© 2004 by Society for the Social History of Medicine
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The Construction of an Animal Plague: Foot and Mouth Disease in Nineteenth-century Britain
1 Research Associate, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Centre for the History Science, Technology, and Medicine, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UKE-mail: Abigail.woods{at}man.ac.uk
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 late-Victorian 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.
Keywords: foot and mouth disease; cattle plague; legislative disease control; imported disease; contagion; agriculture; meat and livestock trade; veterinary; controversies