Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 1 (2011), p. 145

Compared to other disciplines, historians of medicine have been very slow to move away from exclusively human-centric approaches to embrace non-humans and ecologies of health. This is despite the fact that human-animal-environment interactions were and are critical to many of their favoured topics, for example, plague and malaria. Because they draw connections with work in geography, social anthropology and other disciplines, Karen Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle’s excellent collection of essays on disease and livestock economies is a welcome sign that things are changing in the history of medicine and that the subject is becoming more interdisciplinary. The editors identify four main themes addressed by their contributors: the institutionalisation of veterinary medicine; the global spread of zoonotic diseases; diseases that follow the transfer of livestock to new environments; and colonialism and veterinary medicine. The essays range widely across time and space, from epizootic disease in the Netherlands in the early eighteenth century to the Philippines in the mid-twentieth century. Given the focus on livestock diseases, questions of political economy loom large, for example, in Abigail Woods’s account of the attempts in Britain in the 1940s to use veterinary expertise to boost livestock production to meet wartime shortages and post-war economic priorities. John Fisher and Robert Peden demonstrate the uses of specific and locally adapted veterinary practices to address, respectively, the endemic problems of sheep scab in Australia and foot rot in New Zealand. However, it was major epizootics, especially rinderpest (cattle plague), that swept across national boundaries that had the greatest impact upon veterinary institutions. There are essays on the disease in the Netherlands, Germany, the Philippines, and East Africa, all of which show that, while it was a challenge to veterinarians, who mostly relied upon so-called administrative actions, rather than science, its visitations were an opportunity to develop veterinary institutions and acted as a stimulus to research. Interestingly, Daniel Doepper tells how, while the first two rinderpest epizootics in the Philippines were ‘like biblical plagues’ in their devastation of the livestock economy, a third in wave in the 1910s was managed, if not controlled, by a combination of immunisation and administrative actions.

The discussions of livestock diseases and veterinary medicine in colonial settings show the value of interdisciplinary approaches. Martine Barwegen, who also discusses rinderpest, shows the importance of local knowledge and veterinary expertise in Java in the 1870s. She concludes that state control policies probably made the outbreak worse, as the disease was already enzootic, with indigenous farming methods maintaining an ecological balance that prevented the disease from becoming epizootic. Lotte Hughes uses anthropological methods to construct a narrative of how the Purkho Masai reacted to the impact of colonial rule in Kenya on their livestock husbandry. She suggests that in established grazing areas there was an ecological balance between pathogens, vectors, animals and humans that kept the disease at low levels, and that inevitably such conditions could not be replicated in the reserves they were moved to, ironically to escape East Coast Fever. Saverio Kratli works on the nomadic herders, the WoDaaBe, in the Sahel region of West Africa. He uses actor network theory in his chapter to explore the various colonial knowledges and practices that came together to produce a consensus about what breeds were appropriate for the new colonial environment, which was, of course, a natural-cultural hybrid. The editors make this point more clearly their introduction, observing that in colonial settings, ‘the practice of veterinary medicine was as much about reordering indigenous society as it was about controlling disease’ (p. 12). Finally in this vein, David Anderson charts the development of the Kenyan cattle trade in the inter-war period and gives us an economic history that takes the ‘local’ seriously, both in terms of the world views and agency of African pastoralists and the effectiveness of administrative and veterinary rule across the colony and at its borders. The editors close the volume with an agenda for further work on other times, places, animals and diseases, and for studies that are more sensitive to gender and local cultures. Such studies would, of course, be very valuable, but Karen Brown and Dan Gilfoyle have already in this collection addressed many of these issues, I expect this volume will stimulate scholars in many disciplines to explore the history of veterinary medicine and animal diseases.