One Health. Группа авторов
consequences of poorly understood animal–human interfaces, a butterfly effect,1 in a likely zoonotic event which led to worldwide, serious economic consequences from reductions in trade and shortages of interconnected supply and production chains. Tragically, the prevailing shortsighted financial planning ignores the urgency of assessing the broader ramifications of public health and reduced funding for public health, particularly veterinary public health, an investment that would cost only a negligible fraction of the social and economic losses we witness today.
The insights gained from drastic examples like the recent COVID-19 epidemics along with the significant body of successful research and applications, as partly summarized in this second edition, encourage us ever more to insist on demonstrating the added value of integrated approaches and cooperation between related health sectors. It is only through integrative and iterative forms of cooperation that we can create the urgently required comprehensive policies to protect human and animal public health and preserve ecosystem services, a most powerful contribution to reduce and mitigate environmental and climate change.
It is an enormous pleasure for us to see the evolution of what initially appeared as a disconnected set of fragments and uncoordinated patchwork of thoughts, evidence and impacts to a coherent, well-profiled and unique quilt displaying an integrated view of health and well-being. The present edition attempts to carve out the key messages and to understand how scientific evidence can be translated into practices, academic teaching, institutional organization and integrated health policies resulting in a major impact in the pursuit to achieve the SDGs and, thus, better health and well-being within sustainable ecosystems.
We wish you a most stimulating read, and let us hope we can jointly tackle the remaining research, development and action agendas to which these contributions point. ‘We are not only responsible for what we do, but also for what we do not’ (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, Molière, 1622–1673).
Jakob Zinsstag
Esther Schelling
Lisa Crump
Maxine Whittaker
Marcel Tanner
Craig Stephen
29 February 2020
Notes
1 In chaos theory, butterfly effects are small initial changes, which result in large effects at a later stage (Henri Poincaré, Paris, 1854–1912).
We thank our editors at CABI, Alexandra Lainsbury and Ali Thompson, and CABI as a whole, for their most helpful support.
We gratefully acknowledge all external reviewers who contributed critical assessments to the different book chapters.
MICHAEL BRESALIER,1* ANGELA CASSIDY2 AND ABIGAIL WOODS3
1 Department of History, Swansea University, Swansea, UK; 2 Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology, University of Exeter, UK; 3 College of Arts, University of Lincoln, UK
Introduction
The purpose of this chapter is to outline the history of One Health. This task immediately raises the question of how to approach the history of a subject that only became known as ‘One Health’ a few years ago, and is still evolving conceptually under the influence of health challenges, scientific advances, and political, economic, environmental and professional priorities. While there were many precedents to One Health, they did not go by this term, and they occurred at times when health problems, scientific ideas, and the wider world were very different from today. This state of affairs makes it impossible to impose a simple structure on to past events, or to link them, in linear fashion, to present-day One Health.
It is important to highlight this problem because existing histories of One Health usually gloss over it. These accounts are structured around key historical figures and scientific advances, whose contributions to health are used to argue for the importance of pursuing a One Health approach today. The achievements of Rudolf Virchow, Robert Koch, William Osler, John McFadyean, James Steele and Calvin Schwabe are routinely celebrated, along with the health benefits of vaccination, the germ theory and zoonosis control. While the importance of these individuals and activities cannot be denied, their roles within the history of One Health require more critical consideration. The accounts in which they feature are neither politically neutral nor historically well grounded, and have been assembled not for the purpose of understanding the past, but for advancing the case for One Health today. While this strategy may be useful in justifying and winning support for One Health, it has resulted in an extremely partial and selective reading of the past.
Rather than analysing history retrospectively from the perspective of present-day agendas, this chapter adopts a neutral, prospective, evidence-based approach that pays due regard to historical context.1 Drawing on an extensive body of historical literature and source material, it aims to effect a fundamental shift in the way that the history of One Health is popularly conceived. It takes as its subject matter the constellation of ideas, practices and circumstances that brought human and animal health (and to a lesser extent, the environment) into alignment, the people and institutions involved, and the reasons for change over time. Partly due to space constraints, and also because this history is still under active investigation, it makes no claim to completeness, particularly with regard to very recent events which are well described elsewhere (Lebouef, 2011; A. Cassidy, 2020, unpublished results). While Western medical and veterinary traditions form the primary focus, it acknowledges the importance of cross-cultural exchanges, which were often facilitated by international health organizations concerned with human and animal disease control.
The first section of the chapter analyses intersections between human and animal health in the pre-modern era, to reveal how deeply animals and animal health were embedded within human medicine. The second section extends from the late 18th-century foundation of the veterinary profession until the turn of the 20th century. It tracks the evolving relationship between the veterinary and medical professions, and how, as scientific ideas and practices changed, new links were forged between human and animal bodies and diseases. The third section extends this analysis into the 20th century, focusing particularly on the changing status of animals within medical research, and on international efforts to develop comparative medicine and veterinary public health. The conclusion reflects on the importance of these findings for history and for One Health today.
Pre-modern Connections
Looking back on the pre-modern era, commentators often highlight the existence of a fundamental, well-entrenched distinction between humans and animals, which derived from the Christian belief that only humans had souls (Hardy, 2003). In fact, this divide has been overstated, for the perceived