Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues

Norman F. Cheville

Description

Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues covers the century when infectious plagues—anthrax, tuberculosis, tetanus, plague, smallpox, and polio—were conquered, and details the important role that veterinary scientists played. The narrative is driven by astonishing events that centered on animal disease: the influenza pandemic of 1872, discovery of the causes of anthrax and tuberculosis in the 1880s, conquest of Texas cattle fever and then yellow fever, German anthrax attacks on the United States during World War I, the tuberculin war of 1931, Japanese biological warfare in the 1940s, and today’s bioterror dangers.

Veterinary science in the rural Midwest arose from agriculture, but in urban Philadelphia it came from medicine; similar differences occurred in Canada between Toronto and Montreal. As land-grant colleges were established after the American Civil War, individual states followed divergent pathways in supporting veterinary science. Some employed a trade school curriculum that taught agriculturalists to empirically treat animal diseases and others emphasized a curriculum tied to science. This pattern continued for a century, but today some institutions have moved back to the trade school philosophy. Avoiding lessons of the 1910 Flexner Report on medical education reform, university-associated veterinary schools are being approved that do not have control of their own veterinary hospitals, diagnostic laboratories, and research institutes—components that are critical for training students in science. Underlying this change were twin idiosyncrasies of culture—disbelief in science and distrust of government—that spawned scientology, creationism, anti-vaccination movements, and other anti-science scams.

As new infectious plagues continue to arise, Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues details the strategies we learned defeating plagues from 1860 to 1960—and the essential role veterinary science played. To defeat the plagues of today it is essential we avoid the digital cocoon of disbelief in science and cultural stasis now threatening progress.

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part I. Prologue

1. The Veterinary Schools of Europe

2. Edward Jenner: Zoologist, Physician, Pioneer

3. William Dick: From Farrier to Veterinarian in Edinburgh

4. The Science Giants of 1860: Pasteur, Virchow, and Darwin

5. Robert Koch: Game Change

Part II. Farrier to Veterinarian

6. Emigrants West: Ohio Country, Iowa Territory, and Tejas

7. The Canadian Midwest: Divergence of Lower and Upper Canada

8. Pioneers in the Midwest Frontier: Physicians in Veterinary Practice

9. New Plagues, Civil War, and the United States Department of Agriculture

10. Agriculture and Veterinary Science in the Midwest

Part III. Pioneering Veterinary Education

11. Urban East Versus Rural West: Montreal and New York Diss Toronto and Iowa

12. The Pioneer State Colleges: Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Cornell

13. Plagues and the Bureau of Animal Industry

14. Bacteriology in the Heartland

15. The 1890s: Horse Markets and Enrollments Drop

Part iv. Livestock and Veterinarians Go West

16. Private Veterinary Schools: Chicago, Kansas City, and Indianapolis

17. Public Veterinary Schools: The Second-Generation Pioneers

18. The Bureau of Animal Industry and Hog Cholera

19. Veterinary Education, Charles Stange, and the Flexner Report

20. World War I: Biowarfare, Prejudice, and the U.S. Army
Veterinary Corps

Part v. Ascendance

21. Agricultural Depression Amidst a National Boom: The 1920s

22. 1929: Prelude to Bad Times

23. Public Health and Distrust of Government: The Tuberculin War

24. A Depression Paradox: Culture and Science

25. New Deal: Discoveries in Infectious Disease

Part vi. Duty Required

26. War: The Home Front

27. Veterinary Corps and Bioterror

28. Postwar Investigations of Enemy Biological Warfare

29. Prelude to the Science Revolution

30. The Atomic Age

Part vii. Transformation

31. New Programs, New Laboratories: Malaria, Polio, and New Viruses

32. Comparative Medicine: Models for Leukemia

33. Grassroots Mandates: The National Research Centers for Livestock Diseases

34. Old Plagues in the Wild: The National Wildlife Centers

35. New Plagues: Scrapie, Mad Cow Disease, and the Prion

Part VIII. Epilogue

36. The Farm Crises of 1980–1995: Distrust of Science

37. The Gender Shift

38. Biopolitics

39. Bioterror, Anthrax, and the National Animal Health Networks

40. Anti-Science Scams and Keys to Progress

Appendixes

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Midwest
• Histoire
• State
• Midwestern United States
• United States
• History
• Local

Informations

• Publié par: Purdue University Press
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612497563
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

