Zoonosis Before Bacteriology

The project will investigate for the first time how zoonosis (the transmission of diseases from animals to humans) emerged as a scientific and governmental problem between 1770 and 1870 at the crossroads of medicine, pathology, physiology, epidemiology, veterinary medicine and public health. Rather than reading this historical process from the teleological lens of the eventual bacteriological illumination of zoonosis, the project will explore how, as a novel question for science, state and empire, posed at a key junction in their formation, zoonosis played a catalytic role in transforming modern medicine, multispecies relations, governance and their inter-relation. Examining how different diseases (glanders, rabies, anthrax, trichinosis) became scientifically understood and governed as zoonoses, the project will ask: 1) What forms of scientific knowledge were involved in and became fostered by the development of zoonosis as a new disease category?; 2) How did the new category of zoonotic diseases bring together the governance of animals and humans in different contexts of its application? Project researchers will explore the ways in which zoonosis transformed understandings of contagion, reconfigured multispecies relations, and led to new medical approaches to space. The project will examine the connected histories of scientific framings of zoonosis in 1770-1870 Europe, and the ways in which these became entangled with colonial and decolonial projects in Algeria (glanders), Argentina (rabies), and Saint-Domingue (anthrax), and, in the case of trichinosis, led to the emergence of the first zoonotic surveillance system (Duchy of Brunswick). The project will foster a new historical understanding of the formation and development the question of zoonosis as an epistemic and biopolitical catalyst, delivering a new framework for examining modern medicine, governance, multispecies relations and their interrelation at a crucial period of their development.