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A cabinet of the ordinary: domesticating veterinary education, 1766–1799
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 April 2018
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 constraints 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.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2018
Footnotes
I would like to thank the members of the Singer Prize selection committee and BJHS reviewers and staff for their helpful feedback in developing the article. This paper has benefited from thoughtful comments from my adviser, Janet Browne, and conference participants at the History of Education Society (2015) and the Göttingen Summer School organized by Dominik Hünniger (2016). Dani Inkpen, Yvan Prkachin, Avi Kelman and Carol De Rose have proven to be especially generous and rigorous readers. I am indebted to Lucas Mueller and Jolien de Vuyst for discussions about the nuances of German and Dutch. Research for this project was supported by SSHRC (Canada) and Chateaubriand (France).
This essay was awarded the Singer Prize by the British Society for the History of Science for 2016.
References
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32 The name Le Moyne appears on dozens of receipts in the school's financial records for meat for the kitchen. Occasionally he also features in the ‘objet divers’ section with explicit reference to dissection and the cabinet. For specific examples see ‘Chapitre de divers objets du mois d'avril 1770’ and ‘Chapitre de divers objets du mois de janvier 1770’, in F/10/1260, cross-referenced against individual receipts located in the same files, AN F/10/1258–1261.
33 On Alfort's predatory relationship with the Ecole royale vétérinaire de Lyon see Arloing, M.S., Le berceau de l'enseignement vétérinaire: Création et évolution de l'Ecole nationale vétérinaire de Lyon, 1761–1889, Lyon: Imprimerie Pitrat ainé, 1889Google Scholar.
34 The former guard to the Polish king and sous-equestrian to the Royal Academy of Nancy, Jean Léonard Larché, advertised that he would be opening a horse hospital in a northern Paris suburb, Villette, in 1763, and by 1767 he had advertised that it had opened, but it seems to have left little mark. See ‘Avis donné au publique par M. Larché’, Gazette du commerce de l'agriculture et des finances (12 May 1767) 38, p. 371Google Scholar. ‘De la gourme des chevaux’, Journal oeconomique, ou memoires, notes et avis (1763), pp. 311–312.
35 There is an undated advertisement for a veterinary hospital created by the intendant in Saint-Emilion, Saint-Sulpice, quite possibly in response to a devastating epizootic outbreak in the provinces of Guyenne and Gascony in the 1770s. See also s.d., ‘Avis sur la maladies des bestiaux’, Archives départementales de la Haute-Vienne, C24. Passing references to a hospital in that region occur in Archives départementales de la Gironde, C3300.
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39 ‘Observations sur les changemens qu'il a paru convenable d'apporter au Règlement de 1780’, dossier 63, AN F/10/1200.
40 Medical registers, 1767–1771: ADVM 1ETP 400, 401. Financial registers, 1788–1790: AN F/10/96, 97. Though these are asymmetrical sources, both provide a great deal of comparable knowledge about entry duration and mortality.
41 All comments on the hospital from this period of time come from having reconstructed their hospital records out of two separate manuscript registers of 583 and 663 pages respectively. ADVM 1ETP 400 & 401.
42 Not all horses staying approximately a year or longer needed constant medical attention, and some were moved out to the fields to graze as a part of their convalescence. Fols. 141–144, ADVM 1ETP 401; fols. 301–308, 597–601, ADVM, 1ETP 400.
43 There are at least two cases in the register that would indicate that cheval, though linguistically gendered masculine, did not always denote a male horse, including one case of pregnancy. Fol. 345, ADVM 1ETP 401. It appears as though sex-specific notation stopped being prioritized in the records after 1769, where the first two-thirds of the records contain 90 percent of the female notations. See also Dubois, Jean, ‘Le genre dans les noms d'animaux’, Linx (1989) 21, pp. 87–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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55 Pierre Flandrin, ‘Description Pathologique et anatomique d'un sarcocèle monstrueux dans un cheval’, Journal de médecine, chirurgie, pharmacie, &c., April 1789, pp. 71–89.
