1By the nineteenth century, medical disciplines and specialties had become firmly established. But it was in France during the second half of the eighteenth century that medicine underwent a process of specialization, during which period distinctions were made between the different branches and disciplines. Specific research on the endocrine and nervous systems, the increasing interest shown concerning children’s health, and the detailed development of theories and studies on hygiene are examples of this process. Veterinary medicine was one of the specialist branches of medicine to emerge in the eighteenth century. This particular type of medicine, which was developed in order to preserve the health of domestic animals, gained a certain autonomy, particularly from the 1760s, when it enjoyed institutional recognition after the first veterinary schools were established. It was, however, a branch of medicine that was often discredited due to the tendency of the wider medical profession to see animals as inferior. [1]

2This specialist branch was developed against a background of works in which there was a wealth of medical descriptions, comparisons, and hypotheses. It was characterized by an anatomical, physiological, surgical, and medical understanding all of its own. An important body of literature written by physicians and philosophers, who had been devoted to the study of nature since antiquity, contained numerous descriptions of animals both healthy and sick. Aristotle carried out a biological study of the different parts of an animal’s body that opened up new horizons as to what constituted life, an area that other philosophers, such as Empedocles and Democritus, had already begun to elaborate. A fairly significant study of physiology had thus been in operation since at least the sixth century BCE. The Hippocratic Corpus—an inexhaustible number of medical writings that far exceeds the works recognized as having been written by Hippocrates himself—contains cases of epilepsy in goats and sheep. Cases of dislocation and accidents affecting the limbs and bones of animals are discussed and described. [2] These various works testify to the fact that a modicum of anatomical and surgical knowledge had been in place since the fifth century BCE. Similarly, the provision of (continually improving) medical care was extended to animals. We find evidence of this once again in documents sometimes dating to the very earliest period of antiquity. [3] Pelagonius’ Ars Ueterinaria, a treatise on hippiatrics written in Latin, is evidence of knowledge concerning horses. Published toward the middle for the fourth century ACE, and uncovered during the fifteenth century, it included the rudimentary aspects of veterinary medicine addressed to the owners of horses. [4] These works show that knowledge concerning the treatment of diseases affecting domestic animals was already well-established. Collected medical works presenting a series of descriptions of the diseases affecting wild animals and, more commonly, domestic animals, prove the attention shown to animal health. These diseases were progressively distinguished, classified, and conceptualized under the titles of epidemics, epizootics, and zoonoses. [5] The works draw particular attention to the degree of fear that these different diseases continued to inspire in various populations. It had long been common knowledge in medicine (realized through trial and error) that human health and its future had to be positioned and evaluated in connection with other living creatures. This made animals a source of information concerning human health.

3Long before they had awakened a demand for veterinary medicine in the true sense of the word, [6] sick animals raised the question of the need for a preliminary form of medicine—for humans. How would humanity be able to protect itself from diseases affecting the species closest to it, domestic animals (livestock and domestic pets), and wild animals living close to human habitation (foxes, wolves, wild dogs, and so on)? These were the concerns of peasants and populations involved with the movement of flocks and the intrusion of wild animals suffering from deadly diseases like rabies into towns. These were also the concerns of doctors involved in investigative work to determine the causes of diseases. The reason for these preoccupations was medical as well as economic; namely, the protection of populations from disease and famine. Human health, in short, depended on animal health. The history of medical practice and expertise, to which a wealth of observations made by naturalists often contributed, resulted in the late development (in the eighteenth century) of a specific type of medicine for animals.

4It was, in fact, during the course of the second half of the eighteenth century that veterinary medicine was to emerge as a discipline primarily concerned with the health of livestock and, in particular, the skills required for breeding horses. It was led by several rather isolated medical figures, one of whom was a pioneer in the field along with Claude Bourgelat. It was by royal edict, but owing to the influence of a few personalities of whom Bourgelat was one, that the first veterinary schools were established. Although veterinary practice existed much earlier, it was at this point that it became an institution. This emergence can be partly explained by a number of circumstances. Owing to increasing concerns regarding public health and its extension to significant populations, it was thought that individuals needed to be taught better skills for mastering the procreation of animals living in herds. Particular attention was given to practices and projects for improving animal breeds (which were to become important a century later)—an emphasis that had cultural as well as scientific implications. [7] Finally, we should also take into account the existence in this same period of arguments concerning the sensitivity not only of the animal, but also toward the animal. Thus, if living matter possesses sensitivity, and if the latter is not the only prerogative of the soul, how can we exempt animals from possessing this quality? And if, indeed, they are sensible beings, would they not be like us? And would this not bring the animal, in all its forms, closer to the human being?

