Writing

On the humanities

“Thinking with Consent in the Digital Classroom,” Hybrid Pedagogy, 25 March 2021, with Molly de Blanc

On history

Abstract. This article presents a case study on how urban-rural divides influenced the introduction of standardized and institutionalized veterinary education in France in the late eighteenth century, illuminating some continuities and discontinuities between the Old Regime and the Republic. Under Louis XV in the 1760s, France became the first European kingdom to formalise veterinary education and opened the world’s first veterinary school to extend expert medical knowledge to economically essential livestock. That first school was situated in a suburb of Lyon. After it opened, regional administrators across France petitioned for more rural schools, but the primary advocate for the importance of veterinary education wanted the school moved into the urban center of Paris and argued against opening schools in any rural settings. Instead of moving the suburban Lyon school inside Paris, a second school was opened in Alfort, a nearby hamlet. They called it the École royal vétérinaire de Paris, and still exists today in situ under the name École nationale vétérinaire d’Alfort. Veterinary educators, advocates, and students appealed to the different resources in urban and rural environments when deciding the future of animal health and medicine, but, even where access to farmlands could have been of great pedagogical benefit, the intellectual and cultural capital of urban settings was seen as essential to the future of statecraft. Though some regional administrators did open their own schools in the countryside, none lasted more than a few years.

Abstract. In the late eighteenth century, the Ecole vétérinaire d’Alfort was renowned for its innovative veterinary education and for having one of the largest natural history and anatomy collections in France. Yet aside from a recent interest in the works of one particular anatomist, the school’s history has been mostly ignored. I examine here the fame of the school in eighteenth-century travel literature, the historic connection between veterinary science and natural history, and the relationship between the school’s hospital and its esteemed cabinet. Using the correspondence papers of veterinary administrators, state representatives and competing scientific institutions during the French Revolution, I argue that resource con- straints and the management of anatomical and natural history specimens produced new disciplinary boundaries between natural history, veterinary medicine and human medicine, while reinforcing geographic divisions between the local and the foreign in the study of non- human animals. This paper reconstructs the Ancien Régime reasoning that veterinary students would benefit from a global perspective on animality, and the Revolutionary government’s rejection of that premise. Under republicanism, veterinary medicine became domestic.

“European Natural History Traditions,” Oxford Bibliographies, “Ecology” with Harriet Ritvo

Book Reviews

Henrietta McBurney, Ian Rolfe, Caterina Napoleone, and Paula Findlen (eds.). The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo. Series B, Parts IV-V: Natural History: Birds, Other Animals and Natural Curiosities (Harvey Miller Brepols: 2017), 2 vols. For Nuncius (2018) 33.1, pp. 151-154.

Bruno Colson (ed.). Napoleon: On War (Oxford University Press, 2015). For Revista Universitaria de Historia Militar (2018) 7.14, pp. 265-268.

Kathleen Hardesty Doig. From ‘Encyclopédie’ to ‘Encyclopédique méthodique’: Revision & Expansion (Voltaire Foundation: 2013). For The British Journal for the History of Science (2015) 48.3, pp. 513-514.

Translations

Sample entries from Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie

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