This paper uses the surviving records of Pathological Societies to develop a new perspective on the place and purpose of animals within 19th century British medicine. Existing literature on this topic tends to privilege the late 19th century experimental sciences of physiology and bacteriology, and to assume that animals were used primarily as models of the human body. Predating these developments, I will reveal the importance of animals to doctors’ non-experimental enquiries into disease, and the multiple ways in which their pathology was interpreted.

At a time when pathology barely existed as a distinct, institutionalised profession, the pathological societies played a key role in its development by offering regular opportunities for health professionals to present and discuss specimens. A proportion of these specimens were animals. Drawn from a range of species and derived from multiple sources, their exhibition reveals that in a world with strong traditions of natural history, where doctors lived, worked and played amongst animals, interest in their diseases was viewed as a legitimate pursuit.

From their descriptions of these specimens, I will show that doctors conceptualised animal pathology in several different ways: sometimes it was viewed as identical to human pathology; in other cases, analogies were drawn. Animal disease could also be a source of human infectious disease, or the basis for comparisons across species. Its study not only reveals the proximity of human and animal, but also the development of working relationships between vets and doctors, which throw into question historians’ claims of a hostile or non-existent relationship between the professions.