One Health. Группа авторов
medical scientists on how to maximize experimental outcomes while minimizing animal welfare costs (Kirk, 2009). Such work was reminiscent of how vets had facilitated medical research on animal diseases during the mid-19th century, but the science, the setting and the animals were now very different. However, not all vets embraced the changing status of the laboratory animal. Starting in the 1920s, some voiced criticisms of animal models, and called instead for the study of spontaneous disease events in zoo, farm, wild and pet animals (Allbutt, 1924). They argued, as in the 19th century, that diversity was important to the creation of scientific knowledge, and they perceived disease problems in different species as analogous rather than identical. They referred to this form of investigation as ‘comparative medicine’ – although confusingly, the use of this term today applies to the care of laboratory animal models as well.
Interwar comparative medicine advocates included O. Charnock Bradley (1871–1937), Principal of the Royal (Dick) Veterinary College, Edinburgh, and T.W.M. Cameron, professor and Director of Parasitology at McGill University (Bradley, 1927; Cameron 1938a, b). Investigation of comparative medicine gathered momentum in the decades after World War II. Meetings at the New York Academy of Medicine, University of Michigan, Rockefeller Foundation, University of Pennsylvania and the London Zoological Society aimed to demonstrate its practical value and to debate its incorporation within medical, veterinary and graduate school curricula (Jones, 1959). In 1958, a joint Washington meeting of medical and veterinary experts attached to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Pan-American Sanitary Bureau (PASB) proposed creation of a new programme in comparative medicine, with the aim of expanding the kinds of animals and animal diseases used in basic medical research (Smith, 1961). W.I.B Beveridge, Director of the Institute of Animal Pathology at Cambridge University, was the lead consultant (Beveridge, 1969). Initially concentrating on cardiovascular disease and cancer, the official task of this programme expanded in the early 1960s to include comparative virology, neuropathology and mycoplasmology, as well as work on the welfare of primates in medical research centres (Kaplan, 1961; Cotchin, 1962).
From the 1920s onwards, advocates of this form of enquiry adopted an almost identical refrain. They argued that comparative medicine could tackle a wider range of diseases than could be experimentally induced, and would produce fundamental insights common to all species. Although it required knowledge of species’ similarities and differences, veterinary surgeons already possessed such insights. Moreover, the approach would help to bridge professional, epistemological and practical divisions between veterinary and human medicine (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