5It was in a climate in which there was an extremely ambivalent conception of animals that veterinary medicine took its first tentative steps. It was a form of medicine devised by humans for humans, in which animals were usually the object.

6First of all, seen from a human perspective, the animal constituted an object of study and science. In order to understand animals, humans would need to take care of them as they take care of themselves. Second, animal health was of importance economically and for health reasons, owing to the fact that sick animals represent a threat to humans. Third, the animal’s new status required an appropriate type of medicine, thus explaining the emergence of veterinary medicine in its own right. Fourth, its emergence led to a change in the common perception of animals, in which they became beings worthy of greater attention.

A Knowledge of Animals to Treat Both Them and Us

7The teaching of medicine involves the acquisition of a comprehensive understanding of the anatomy and physiology of living creatures. Although a number of physicians took exception to anatomical study even in the eighteenth century, they were regularly criticized by their colleagues. [8] In order to combat the diseases affecting humans, a physician must begin by acquiring an understanding of human anatomy. [9] The history of the development of human anatomical knowledge was linked with that of the animal from the very beginning. Democritus’ anatomical investigations and the studies carried out by Aristotle in his Parts of Animals testify to this. In this respect, it is the comparison between the two that accounts for the fact that the animal has been an integral part of medical knowledge for a very long time. [10] This knowledge was developed through observation, experience, and experimentation.

8Stating that the animal is an object, an object of knowledge in this case, implies that the animal is perceived as being useful from many angles. This leads to many projects involving the exploitation of its body and the natural resources connected with it. The animal is, thus, both an object and a means of exploiting the earth’s riches. The same is true of examination and research into its body, into its innermost recesses in fact, when it is conducted to provide answers to the questions raised by humans in their scientific quest for the mechanisms of reproduction, absorption, and digestion. The objectification of the animal has been a recurrent theme throughout the ages. Objections to it were uncommon owing to the fact that it represented a valuable source of observation and experimentation, much of it going back to earliest antiquity. In this context, we should mention Galen (131–210? ACE), the physician from Pergamum, who not only made a defining element of the four humors in medicine in the centuries that followed, but also put forward a coherent anatomy of the human body, piecing it together in a learned comparative work based on animals. This provided his successors with a considerable body of anatomical and physiological studies of the body. His dissections were largely carried out on animals—on monkeys, pigs, and cattle. The fact that human corpses had not at this time been dissected may partly be explained by the constraints of Roman law. Galen used the human body only for what is referred to today as osteology. He put the liver as the center of blood circulation, and outlined a description of the nervous system that was less inaccurate than some more recent anatomico-physiological ideas. He saw the brain as the source of the path taken by nerve impulses along the nerves, and his studies on living animals enabled him to carry out work on the laryngeal nerves. Animals represented the basic experimental material in this context, from which a body of systematic doctrines was built up, leaving a permanent mark on physiological studies over the ensuing centuries. Indeed, Galen’s influence persisted up until the formulation of the important systems of mechanistic physiology in the seventeenth century.

9It was during the seventeenth century in fact that animals’ and humans’ bodies were both viewed as dynamic machines. We see, beyond the mechanistic physiological representations of the seventeenth century, the emergence of a comparative anatomy and physiology. This contributed in part to the elucidation of the map of the human body, thanks to knowledge acquired from animals, which was the result, of course, of numerous dissections. Fifteen centuries after Galen, the surgeon René-Jacques Croissant de Garngeot (1688–1759) became one of the definitive authorities on comparative anatomy. [11] He published a treatise entitled Myotomie [12] humaine et canine, ou la manière de disséquer les muscles de l’homme et du chien in Paris in 1724. This work represents a significant example of the scientific and experimental use of animals as an influence in medical and surgical development. The initial argument put forward by Croissant de Garengeot in defense of his dissection of canine corpses was rather pragmatic, given that he was a professor of surgical procedures. He realized that, as a number of students could not afford the sums of money necessary to obtain human corpses, they could use dogs as a starting point for learning about the anatomical similarities between some of the canine parts and those of humans:

10

The dissection of the bodies of animals thus leads the student of surgical procedures as though by the hand, enabling them to form the aptitude necessary for the future dissection of all the parts contributing to the singular and marvelous structure of the human body when the occasion arises. [13]

