href="#ulink_0e70510d-aca5-5197-a8a8-f4c97a3a0835">Bradley, 1927; Cameron, 1938a, b; Beveridge, 1972). Renewed calls for unifying veterinary and human medicine were made within this context, on the assumption that these were two strands of ‘one’ medicine.
Today, the coining of the term ‘One Medicine’ is usually attributed to Calvin Schwabe, a vigorous proponent of comparative medicine, who employed the term frequently in the third edition of his volume Veterinary Medicine and Human Health (1984). However, it was used on many earlier occasions to illustrate the nature and value of comparative medicine (Bradley, 1927, p. 129; Shope, 1959; Beveridge, 1969, p. 547). During the mid-20th century, it was particularly associated with authors from the University of Pennsylvania veterinary school (Schmidt, 1962; Allam, 1966; Cass, 1973) and the University of Minnesota.3 It is likely that Schwabe adopted the term ‘One Medicine’ from mid-20th-century currents of thinking within comparative medicine.
By the 1970s the results of comparative medical research into chronic human disease were still rather uneven. It seems that the skills required for conducting this research were rather difficult to obtain, and that few scientists were convinced by its claimed superiority over other methods or by broader visions of ‘One Medicine’. The failure to advance comparative medicine was indicative of the growing differences between the professions in their research orientation and in the status they awarded to animals. Such differences were consolidated by 20th-century research and development infrastructures, which allocated human and animal health to different funding streams, research institutions and international organizations.
Yet at the same time, certain individuals, working in specific settings on particular disease problems, brought human and animal health into closer alignment. One key institution was the Rockefeller Foundation, which made the study of animal pathology central to many of its medical, scientific and public health programmes (Corner, 1964). Theobald Smith, the first director of its Department of Animal Pathology at Princeton (established in 1915), had made his name at the Bureau of Animal Industry, where he applied a comparative ecological approach to the study of Texas fever (Méthot, 2012). Both he and his successor, Richard E. Shope, who discovered the influenza virus of pigs and proposed its role in human influenza, were medically trained. Yet they saw animal pathology as the necessary foundation of all medicine (Shope, 1959). One particularly productive line of work, begun by Peyton Rous on chickens and continued later on rabbits in collaboration with Shope, was the role of viruses in cancer causation (Rous, 1910; Shope, 1933). Elsewhere in the USA, the University of Pennsylvania, the Mayo Clinic at the University of Minnesota (incorporated in 1915) and the Hooper Foundation for Medical Research at the University of California (established in 1913) were among a cluster of institutions that supported medical–veterinary interactions in research and postgraduate education (Steele, 1991). In France and Germany, the Pasteur and Koch institutes remained committed to a comparative approach, as did other medical research centres in Europe (Gradmann, 2010). In Britain, the Medical Research Council established a programme of research into dog distemper which helped scientists to discover the human influenza virus in 1933 (Bresalier and Worboys, 2014).
Twentieth-century relations between health and the environment were similarly characterized by variability and ambiguity. By enabling the targeted control of infectious agents, the development of vaccines and antibiotics diverted attention away from the environmental factors that influenced their emergence, spread and clinical impacts. These interventions were so successful in the West that despite a few opposing voices, by the 1960s and 1970s it was widely believed the conquest of infectious disease was in sight (Anderson, 2004). In certain colonial and post-colonial settings where infectious diseases remained a problem, however, the environment could not be ignored. In the case of trypanosomiasis during the first half of the century, a highly ecological set of investigations resulted which drew on entomology, medicine, veterinary medicine and agricultural science to generate a dynamic picture of the disease (Tilley, 2011).
The elevation of development as an economic and political priority made colonial and post-colonial settings important to the integration of human and livestock health and nutrition (Staples, 2006). In 1948, as part of an international drive to improve human health through disease control and better nutrition, the WHO set up a VPH unit within its Division of Communicable Diseases (WHO, 1958). Headed by the American Martin Kaplan, who had degrees in veterinary medicine and public health, it developed close relations with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), other UN agencies, and the Office International des Epizooties (OIE) (Kaplan, 1953). A series of joint WHO/FAO meetings in the 1950s led to collaborative programmes on zoonoses, meat hygiene and veterinary education. It also brought a working definition of VPH as comprising ‘all the community efforts influencing and influenced by the veterinary medical arts and sciences applied to the prevention of diseases, protection of life, and promotion of the wellbeing and efficiency of man’ (WHO/FAO, 1951).
In framing animal health as a crucial problem of human health and development, the FAO and WHO positioned veterinarians, trained and working within public health, as vital to realizing these goals (Bresalier, 2018). However, most countries lacked such personnel (WHO/FAO, 1956), therefore establishing new education and training programmes became a key focus. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the WHO and FAO acted to support and fund veterinary and VPH education in the developing world. These activities relied on expertise drawn from the USA, which led the post-war development of VPH at national, state and local levels, as well as internationally through the Pan-American Health Bureau (PAHB). The leading figure in these initiatives was James H. Steele (Steele, 2008). Trained in both veterinary medicine and public health, he was a prodigy of the Swiss-American veterinary pathologist Karl M. Meyer, himself a vocal proponent of the integration of human and animal medicine. It was Meyer who established the Hooper Foundation as a world-leading research centre on zoonoses and food safety.
As is evident from the above, post-colonial and international health contexts were very important in shaping the careers and ideas of many of the key figures who aligned themselves with a ‘One Medicine’ agenda. Their work within developing countries also enabled them to engage in cross-cultural encounters and exchanges with pastoral and agricultural peoples, which informed their
