The Bovine Scourge: Meat, Tuberculosis and Public Health, 1850–1914

Extract

Waddington provides a useful addition to the steadily expanding literature dealing with food quality and the official reactions to perceived problems in the nineteenth century. It is neatly integrated into various literatures, notably those on public health, medicine, professionalisation (principally in relation to veterinary science) and food regulation. This is, inevitably, a difficult balancing act in terms of the degrees of detail required to inform the reader, to explore different themes and to make appropriate connections. Overall, the pitfalls are addressed effectively and Waddington's study complements and develops the work of Anne Hardy in these areas. The book should be of interest to historians of medicine, especially for its illumination of the debates over diseases in animals and humans and of some of the professional rivalries within the public health sphere.

The approach is essentially chronological, examining the mid-nineteenth-century concerns about bovine tuberculosis and ending around 1914 with the debates over meat, milk and tuberculosis. The various issues are explored through local and national government papers, the many official reports and investigations into tuberculosis, and numerous trade and professional journals. Waddington highlights a familiar pattern of concerns aired primarily by social reformers including doctors and veterinarians, and of the countervailing forces of inertia and higher priorities, which constrained effective regulatory action. Bovine tuberculosis was recognised as a major problem from the 1860s but the condition was the subject of a sustained scientific controversy and of uncertainties about the implications and extent of bovine tuberculosis. These uncertainties included whether tuberculosis was a zoonosis, how it might best be identified in cattle, and whether evidence of bovine tuberculosis required removal only of diseased tissue or disposal of the entire carcass. Each theme allowed a good deal of scope for disagreements among scientists, medical professionals, commercial interests and magistrates, especially given the local administration of inspection regimes. The retail level, that is the local butchers' shops, appears to have attracted more attention from public health officials than did farmers. But the practical challenges of effective inspection were compounded by the low status of meat inspectors. As with other local health officials, meat inspectors endeavoured to develop and assert their professional credentials and believed that commercial influence, often directly exerted via elected officials, impeded their efforts.