11His second argument demonstrates an anthropological and philosophical interest in this respect, specifically with regard to the superiority of humans over animals (the “brutes” and “beasts”) in terms of physical and moral perfection. This is representative of a type of reasoning inherent in research at that time, to which the majority of naturalists and philosophers adhered. Croissant de Garengeot was one in a line of learned men that included some better known figures. William Harvey was one of these; he sacrificed many does and other mammals on the altar of comparative anatomy, and the results were never quite satisfactory. [14] This lack of satisfaction is explained by the complexity of the questions relating to the mechanisms of reproduction, which was the subject of an infinite number of experiments, observations, and hypotheses carried out by European scientists at that time. Would the animal be able to enlighten humans as to the fabric of living creatures? This perpetual quest, which exhausted Harvey, is mentioned in a detailed narrative by Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis at the beginning of his Vénus physique. [15]

12A more substantial examination of this sacrifice of animals might lead us to transcend the boundaries of the period of this article and, should we do so, to take up the thread of a history still in the making, namely, that of laboratory animals and the impassioned debates occasioned by these practices. This would be a subject for another article.

The Sick Animal: A Threat to Humans

13During the eighteenth century, complex questions and contradictory theories were raised as a result of contagious disease epidemics. In general, the term epidemic referred to the transmission of “morbiferous matter” from human to human. However, every experience of new forms of epidemic over the centuries contributed to a change in the way this type of phenomenon was perceived as well as the definitions associated with it. [16] The transmission could assume a number of different forms to include pestilence, virus, [17] miasmas, and animals as carriers of contagious diseases. The plague represents a recurring example of this sort of description and the difficulties experienced in determining its causes. The problem associated with the transmission of disease was intensified when it was a matter of the passage of disease from animals to humans. What were the implications? There were numerous examples of this type of transmission. Rabies regularly terrified whole populations, and epizootics also sowed the seeds of fear, striking a chord in collective memories. Not only did epizootics constitute a reminder of epidemics, but also possibly heralded them. After all, what was really known about the transmission of contagious disease from animals to humans? The nature of the debate concerning epizootics consistently reflects the fear of transmission in all its forms, especially the fear of what has, since the nineteenth century, been referred to as zoonosis. The diseases and dangers associated with Hungarian beef, brought by herds traveling across Europe, which were seemingly increasingly threatening, represent one example. The great cattle epidemics were the subject of important treatises written by the Italian physicians Giovanni Maria Lancisi [18] and Bernardino Ramazzini. [19] They were also studied by a physician from Montpellier, François Boissier de Sauvages. [20] This type of fear had a wider import rather than just whether meat was consumable or not. It occasioned vivid and often disturbing fantasies connected with the relationship between sick animals and humans. In fact, ever since antiquity, this relationship was capable of assuming terrifying proportions from the point of view of its consequences. Rabies was one example of, if not a prototype for, the relationship between the two. We are concerned here with a disease spoken of ever since Homer, taken up by Aristotle, Galen, and Girolamo Fracastor, and the subject of treatises written by Boissier de Sauvages (Dissertation sur la nature et la cause de la rage, Toulouse, 1749), Antoine Portal (Observations sur la nature et sur le traitement de la rage, Yverdon, 1779), and in Italian, by Franco Falese (Trattato della idrofobia, Lucca, 1739), and Vincenzo Malacarne, [21] and so on. Fiction was often mixed with fact in the accounts of cases of rabies. Boissier de Sauvages’ description in his treatise Dissertation sur la rage provides one example:

[Some] travelers, who were given meat from a pig with rabies by an innkeeper, straightaway became rabid and bit each other. This story was told by an anonymous author, and may not readily be believed, but with respect to this disease, “Le vrai peut quelquefois n’être pas vraisemblable” [At times the truth may not seem probable]. [22]

Medical Treatment for Animals and the Emergence of Veterinary Medicine

14The first stage in the emergence of veterinary medicine is thus based on a history—essentially that of man’s concerns relating to diseases affecting livestock and their implications as far as human beings were concerned. These preoccupations run through medical literature throughout the eighteenth century. Boissier de Sauvages, who was anxious lest the signs of this deadly epizootic appear on the bodies and faces of humans, researched the causes of disease in the Vivarais cattle. [25] He also wrote on the causes of rabies, a scourge that could not only affect people, but also decimate whole flocks, which meant considerable losses for livestock owners. [26] Determined to establish the causes and origins of a devastating and universally feared disease, in 1763, the surgeon Claude Pouteau also wrote an Essai sur la rage. [27] In 1770, Bourgelat, in his École royale vétérinaire, recommended treatment for the epizootic disease affecting livestock in order to preserve the flocks and herds from certain epizootic factors connected with the air, the quality of the pasture and of the water, and so forth. [28]