PIONEER SCIENCE AND THE GREAT PLAGUES
NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE HUMAN-ANIMAL BOND
Series editors: Alan M. Beck and Marguerite E. O Haire, Purdue University
A dynamic relationship has always existed between people and animals. Each influences the psychological and physiological state of the other. This series of scholarly publications, in collaboration with Purdue University s College of Veterinary Medicine, expands our knowledge of the interrelationships between people, animals, and their environment. Manuscripts are welcomed on all aspects of human-animal interaction and welfare, including therapy applications, public policy, and the application of humane ethics in managing our living resources.
Other titles in this series:
The Canine-Campus Connection: Roles for Dogs in the Lives of College Students
Mary Renck Jalongo (Ed.)
Cats and Conservationists: The Debate Over Who Owns the Outdoors
Dara M. Wald and Anna L. Peterson
That Sheep May Safely Graze: Rebuilding Animal Health Care in War-Torn Afghanistan
David M. Sherman
Transforming Trauma: Resilience and Healing Through Our Connections With Animals
Philip Tedeschi and Molly Anne Jenkins (Eds.)
A Reason to Live: HIV and Animal Companions
Vicki Hutton
Animal-Assisted Interventions in Health Care Settings: A Best Practices Manual for Establishing New Programs
Sandra B. Barker, Rebecca A. Vokes, and Randolph T. Barker
Moose! The Reading Dog
Laura Bruneau and Beverly Timmons
Leaders of the Pack: Women and the Future of Veterinary Medicine
Julie Kumble and Donald F. Smith
Exploring the Gray Zone: Case Discussions of Ethical Dilemmas for the Veterinary Technician
Andrea DeSantis Kerr, Robert Pete Bill, Jamie Schoenbeck Walsh, and Christina V. Tran (Eds.)
Pet Politics: The Political and Legal Lives of Cats, Dogs, and Horses in Canada and the United States
Susan Hunter and Richard A. Brisbin, Jr.
Free Market Dogs: The Human-Canine Bond in Post-Communist Poland
Michal Piotr Pr gowski and Justyna Wlodarczyk (Eds.)
PIONEER SCIENCE AND THE GREAT PLAGUES
How Microbes, War, and Public Health Shaped Animal Health
Norman F.
CHEVILLE
Copyright 2021 by Purdue University Press.
Printed in the United States of America.
Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file at the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-61249-656-6 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-61249-642-9 (paperback)
An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is 978-1-61249-702-0.
Cover photo: Veterinary Pathology class, Iowa State College, 1929.
From author s collection.
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
P ART I . P ROLOGUE
1 . The Veterinary Schools of Europe
2 . Edward Jenner: Zoologist, Physician, Pioneer
3 . William Dick: From Farrier to Veterinarian in Edinburgh
4 . The Science Giants of 1860: Pasteur, Virchow, and Darwin
5 . Robert Koch: Game Change
P ART II . F ARRIER TO V ETERINARIAN
6 . Emigrants West: Ohio Country, Iowa Territory, and Tejas
7 . The Canadian Midwest: Divergence of Lower and Upper Canada
8 . Pioneers in the Midwest Frontier: Physicians in Veterinary Practice
9 . New Plagues, Civil War, and the United States Department of Agriculture
10 . Agriculture and Veterinary Science in the Midwest
P ART III . P IONEERING V ETERINARY E DUCATION
11 . Urban East Versus Rural West: Montreal and New York Diss Toronto and Iowa
12 . The Pioneer State Colleges: Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Cornell
13 . Plagues and the Bureau of Animal Industry
14 . Bacteriology in the Heartland
15 . The 1890s: Horse Markets and Enrollments Drop
P ART IV . L IVESTOCK AND V ETERINARIANS G O W EST
16 . Private Veterinary Schools: Chicago, Kansas City, and Indianapolis
17 . Public Veterinary Schools: The Second-Generation Pioneers
18 . The Bureau of Animal Industry and Hog Cholera
19 . Veterinary Education, Charles Stange, and the Flexner Report
20 . World War I: Biowarfare, Prejudice, and the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps
P ART V . A SCENDANCE
21 . Agricultural Depression Amidst a National Boom: The 1920s
22 . 1929: Prelude to Bad Times
23 . Public Health and Distrust of Government: The Tuberculin War
24 . A Depression Paradox: Culture and Science
25 . New Deal: Discoveries in Infectious Disease
P ART VI . D UTY R EQUIRED
26 . War: The Home Front
27 . Veterinary Corps and Bioterror
28 . Postwar Investigations of Enemy Biological Warfare
29 . Prelude to the Science Revolution
30 . The Atomic Age
P ART VII . T RANSFORMATION
31 . New Programs, New Laboratories: Malaria, Polio, and New Viruses
32 . Comparative Medicine: Models for Leukemia
33 . Grassroots Mandates: The National Research Centers for Livestock Diseases
34 . Old Plagues in the Wild: The National Wildlife Centers
35 . New Plagues: Scrapie, Mad Cow Disease, and the Prion
P ART VIII . E PILOGUE
36 . The Farm Crises of 1980-1995: Distrust of Science
