Waters, Places, held responsible for the rise and fall of epidemics (Wilkinson, 1992; Nutton, 2004). These ideas implied that similar interventions, such as bleeding, purging, lifestyle changes and improvements in the environment, could restore or maintain the humoural balance in both human and animal bodies. Formally trained healers usually focused on one or the other. Physicians, surgeons and apothecaries treated humans, while animals received dedicated attention from medieval veterinarians at the Mamluk courts, and from British farriers, French marechals, Spanish beitars and their equivalents in other countries (Conrad et al., 1995; Shehada, 2012). However, such healers were expensive and few in number. Consequently most humans and animals relied on self-help, clergymen, gentry, and the various self-styled healers that made up the ‘medical marketplace’. Here, the division between species was less well defined (Curth, 2002).
The 17th and 18th century movement away from ancient Greek thought brought humans and animals into even greater proximity. The new experimental philosophy of nature, and Rene Descartes’ (1596–1650) conception of animals as ‘automata’ (self-operating machines), resulted in the more extensive use of animal vivisection in medical research and teaching (Guerrini, 2003). For example, Swiss physiologist Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777) used live animals to work out human neurological functions (Eichberg, 2009). At Leiden in the Netherlands, and later in Edinburgh, Scotland, anatomy lecturers vivisected dogs and dissected humans simultaneously, in order to demonstrate to students the structure and the function of body parts (Guerrini, 2006). A new scheme of classifying animals, drawn up by Swedish naturalist, Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778), placed humans, apes, monkeys and bats within the same order of primates, and brought humans and orangutans together in the genus Homo, thereby challenging notions of a human‑animal divide (Ritvo, 1995). Subsequently, in Paris, additional classification schemes were drawn up using dissected animals from the Versailles menagerie. Here, the key figures were George Buffon (1739–1788), the medically trained comparative anatomist, Louis Daubenton (1716–1799), and Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) (Cunningham, 2010).
One of Daubenton’s pupils, the physician Vicq d’Azyr (1749–1794), went beyond comparative anatomy to develop a truly comparative form of medicine. His initial concern was cattle plague or rinderpest. This disease was prevalent throughout Europe in the 18th century. It inspired much medical comment and attempts to control it by quarantine, modelled on responses to bubonic plague in humans (Wilkinson, 1992). After reporting upon this disease to the French government, d’Azyr was made secretary to a Royal Commission of Enquiry into epidemics and epizootics, and steered its 1778 evolution into the Societe Royale de Medicine. His investigations drew on medical meteorology and topology to correlate human and animal epidemics with climatic and geographical conditions. D’Azyr also performed animal experiments. He believed that by understanding the functioning of organs in health, it was possible to make sense of their dysfunction in disease (Hannaway, 1994). Perceiving no dividing line between human and animal medicine, he argued that ‘considerations on the diseases which attack man are applicable without any exception to those which attack animals. Medicine is one: and its general principles, once set out, are very easy to apply to different circumstances and species’ (Hannaway, 1977, p. 438).
A similar stance was adopted by a number of British surgeons, who became actively involved in equine health care during the second half of the 18th century. Arguing that ‘physic’ (conventional medicine) was the same whether practised on humans or horses, they wrote medicalized manuals of farriery and established infirmaries for the treatment of horses and tuition of pupils. For them, farriery was part of natural history or comparative anatomy. It was therefore a polite practice, suitable for a gentleman (MacKay, 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