15Not all animals were considered as equal among themselves, either medically or culturally. A rising star emerged from among “beasts” and livestock, namely, the horse. Immortalized by Buffon’s celebrated text, [29] the horse was certainly considered to be superior to all other animals, requiring appropriate treatment in consequence. Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, noting that the term “veterinarian” is a translation of the art of farriery (it comes from the Latin veterinarius meaning “farrier”), testifies to the fact that medical treatment for animals was largely limited to horses. Beyond this reference, it is indeed the horse that dominates literature on animal medicine, with a significant number of published texts focusing on the care of this particular animal. Some of these works deal primarily with aspects connected with regulation, [30] while others are more concerned with the development of veterinary matters [31] or, indeed, a combination of aesthetic, sporting, and veterinary considerations. [32] There are other books that prioritize breeding and the veterinary skills needed for its success. [33] Finally, training should not be forgotten since the horse is an animal that requires training. [34]

16In the eighteenth century, the art of veterinary medicine, among other aims, [35] focused on encouraging and implementing a policy to improve breeds in order to combine elegance with robustness, revealing through the bodies of animals a genuine ability to preserve human agricultural and nutritional resources. While the article entitled “Vétérinaire” in the Dictionnaire raisonné mentions the term merely as being almost synonymous with farriery, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (4th edition, 1762) makes no mention of it at all. At the end of the eighteenth century, the Encycopédie méthodique de médecine offers a definition closer to a more contemporary notion. After having described the antiquity of medicine in ten lines or so, the author notes:

17

It is only really towards the middle of the last century, in our country, that we have become seriously committed to the creation of a veterinary art, that is to say, a science, the aim of which is to reproduce, preserve, and improve domestic animals. [36]

18However, it was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that veterinary medicine took hold, owing to a royal edict issued in 1761. This edict was cemented by the creation of the first two royal veterinary schools, one founded in 1762 at Lyon, and the other in 1765–1766 at Maisons-Alfort.

19This event should be placed within the historical context of the professionalization of medical bodies. A number of specifications were drawn up for surgeons and pharmacists concerning their occupations in a process that was apparently intended to clarify their relationship with doctors. With the emergence of medical schools, followed by hospital reforms and the foundation of medical examinations right at the beginning of the nineteenth century (1802), specialties gradually began to emerge. There was, therefore, a general climate which made the emergence of a formalized and institutionalized veterinary specialty completely understandable. It was an area of expertise that would be greatly exploited in a systematic way at the end of the following century. However, the art of veterinary medicine can also be understood as a scientific recognition of a body of breeding practices. This branch of medicine nevertheless had to overcome the prejudices that accompanied its emergence. An example of such prejudice was recorded by the author of L’Art vétérinaire ou médecine des animaux in 1767, in the text for the curriculum of the first veterinary school at Lyon:

20

The art of veterinary medicine today is in an abject state. Everything that was respected by the philosophers and physicians of antiquity, everything with which they deigned to occupy themselves, and the knowledge relating to this subject handed down to us by them, is more or less forgotten. We no longer read Varro, Columella, Dioscorides, Democritus, Rasis, and Avicenna etc., not even in compilations such as those by Gesner and Aldrovand and, even if Aristotle and Pliny are still sometimes consulted, this is apparently only in order to substantiate the errors of the one and the fables of the other. [37]

21The isolation of these veterinary pioneers has been emphasized by modern medical historians, in their descriptions of the prejudices encountered by the emerging discipline in their presentations and articles, as well as by the doctors who worked hard to develop it:

22

Coarse practitioners of vulgar medicine—this is a ready-made image that would stick to veterinarians for a long time, tempered only be another prejudice, derisory also, that of the animal’s inability to speak, the opposite of the supposedly useful discourse of patients with their doctors. [38]

23We should draw attention to three principal issues connected with the emergence of veterinary medicine. The first involves the statutory issue, in which veterinary medicine would become an institution in legal, educational, and administrative terms, a discipline concerned not only with animals, but also with patients. [39] The second concerns the scientific issue, in which veterinary medicine, with its optimal knowledge of the animal and the economic aspects associated with it, would be granted scientific status in its own right. The third was the cultural issue, since, at this time, a more refined social perception of animals was beginning to emerge. A form of recognition concerning animal rights was starting to appear, as long as the animal was considered useful, elegant, and amenable, which was the case for horses.

