Man's attempts to learn about aspects of the human body and its functions by observation and study of animals are to be found throughout history, especially at times and in cultures where the human body was considered sacrosanct, even after death. This book describes the origins and later development, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of comparative medicine and its interrelationship with medicine and veterinary medicine and the efforts of its practitioners to understand and control outbreaks of infectious, epidemic diseases in humans and in domestic animals. In the...

Animals and Disease examines the interactions of medicine and veterinary medicine in their common quest for ways of combating and controlling epidemic diseases in man and animals. Emphasis is placed on the study of animal disease itself, and its implications for human medicine, at first empirically, and later by deliberate use of animal models. Following a general introduction, the text is mainly concerned with developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing in particular on the apparent paradox of the founding of the Brown Institution in London, an institute for comparative...