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63 Railliet and Moulé, op. cit. (10), p. 42.
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66 Félix Vicq d'Azyr and Honoré Fragonard, ‘Rapport: Cabinet d'Anatomie de l'Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire d'Alfort’, 5 prairial an II, AN F/17/1237.
67 Chaussart, op. cit. (54); Le point du jour, 17 August 1790, pp. 129–134; Philippe-Etienne Lafosse, Mémoire sur l'Ecole royale vétérinaire d'Alfort: Raisons de l'inutilité de cet etablissement, & moyens de le remplacer avec beaucoup d’économie pour l'Etat, 1789; Journal des décrets de l'Assemblée Nationale, pour les habitans des campagnes, 15 August 1790, pp. 23–24; Journal des Etats généraux, convoqués par Louis XVI, le 27 avril 1789, vol. 14, pp. 466–467Google Scholar; de Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Bernardin, Mémoire sur la nécessité de joindre une ménagerie au jardin des plantes de Paris, Paris, 1792Google Scholar.
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70 For example, in June 1746, the room where the Académie des sciences held its meetings was appraised to hold almost eighty cabinets with rotting wood turning to worm food. The natural history specimens, mostly stones and minerals, were to be subsumed under the Cabinet d'histoire naturelle de sa majesté, to be properly cared for and studied. Buffon, ‘Etat des Cabinets et Tables’, 25 April 1748, Item 492, AN AJ/15/512.
71 Chabert to Commission d'Agriculture, 6 brumaire an III, AN F/10/238.
72 On the importance of esprit de vin see Baumé, op. cit. (2), pp. 325–327; Cullen, Louis M., The Brandy Trade under the Ancien Régime: Regional Specialisation in the Charente, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 257–259Google Scholar; Spary, Emma C., Eating Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670–1760, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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75 Augustin Thouret to Commission d'instruction publique, 27 floréal an III, AN F/17/2280; Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Antoine Laurent de Jussieu (Muséum nationale d'histoire naturelle) to Commission d'agriculture, 15 fructidor an III, AN F/10/238.
76 Nota, 8 pluviôse an III, AN F/17/2281. Dossier ‘Animaux du Raincy 1794’ and ‘Notes relatives a l’établissement d'une menagerie’ AN AJ/15/844. The Commission temporaire's meeting descriptions contain repeated reference to the museum's acquisition of specimens, base materials, books and living creatures from individuals’ homes and larger collections. In Procès-verbaux, op. cit. (64).
77 Lamarck and Jussieu, op. cit. (75). On the significance of familial metaphors in the French Revolution see Hunt, Lynn, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, Oxon: Routledge, 1992Google Scholar; Desan, Suzanne, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004Google Scholar; Heuer, Jennifer Ngaire, The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789–1830, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005Google Scholar.
78 Lamarck and Jussieu, op. cit. (75).
79 Bourgelat, op. cit. (3).
80 Bourgelat, op. cit. (50), p. 284.
81 [Philibert] Chabert, Traité de la gale et des dartres des animaux, Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1787, p. 13Google Scholar; Chabert, ‘Extrait d'un mémoire sur la morve, inseré dans le volume de la Société royale de médecine, pour l'année 1779’, Observations et memoires sur la physique, sur l'histoire naturelle et sur les arts (1783) 23, pp. 208–217, 208Google Scholar.
82 The only reference that I have located describing the space as a veterinary cabinet is Sanders's travelogue, op. cit. (16). All other sources move between ‘anatomy’ and ‘natural history’.
83 Gustaf Lenboms's lecture notes (c.1763), D 1356b, fol. 502, Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek.
84 The shift by which multiple administrators come to describe Alfort's cabinet through the qualifier of ‘natural history’ hit its peak in 1796, when the museum was finally in the process of acquiring the objects to which they'd held claim for more than a year. See Ministère de l’intérieur to Ministère de la guerre, 21 pluviose an IV; Milet-Mureau to Ministère de l’intérieur, 3 ventôse an IV; Chabert to Ministère de l’intérieur, 2 germinal an IV; Petiet to Ministère de l’intérieur, 27 germinal an IV; Petiet to Ministère de l’intérieur, 13 floréal an IV; Ministère de l’intérieur to Dubois, 15 floréal an IV; Ministère de l’intérieur to Ministère de la guerre, 19 floréal an IV; Ministère de l’intérieur to Chabert, 3 prairial an IV. From AN F/10/1203.
