This chapter addresses a topic – health – that has come to light in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Bringing together animal studies and the medical humanities, the chapter examines key texts from Leo Africanus, William Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, and others to trace close historical and discursive relationships between human and animal health. Focusing largely on diseases thought to be what we would now call zoonotic, or transferable from nonhuman animals to humans, the chapter seeks to make apparent the significance of cross-species infections that, before antibiotics and most vaccines, helped shape literature, trade, health, and imperial order. Although rabies provided the most recognizable model of cross-species infection, the chapter begins with locust swarms, which offered many Christian writers a model for articulating global connections between pests and pestilence, then turns to shipboard rats, which, even before germ theory, were thought by many early moderns to function as harbingers of death and disease. Having demonstrated how deeply cross-species contagion was entangled with theological definitions about what it is be human, the chapter ends by exploring a little known topic – early modern and eighteenth-century cattle plague – and its implications for reimagining a multispecies medical posthumanities.

Globalization is not new. From the time of ancient migrations, human activities increasingly shaped the ecologies of health and disease around the world. When the peoples of the Western and Eastern Hemispheres encountered each other, the invading Europeans brought their domesticated animals, plants, and diseases with them. These demographic and ecological transformations ushered in a new era for animal healing and veterinary medicine. How were animal diseases circulating around the world due to exploration, colonialism, war, and trade? What was the impact of these diseases on human health and well-being, and on the projects of colonialism and state formation? The impacts of large-scale animal epidemics and pandemics enabled by the ecological exchanges of animals, parasites, and pathogens are analyzed. Further, this chapter highlights the development of physiology, pathology, and new disease causation models, while investigating how medical concepts, popular beliefs, and therapies were used in animal health care.

The numbers of pets, availability of goods and services for them, and the veterinary profession’s attention to companion animal medicine are increasing (especially in Asia and Latin America). The concept of "anthropomorphism" (attributing human characteristics to animals) contributes to the idea that family pets are worthy of expensive care. Animal welfare activism expanded in Western societies and became politicized in Europe. These changes led to reductions in the use of laboratory animals and veterinarians’ increased attention to animal suffering. While traditional healing systems are often combined with Western veterinary medicine around the world, in some places the standard of animal care was based on that of human hospitals. Veterinarians adopted new technologies, including CT and MRI scanning and genetic testing. Personal computers, the internet, and mobile phones have revolutionized veterinary practice in some areas; this required veterinarians to learn new skills. In 2011–2012, veterinarians celebrated the World Veterinary Year, (250th anniversary of the first European veterinary school) and the eradication of rinderpest from the world (a triumph for veterinary international cooperation). Veterinarians have been major drivers of "One Health," the most recent effort to combine all aspects of health care for animals, the environment, and humans to address ecosystem destruction and prevent disease outbreaks.

In the early 1800s, animal owners and local healers provided most veterinary care, and indigenous healing methods thrived around the world. Colonialism, global trade networks, and other circulations of animals led to disease outbreaks (epizootics). Rinderpest, imported by Europeans, destroyed about 90 percent of all wild and domesticated bovines in sub-Saharan Africa, causing devastating famines. European-model veterinary schools continued to spread around the world. Their graduates worked to reduce competition by developing laws and regulations that forbade non-graduates from practicing animal healing. Veterinary leaders envisioned "scientific" veterinary medicine, using microscopes and other tools. By working to establish microbiology, comparative pathology, and "one medicine," veterinarians were important co-creators of modern medicine and public health as we know them today. Ideas about disease causation included the roles of the environment and insects in spreading disease; the contagium vivum; parasitism; toxins; and several germ theories. Some veterinarians treated companion (pet) animals, whose owners valued them for emotional reasons. Associations for the humane treatment of dogs and other animals were established. Pet owners increasingly expected scientifically trained veterinarians to provide the same services for pets that their owner could expect at a hospital for humans.

The Netherlands emerged from the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) a weakened state, and anxieties about the decline of Republic expanded as a result. That same year, an outbreak of cattle plague emerged in the Republic. Originating in the eastern European steppes, this panzootic spread slowly across Europe following networks of war and trade. Centuries of landscape transformation in the Netherlands set the stage for this disaster, and weather associated with a changing climate conditioned its severity. The disease killed hundreds of thousands of cattle in the Republic, impacting Dutch urban and rural livelihoods. Between 1713 and 1720, state authorities, moralists, and farmers struggled to understand and manage the disease. This chapter investigates the social and environmental origins of cattle plague, as well as cultural and state response. State authorities based their strategies in environmentalist and contagionist theories of diseases transmission that varied across scale. Its impacts were far from uniform, but moralists framed cattle plague as a problem that affected the entire country, which reinforced narratives of Dutch decline. This chapter argues that causal stories explaining the origins and meaning of the disease both reinforced pessimistic decline narratives and prompted a universalist approach to medical responses.

The return of rinderpest to the Netherlands in 1744 was the nadir of the eighteenth-century era of disaster. Hardly a generation removed from the first outbreak, cattle plague returned to the Republic with far greater intensity. It lasted over twice as long and resulted in over a million cattle deaths. Chapter 6 compares the second outbreak of cattle plague to the first, assessing changing response. Like the first outbreak, cattle plague emerged in the context of conflict and extreme weather. Unlike the previous episode, it interacted with an ongoing disaster cascade that amplified and prolonged its consequences. Popular and state response showed remarkable continuity. Rinderpest was not novel, and prior experience proved beneficial as provinces tapped the cultural memory of the previous outbreak. Provincial decrees quickly reinstituted bans on cattle importation, enacted quarantines, and issued certificates of health. Pamphlet literature again highlighted the human tragedy of the animal disease and bemoaned its moral implications. The extensive scope and duration of this outbreak attracted new attention from an international network of medical practitioners. Its increased severity prompted novel medical responses, including the first inoculation trials. These trials reveal the diffusion of declensionist fears into the economic and social program of the Dutch Enlightenment.