 1937, though it seems unlikely that beef was ever a major vector.

Even when local authorities started to take action to detect the disease in animals after slaughter, the lack of any generally-agreed standards of inspection meant meat passed fit for human consumption in one locality could be condemned in another. The medical and veterinary professions saw the introduction of the municipal abattoir as part of the solution, while butchers strongly resisted attempts at increased inspection. This was partly because it was impossible for them to pass the blame for the disease and the question of compensation back to the dealers and farmers who sold infected cattle. Butchers saw inspection of their premises and attempts to force them to use public abattoirs as attempts to force them to bear all the cost of the disease.

In an impeccably documented study, the author presents us with a convincing analysis of the relationship between all the warring interest groups engaged in the meat politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He guides the reader through the welter of confusion and contradiction that enveloped the whole debate and shows how the emerging veterinary profession used the disease to gain a larger role in public health. Amongst the medical profession, local Medical Officers of Health also used the disease as a platform from which to reinforce their efforts to reform the meat and milk businesses. Whilst the tuberculosis question may have been uppermost in the minds of all health professionals, it did not drive either farming or the food industry. For all of those in the meat industry it became just another problem to cope with. Farmers were mainly worried about foreign competition and its effects on prices and profits. For those in the meat trade it took its place alongside complaints about swine fever regulations, legislation over shop hours, attempts to enforce the marking of home- and foreign-produced meat, fear of the power of the American Meat Trust, and the security of foreign supplies. The main thing that this important book does is to leave the reader in no doubt about the importance of this disease and its control to our general understanding of British livestock farming and food history.