37 . The Gender Shift
38 . Biopolitics
39 . Bioterror, Anthrax, and the National Animal Health Networks
40 . Anti-Science Scams and Keys to Progress
Appendixes
Notes
Index
About the Author
PREFACE
A nimal health care in North America evolved from farriers and itinerant cow leeches to science-based veterinary medicine in one century, from 1860 to 1960. This history focuses on the scientists and institutions that pioneered veterinary education and research. It memorializes the events and ideas that propelled science forward and those that blocked progress. An important part of the story is how cycles of discovery were enhanced or retarded by viability of the economy, by demands of war, and by idiosyncrasies of political culture-elements of society that are linked together.
Veterinary science in the rural Midwest arose from agriculture, but in urban Philadelphia it came from medicine; similar differences occurred in Canada between Toronto and Montreal. The Iowa Agricultural College was the first to establish a state-supported school of veterinary medicine in the United States that survived; its first scientists were agriculturalists and its graduates founded colleges and departments of veterinary medicine in the Midwest, Great Plains, Atlantic Seaboard, South, and the Palouse of the Northwest. In contrast, the University of Pennsylvania veterinary school was established as a cooperative venture with the medical school; its first science faculty were physicians who brought home the medical sciences from Europe.
As land grant colleges were established after the American Civil War, individual states followed divergent pathways in supporting veterinary science: one, a trade school curriculum that taught agriculturalists to empirically treat animal diseases; the other, a curriculum tied to science. The relevance of this, a pattern continued for a century, is that today some institutions have moved back to the trade school philosophy. Avoiding lessons of the 1910 Flexner Report on medical education reform, university-associated veterinary schools are being approved that do not have control of their own veterinary hospitals, diagnostic laboratories, and research institutes, components that are critical for training students in science. Underlying this change were twin idiosyncrasies of culture-disbelief in science and distrust of government-that spawned scientology, creationism, anti-vaccination movements, and other anti-science scams. All of these scalawags had destructive impacts on science in general and in veterinary medicine in particular. And there were other bogeymen within science: fraudulent scientists that stole the work of others, dishonest entrepreneurs, and latter-day snake oil salesmen.
The most recent impact on veterinary science has been the ascendance of women. Not permitted to study for the profession in early times, female students exploded after World War II, from near 0 in 1960 to nearly 90 percent of all veterinary school graduates in 2000. Women continue to play an increasing role in scientific research in the great plagues: veterinarian Amy Vincent, a scientist at the National Animal Disease Center, was awarded membership in the National Academy of Medicine in 2020 for her work on surveillance, vaccines, and the pandemic potential of swine influenza models.
THIS BOOK COVERS THE CENTURY when the infectious diseases anthrax, tuberculosis, smallpox, tetanus, plague, and polio were conquered and illuminates the important role that veterinary research played in that battle. The narrative is driven by astonishing events that centered on animal disease: the influenza pandemic of 1872, discovery of the causes of anthrax and tuberculosis in 1880s, the conquest of Texas cattle fever and then yellow fever, the German anthrax attacks on the U.S. during World War I, the tuberculin war of 1931, Japanese biological warfare in the 1940s, and today s bioterror dangers. These events illustrate how progress in biomedical science comes and goes in cycles. From 1860 to 1960, new investigative techniques appeared, shined brightly, and were replaced by technologies that were more advanced. When seminal discoveries were made, each generation of scientists was presented with new opportunities that lasted decades. This is the story of how pioneer veterinary scientists contributed to and capitalized on those discoveries for one century.
Norman Cheville
January 2021
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the many colleagues who have enriched my life as a veterinarian, especially to early collaborators in scientific research at the National Animal Disease Center: Milt Allison, Randall Cutlip, John Kluge, Janice Miller, Vince Meador, Harley Moon, Martin Van Der Maaten, and the more than thirty graduate students and visiting scientists who helped in many ways. Special thanks to the following Iowa St