This symposium aims to explore new ways of thinking about animals within the history of modern medicine. While there is already an extensive literature on the history of using animals to enquire into human health and disease, this suffers from two important weaknesses. Firstly, in focussing on animals in experimental settings, it neglects to consider their use in the non-experimental production of medical knowledge. Secondly, the epistemological status of the animal is rarely problematised. Authors tend to assume rather than demonstrate that in health and disease, animals served as ‘models’ of the human body. Yet closer inspection reveals a multiplicity of animal roles: as disease victims, sources of therapy, transmitters of infection, patients, sources of knowledge about the relationships between species, or tools for identifying the universal laws of life and death

The papers presented here will explore a selection of these and other roles played by animals and their diseases in 19th and 20th century medicine. In line with the conference theme, they ask what ‘work’ animals and their diseases performed. In what ways were expert knowledge, practice, relationships and scientific disciplines constituted around these subjects, and with what implications for the development of modern medical science? Such insights are not simply of historiographical importance; they also offer important historical context to the present-day movement for ‘One Health’, which aims to bring human, animal and environmental health closer together.