24The institutionalization of veterinary medicine was confirmed through the creation of the veterinary schools in Lyon and Alfort, then Limoges… The official documents available for consultation, such as the Règlement de l’École royale vétérinaire d’Alfort of 1766, show, as indicated by the written instructions given to the medical students of that period, that the institutions advocated precision and austerity; essentially military qualities. Article 6 of these regulations is proof of this:

25

When a supervisor notices that any of his pupils are, and remain, weak in one of the parts being demonstrated, he should send them to a lesson with the supervisor in charge of demonstrating the part in question. All pupils are required to obey the aforesaid supervisor, on pain of expulsion. [40]

26The key person behind the creation of the schools was Bourgelat. [41] He contributed to the construction and consolidation of a bridge uniting clinical medicine and hospital practice. He also united the medical institution with medical science, which gave a status to students as future veterinarians, and to animals as objects not only of knowledge but also deserving of the special care intended for them. Bourgelat was made a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1752. He was then approached by Diderot and d’Alembert, who suggested that he should collaborate with them on the Encyclopédie as an editor for articles concerning equestrian schooling, farriery, and related arts. When he had corrected the contributions submitted by previous authors, he signed the first of about 250 articles in 1755. At first, he was passionately interested in horses, but then, focused on this most noble of animals, Bourgelat collaborated with Henri-Léonard Bertin (1719–1792), an intendant de la généralité lyonnaise and Controller General of Finance, and threw himself heart and soul into the creation of a veterinary school. Reputable surgeons and physicians, such as Claude Flurant, Claude Pouteau, Jean-Baptiste Charmetton, and a number of similarly reputable anatomists, like Honoré Fragonard and other medical school graduates, were the first to officiate at these schools (Lyon, Alfort, and so on). As history demonstrates, there has never been any process involving the institutionalization of a discipline in society without a guiding force. As far as Bourgelat was concerned, veterinary medicine was no exception.

27While the regulations were modelled on those formulated for the attention of future physicians, the theoretical and practical knowledge intended for the students was based on eighteenth century medical science. The text entitled L’Art vétérinaire ou médecine des animaux, cited above, is once again testimony to this:

28

We are concerned with healthy and unhealthy animals alike. Our aim must be, on the one hand, to keep the body’s mechanisms whole and, on the other hand, to put right any disorder or alterations. Indeed, in order to keep the constituent parts in the condition and working order that constitute what we call health, and to correct the disturbances that might have affected them, constituting what we call disease, it is essential to have knowledge of these parts and their actions, as well as the physical implications of these actions. This is because once we recognize these actions, causes, and implications, we are close to the science that enables us to maintain these functions and restore the ones that defects (which are not beyond the power of our art to correct) might have disrupted. [42]

29This sort of document is proof of a move towards specialization in terms of the subjects taught. Bourgelat had based his notion of teaching on a fixed and systematic order, more in keeping with a methodical undertaking, by working on anatomy from the model of a horse, on clinical medicine with livestock, and on pharmacopoeia by adopting human medicine. In contrast, Philippe Chabert (1737–1814), one of Bourgelat’s first pupils and then a professor at the veterinary school at Alfort, laid the foundations for a rational animal pathology by dividing it up and systematizing it. Animal pathology was thus connected to human pathology—it was destined to become refined, isolated, organized, recognized, and perhaps even mastered. Chabert published books on such diverse subjects as the digestion of ruminants, sickness caused by venom, peripneumonia, and the deterioration of milk. This type of versatility can partly be explained by Chabert’s career: he was a professor of farriery, diseases, and operations; inspector of studies; director of the royal veterinary school at Alfort; and, finally, inspector general of the royal veterinary schools.

Did the Emergence of Veterinary Medicine Change the Common Perception of Animals?

30Did the proposal of scientific means and techniques for maintaining the health of certain animals within a specific discipline—that of veterinary medicine—contribute to a palpable change in the portrayal and perception of animals? Did they, for example, obtain any rights? Did medical discourse and practices in this century lead, even minimally, to a type of rehabilitation of animals, causing them to emerge from their state as mere beasts, livestock, or brutes? Animals had long been pawns in the scientific game for naturalists and philosophers, as well as for doctors. They were pawns in terms of health practices, with the improvement of animals seen as a means of improving humans.

31Two approaches to animals were partly changed through the emergence of veterinary medicine. Firstly, the domestic animal became object and stake in a process of improvement, thus confirming increasing scientific control over nature by humans as well as asserting their economic power. Secondly, the animal became an object of attention, demonstrated by an increasingly overcautious examination of its health, something which, for all that, did not cause it to be a subject in its own right. These two approaches to animals will be developed in this final section.

