Abstract

Historians and One Health advocates share a misfounded assumption that medicine in the past was a human-centered endeavor, which took an interest in animals only when they threatened or had the potential to advance human health. This chapter challenges this assumption through a series of examples of how British practitioners of human medicine engaged with diseased animals over the period circa 1790–1900. These reveal that in the relatively recent past, medical professionals paid far more attention to animal diseases and for a greater variety of reasons than are recognised by contemporary commentators.