One Health. Группа авторов
and unstable (Fudge, 2000). In health and medicine there historically existed three key points of intersection. First, animals were used to work out the anatomy and physiology of human bodies. Secondly, they were studied in comparison to humans in order to work out the relations between them. Thirdly, the theory and practice of animal medicine attracted the attention of human doctors, usually as an end in itself, but occasionally as a basis for comparison with human medicine. Aspects of these connections can be identified in very ancient civilizations (Gordon and Schwabe, 2004). However, as all three featured in ancient Greek thought, which exerted a powerful influence in the West right up to the 17th century, this will form the starting point of our survey.
Around one-quarter of the surviving works produced by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in the 4th century BC are devoted to animals, most importantly History of Animals, Parts of Animals and Generation of Animals. While Aristotle distinguished humans from animals through their possession of a rational soul, he also sought to relate them, by documenting differences and similarities in the form, function and purpose of their parts, and drawing up a taxonomic system. The numerous dissections he conducted in the course of this work illustrated the possibility of learning about humans from animals (Clutton-Brock, 1995). Taboos on the use of human bodies led the famous Greek doctor, Galen, working in 2nd-century Rome, to follow Aristotle’s lead. In an extensive and influential body of writing he documented the results of his numerous observations and experiments on animals. The errors he made in extrapolating from animal to human anatomy were not discovered until Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) revived human dissection at Padua University in the 16th century (Guerrini, 2003).
Vesalius, and several of his contemporaries and successors, also vivisected animals in their attempts to work out the differences between living and dead bodies, and to describe and explain how body parts functioned (Shotwell, 2013). Vivisection was problematic: debates surrounded the value of knowledge drawn from animals and the suffering involved (Guerrini, 2003). Nevertheless, it enabled Realdo Columbo (1516–1559) and Fabricius (1537–1619) to identify the pulmonary transit of the blood and the function of the venous valves, respectively. After studying under Fabricius, William Harvey took up an Aristotelian programme of research on animals that resulted in his novel and, at the time controversial, proposal that blood circulated. Meanwhile, as part of the wider investigation of nature, medical doctors followed Aristotle in dissecting dead animals, for example at the elite Paris Academy Royale des Sciences during the 1660s and 1670s. This activity, described as ‘comparative anatomy’, drew on animals derived from colonial conquests that were contained within European leaders’ menageries (Cunningham, 2010).
The health of humans and animals, and their relations to the environment, were defined by the same medical theory: humouralism. Drawing on the ideas of Hippocrates and Galen, this formed the dominant system of medical thought until the 18th century. It held that all bodies were composed of four humours, influenced by factors such as feeding, climate, ventilation, exercise and sexual behaviour. Disease resulted from an imbalance between the humours (Curth, 2002). Bodily health was also influenced by changes in the environment, which the Hippocratic text, Airs, 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,