32At its inception, veterinary medicine needed to prove itself both in terms of its usefulness and its scientific content. However, as far as many doctors were concerned, it would evolve within the confines of “abjection.” [43] Does the idea of a veterinary art that had been developed in a state of abjection, that is to say as the object of profound disrespect, as a valueless vulgar utility, mean that it was considered abject because of the fact that it involved the care and treatment of animals? The origins of this extreme lack of respect for veterinary medicine lay in the contemporary notion of animals—a bestiary composed of a few dignified creatures with the majority of beasts seen as inherently harmful. The horse was, according to Buffon’s emblematic phrase, “the most noble conquest of man,” the animal that was more powerful, better, and nobler than humans themselves. Buffon dedicated an entire text to horses, one that could be considered a veritable anthropology of the horse, an animal that is a being in its own right, with its society and demands—a truly astounding universe in every sense of the word. The horse stands head and shoulders above a throng of other beasts, although Buffon presents a portrait of each species, describing their individual characteristics. According to popular opinion, the horse had little competition. The dog sometimes accompanied it, but only on the sidelines, and the cat was not taken seriously at all during this period (though that would change marginally after the French Revolution). Livestock received some attention, but for other reasons already noted above (economic, dietary considerations, and so forth), as did “beasts,” animals that were more or less exotic, dangerous, harmful, but frequently fascinating, the objects of descriptions made to pander to the inquisitive at that time.

33This increased attention paid to animals and their way of life came from an economic need that was not purely motivated by the fear of epizootics and their consequences for humans. It was a matter of broader economic concerns, in which a more decisive influence was attributed to nature. What we see here is, in fact, a philosophical movement that, far from being naïve, was concerned with a return to nature. On this subject, we might note the arguments put forward by the Physiocrats, who were relatively influential during the second half of the eighteenth century: if the only source of wealth is the earth, it is by seeking to improve it in every way that we will succeed in enriching our nation, with implications for animal health. Apparently a veritable source of income to maintain and develop, animals must receive individual attention in the same way as crops. This cultural movement is palpable throughout this period, as much in the medical texts as in the philosophical discourse of one Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or, rather, in the often cursory perusal of it made by a number of his contemporaries. We frequently encounter a contrast between the healthy air of the countryside and the polluted air of the towns. This contrast encapsulates in an extreme way the great importance attached to theories pertaining to air and climate throughout the eighteenth century. Both in Europe and on the other side of the Atlantic, people used medicines that exploited in a particularly exaggerated manner the study of all the factors behind air pollution. It was as a result of this that topographies gained importance in Europe, which condemned the narrowness of small passageways, the houses built in too close proximity to one another, constricted living quarters, and other factors causing pollution. Nature had become, in this regard, a paradigm of harmony, good health, and beauty…

34It was, therefore, as part of the confirmed evolutionary process of knowledge that animals captured people’s attention. Animals were a source of interest not only with regard to the different domains of medical, zoological, and botanical science, but also in terms of techniques connected with husbandry and agriculture. However, this position did not imply a change in the general perception of animals in the eyes of breeders or doctors, or indeed in scientific circles, with the exception of some zoologists and naturalists. On the other hand, the continued and more detailed observation of animals, as much from the point of view of their physiological make-up as their habits, caused a change in the perception of humans based on that of animals. Thus, as the lines of descent in animals are perfectly capable of improvement through the intervention of breeders, by cross-breeding successively—a phenomenon to which Charles Darwin drew attention—why would it not be the same for humans? And what if the horse became, beyond a companion for humans, a paradigm for the betterment of the human race? This question, far from being raised by a few quacks, was publicized orally and in writing by a man of some standing—the physician Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis. [44]

35Beyond the realms of his own thought, Cabanis expressed a cultural turn in favor of the emergence of a new human being, putting into tangible form the ideals of perfection dreamed of by Condorcet and others. However, the idea of intervention in human reproduction as part of a coherent policy of regeneration has at its roots very ancient practices applied to domestic animals. In fact, the domestication of certain species (e.g. pigs and horses), which is characterized largely by the voluntary coupling of males and females, wherein the candidates are allowed to select their mate, goes back to a period between the eighth and fourth centuries BCE. Of note here is that one of the consequences of Neolithic domestication is a reduction in the size of animals, a point Buffon develops. [45] This idea of improving animal breeds took on an increasingly anthropological character in the eighteenth century. Charles-Augustin Vandermonde had tried his hand at improving the human race even earlier than Cabanis, with the publication, in 1756, of his Essai sur la manière de perfectioner l’espèce humaine. He based his argument on the means used to perfect horses in order to promote an identical policy for human beings. [46] The idea of improvement, which reverberated throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, was partly connected to another idea—that of natural, rather than artificially engendered beauty. Men were strong and handsome, and women natural (without make-up), expressing the unspoiled beauty of nature, and animals dotted all over the countryside were equally attractive. We must return to Bourgelat, however, and the doctors involved with animal health; the care lavished on animals also had as its aim the creation of attractive lines of descent that corresponded to ideals of proportion and color. The anatomy of the horse, patiently developed by Bourgelat, was used to improve its physique, although the aesthetic dimension did not constitute an end in itself. In was in this sense that, according to Kant’s well-known distinction, the horse belonged to the type of beauty referred to as “adherent,” which expresses something more than the mere appearance of the animal. [47]

