The Construction of an Animal Plague: Foot and Mouth Disease in Nineteenth-century Britain
The Construction of an Animal Plague: Foot and Mouth Disease in Nineteenth-century Britain
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动物瘟疫的构建：十九世纪英国的口蹄疫
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发表时间：
2004
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通讯作者：
A. Woods
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作者：
A. Woods
摘要目前，英国农业官员、兽医和畜牧业者都认为口蹄疫是世界上最严重的动物瘟疫之一，这种疾病具有高度传染性，成本极高，只有通过广泛而严格的立法措施才能控制。然而，在1839年首次出现之后的许多年里，评论家们将口蹄疫视为一种温和且无法预防的疾病，并且在1865 - 7年牛瘟流行之后引入和扩大立法控制证明是非常有争议的。直到19世纪80年代和90年代，口蹄疫才被普遍认为是一种毁灭性的疾病;在这一时期，目前的监管框架开始形成。在这篇文章中，我探讨了19世纪末口蹄疫从私人的，无法控制的滋扰到国家管理的动物瘟疫的转变。我认为，与流行的看法相反，这种疾病的危险性并不是不言而喻的，立法也不是一个明显的反应。相反，维多利亚时代晚期英国不断变化的经济、政治、科学和农业环境，以及早期疾病控制立法的广泛影响，重建了公众对口蹄疫的性质、临床效应、起源和传播的理解，从而产生了对更广泛的国家主导法规的支持。
SUMMARY. British agricultural officials, veterinarians, and livestock owners currently regard foot and mouth disease (FMD) as one of the world’s worst animal plagues, a highly contagious and extremely costly disease that is only amenable to control by wide-ranging and stringent legislative measures. However, for many years after its first appearance in 1839, commentators dismissed FMD as a mild and unpreventable ailment, and the introduction and extension of legislative controls in the wake of the 1865‐7 cattle plague epidemic proved highly controversial. FMD was not generally viewed as a devastating disease until the 1880s and 1890s; a period in which the current regulatory framework came into being. In this article, I explore the late nineteenth-century transformation of FMD from private, uncontrollable nuisance to state-managed animal plague. I argue that, contrary to popular belief, the dangerous nature of the disease was not self-evident, nor was legislation an obvious response. Rather, the changing economic, political, scientific, and agricultural context of lateVictorian Britain and the wide-ranging impact of early legislative disease controls served to reconstruct popular understandings of the nature, clinical effect, origin, and spread of FMD, and thereby generated support for more extensive state-led regulations.