Animal Health and the Emergence of Veterinary Medicine in the Eighteenth Century
Barroux, Gilles
Animal Health and the Emergence of Veterinary Medicine in the Eighteenth Century - 2012.
19
Although descriptions of animal diseases have existed ever since antiquity, occasioning descriptions, comparisons, and hypotheses, it was only in the eighteenth century that veterinary medicine became a discipline in its own right. It was due to the leadership of pioneers such as Claude Bourgelat that a science of animal diseases was to develop, particularly those diseases connected with horses, as teaching methods became institutionalized in the first veterinary schools.In veterinary medicine, there was a desire to develop a body of practices and skills that would relegate fear, imagination, and exaggeration to the annals of bygone history. This desire was shared with medical thinking as a whole, and even more with the general spirit prevailing in the arts and sciences of the second half of the eighteenth century. Animals, once they had been understood and mastered, would no longer inspire fear.Did the emergence of a branch of medicine destined specifically for animals have a part to play in altering humankind’s perception of them? If they were better cared for, would they not also take care of humans, as much from the point of view of food as of health?In spite of this, animals, which were cared for in sickness as well as in health, did not become beings more worthy of consideration in the eyes of their human contemporaries than they had been before. They remained strictly within the confines of their medical, nutritional, aesthetic, and economic usefulness.
Animal Health and the Emergence of Veterinary Medicine in the Eighteenth Century - 2012.
19
Although descriptions of animal diseases have existed ever since antiquity, occasioning descriptions, comparisons, and hypotheses, it was only in the eighteenth century that veterinary medicine became a discipline in its own right. It was due to the leadership of pioneers such as Claude Bourgelat that a science of animal diseases was to develop, particularly those diseases connected with horses, as teaching methods became institutionalized in the first veterinary schools.In veterinary medicine, there was a desire to develop a body of practices and skills that would relegate fear, imagination, and exaggeration to the annals of bygone history. This desire was shared with medical thinking as a whole, and even more with the general spirit prevailing in the arts and sciences of the second half of the eighteenth century. Animals, once they had been understood and mastered, would no longer inspire fear.Did the emergence of a branch of medicine destined specifically for animals have a part to play in altering humankind’s perception of them? If they were better cared for, would they not also take care of humans, as much from the point of view of food as of health?In spite of this, animals, which were cared for in sickness as well as in health, did not become beings more worthy of consideration in the eyes of their human contemporaries than they had been before. They remained strictly within the confines of their medical, nutritional, aesthetic, and economic usefulness.
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