36Proclaiming the desire that nature and the beings within it should constitute an aesthetic investment requiring the attention and care of humans—the guardians of nature—does not necessarily imply a palpable change in the general perception of animals. In fact, none of the enterprises involving the improvement in the health of animals at this time conceived of them as equal to humans and, even less, as a group of beings whose integrity was worthy of recognition.

37It is, however, in the day-to-day routines of a veterinary practice still in its infancy that we should look for the beginnings of a change in the status of animals. They were no longer entirely scientific, medical, or aesthetic objects, but closer to being subjects, in the sense in which medicine tends to individualize a sick animal, to listen to it in a state of isolation away from the rest of the herd.

38It seems, however, that animals only represent subjects within a tradition of literary personification that has, as its purpose, an analysis of humans. Nevertheless, there is a certain lingering tension between a form of personification in which animals are legendary and mythical, and the cold, calculating, and objectifying use of animals in economic contexts. [48] Even if it is no longer a question of thinking of the animal as being reducible to a type of machine, [49] which is in line with an important tendency in the philosophy of the period, the sensitivity of the animal remains fundamentally bound up with the question of the sensitivity of matter, an issue very much in the philosophical limelight. At the same time, the fixed hierarchical representation distinguishing between humans and animals in an absolute manner is called into question. [50] Indeed, the moment had not yet arrived when the animal would be considered as a being in its own right. What then of its status as a sick creature? And, to go even further, with the advent of veterinary medicine does it become a patient?

39We recognize the anthropological intensity in the stories and descriptions provided by men and women as testimony of their pain and suffering at the hands of doctors, and the replies of the latter, thanks to a considerable epistolary literature. This literature lends substance to the medical history not only of doctors and their practices, but also of the sick. In a collection of medical observations, for instance, we are interested in a woman who always suffers from the same fever at the same time, in the episodes of gout related by a sufferer, or indeed, in the changes in a soldier’s wounds… It is true, however, that we are not interested, in terms of a detailed, individualized narrative, in a wounded, suffering animal, or in the relationship between vets, not in the same way we would be in the sometimes troubled relations between doctors when their diagnoses conflict.

40An interesting example is found in a book by Ronald Hubscher, [51] Les Maîtres des bêtes: Les vétérinaires dans la société française (XVIII^e–XX^e siècle). It concerns the story of a sick cow and is set at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The cow is no longer eating and is moving with difficulty. Its owner, not recognizing the prodromes (early symptoms) of the disease, opens the jugular vein and orders an infusion of flowers, sulfur, and nitrate of potash. When the animal’s condition deteriorates, the decision is made to apply hellebore to the fetlock, and all further treatment is postponed until the next day. A little while later, the cow is affected by shivering and colic. The vet diagnoses the start of paralysis in the hindquarters and recommends treatment as a result. When he sees the parlous condition of the animal, the farrier recommends that it should be thrown out on the rubbish heap and sends for the knacker. The owner’s son nevertheless decides to call back the vet and, after a week of treatment, the animal’s feeling begins to return so that in the end, it is saved. This story, without endowing the cow with the status of patient worthy of all possible medical attention, summarizes in a very significant manner the play of relationships—the owners, father and son, the vet, and the farrier—concentrated in the episode endured by the animal. This narrative shows the vet as a learned man of science, confronted by the empirical practices of the peasantry. A parallel might be made between the daily round of doctors faced with popular lore and the lack of mutual understanding. We might do well to remember that the struggle against empiricism is almost an integral part of the very history of medicine. This story reveals conflicts of interest between owner, farrier, and vet. The latter bases his relationship with the sick animal on time, the best medium of success in terms of treatment. The owner bases his approach on the fear of losing an asset, and the farrier bases his on profitability and utility without necessarily looking much further.

41Leaving aside the logical argument of Hubscher’s book, which deals mainly with the thorny question of empiricism in medical and veterinary practice, we may want to focus our attention on the sick animal, also in a certain sense the patient in this episode. We know nothing about the animal, a cow, which narrowly escapes a gruesome conclusion to its illness, namely, slaughter and quartering as meat for humans or dogs. It remains enclosed within its total otherness: an animal doomed to remain outside man’s sphere.

42Is a more general knowledge of animals necessary in order to form an understanding of a sick animal, taken in the sense that we are then drawing up a sort of “anthropology” of that animal? And what sort of knowledge might that entail? It is as part of this uneasy interplay of understanding and misunderstanding that an impressive array of questions, hypotheses, and speculations are intertwined in order to gain an understanding of animals. Moreover, a desire to understand animals has long been part of the desire for a fuller knowledge of humans. This brings with it a number of prejudices preventing an understanding of the animal for itself, leading to prejudices as far as humans are concerned. Are we able to build a fitting anthropology based on ignorance of the otherness that is the animal in all its forms? Étienne Bounot de Condillac hopes, in part, to awaken our sensitivity (rather than our affectivity), and thence to conduct our investigations into the subject in a new light. [52] Condillac’s precious contribution to the subject is, however, part of a philosophical debate on the nature and place of humans. The animal intervenes merely as a catalyst within the relativist dimension of a new type of anthropology. Seen in this context, the animal is, at best, a prism.

43This otherness, which is too involved a subject to broach here, is usually expressed by the animal’s muteness: that of the animal subjected to humans from time immemorial. However, this age-old reduction of domestic animals—those involved in physical work and those whose flesh is edible—to the economic considerations of humans is the subject of a vociferous body of literature that is not merely contemporary, in which there are attempts to give these same animals a “voice.” Plutarch, for instance, expresses the universal protest of animals prematurely destined for the pot:

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The animals which you devour are not those which devour others; you do not eat carnivorous animals, but imitate their savage nature. You have no appetite but for meek and innocent brutes that hurt nobody, but, on the contrary, fondly attach themselves to your persons, who faithfully serve you and whom you devour in return for their services. Unnatural murderers! [53]

45Plutarch’s angry indignation came to the rescue when, at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, doctors were warning against the excessive consumption of meat, arguing that it was contrary to a good diet.

46In this respect, two discourses on the subject of sensitivity oppose the essentially unilateral belief that humans are superior to all other creatures. On the one hand, the discourse concerning physical sensitivity put forward by Condillac, in the wake of a whole host of physiologists, doctors, and philosophers, [54] tended to dismiss the dualist representation, in which inert matter was distinguished from the spiritual soul, as anachronistic. On the other hand, the moral discourse dating back at least as far as Plutarch and espoused in particular by Rousseau, [55] constituted a warning as far as those who consumed the flesh of their familiar companions without any qualms were concerned. These two discourses were centered on humans, although they contributed to the partial rehabilitation of animals.

47It is against the background of these ideas and their development that a branch of medicine focusing on the care of animals has been laboriously built up—care that takes into account what they are and in which the appropriate tools are utilized. It remains to be said that, even while its functions have varied according to the changes affecting the relationship between humans and animals in different parts of the world, from its first tentative steps up until the present day, veterinary medicine has overseen the health of animals so as to guarantee that the function for which they exist is carried out under the most appropriate conditions. The veterinarian also takes care that the animal’s meat should be edible, and, as far as possible, at least in the past, that it is a working tool in optimum condition.

48Various events, schemes, and points of view, on the whole fairly recent, have led to the development of a more humanized approach to animals, in which they are perceived to be possible “subjects,” [56] living creatures in their own right. In accordance with a growing concern for the health of animals, particularly livestock, veterinary medicine is partly included within this process. The emergence of an argument defending and demanding an honest approach to living creatures of whatever type comes after a long period of industrialization of animals. Indeed, ever since the nineteenth century, the food industry has palpably contributed to reducing the occupants of farmyards and fields to the status of objects, consumable material, in fact. Horses, previously raised to the level of useful and valuable companions to humans, have joined the throng on the road to the abattoir. [57]

49The emergence of veterinary medicine contributed to a change in perception regarding animals as far as many professions were concerned. This changed perception also affected eighteenth century society as a whole, including doctors, peasants, and occupations connected with the food trade. When animals were better cared for, they in turn took better care of humans, both in terms of food and the preservation of their health. Animals remained within the confines of utility, however. At the same time, this utilitarian notion did not preclude aesthetic concerns—in fact, quite the opposite. The more well-proportioned animals appeared—the horse was the principal model—the more they expressed the balance, power, and subjugation of nature, economy, and, for the owner, a certain social standing.

50In 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, a desire that 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. The final word had not yet been spoken as far as the fear of epizootics was concerned, however. The possibility of the transmission of numerous infections to humans by animals—redrawn by the tools of contemporary science—still had many surprises in store. The complexity of the relationship between humans and animals includes some unknown elements, making the work of redefining all the parameters through which the normal can be distinguished from the diseased all the more difficult.