85 Responding to Richard Burkhardt, Jessica Riskin has argued that this systematic approach was conflated with the charlatanism of empiricism in the Ancien Régime. She argues that the ‘spirit of system’ was an epithet under the monarchial government. Burkhardt, Richard W., The Spirit of the System: Lamarck and Evolutionary Biology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Riskin, Jessica, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
86 Augustin Thouret to Pleichard, 10 prairial an III, AN F/17/2281; Extrait du Registre des délibérations de la Commission temporaire des arts, 25 Germinal an III, fol. 36, Carton 123, AN AF/II/17.
87 [Hilaire-François] Gilbert and [Jean-Baptiste] Huzard, ‘Rapport fait au Comité d’Agriculture et des Arts de la Convention Nationale, le 28 Nivose an III’, in [Philibert] Chabert, [Pierre] Flandrin and [Jean-Baptiste] Huzard, Instructions et observations sur les maladies des animaux domestiques, Paris: Librairie vétérinaire de M.R. Huzard, 1795, pp. 7–65, 21Google Scholar. Reprinted in full in Instructions et observations sur les maladies des animaux domestiques, 2nd edn., vol. 6, Paris, 1806, pp. 21–22Google Scholar. The veracity of such a claim seems extremely unlikely. The school's competitive exams did come under attack during the French Revolution, but having read dozens of exam descriptions for both Lyon and Alfort, I have found no evidence to suggest that detailed anatomical descriptions of foreign species were a deciding factor in certification.
88 Dufot, ‘Lettre’, in Journal de médecine, chirurgie, pharmacie, &c., November 1767, pp. 507–511, 509, reprinted in Mercure de France, January 1769, p. 157. Diderot, Denis, ‘Supplément du voyage de Bougainville, ou dialogue entre A et B’, in Oeuvres complètes de Diderot, vol. 2, Paris: Garner frères, 1875, pp. 193–250, 236–237Google Scholar.
89 Jean-Baptiste-Jacques Thillaye to Commissaires pour l'organisation de l'Ecole de santé, 26 ventôse an III, AN F/17/2811.
90 Commission d'agriculture to Commission temporaire, 28 ventôse an III, AN F/10/238.
91 Philibert Chabert to Muséum nationale d'histoire naturelle, 26 messidor an II, transcribed in Lamarck and Jussieu, op. cit. (75).
92 Commission d'agriculture to Muséum nationale d'histoire naturelle, 5 jour complémentaire an III, AN F/10/238.
93 Jussieu and Geoffrey to Ministère de l’intérieur, 6 ventôse an IV, AN F/10/1203.
94 Borschberg, Peter, ‘The Euro-Asian trade in bezoar stones (approx. 1500 to 1700)’, in North, Michael (ed.), Artistic and Cultural Exchanges between Europe and Asia, 1400–1900: Rethinking Markets, Workshops and Collections, Burlington: Ashgate, 2010, pp. 29–4Google Scholar; Chabert, Flandrin and Huzard, Instructions et observations, op. cit. (87), pp. 79–98; ‘Egagropiles’, in Encyclopédie méthodique: Agriculture, vol. 4, Paris: H. Agasse, 1796, pp. 161–166Google Scholar; Sigaut, François, ‘Combattre les préjugés sur l'empoisonnement du bétail à la fin du XVIIIe siècle’, Histoire & sociétés rurales (2003) 19, pp. 241–251CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
95 Gilbert and Huzard, op. cit. (87), p. 32.
96 Gilbert and Huzard, op. cit. (87), p. 33.
97 van der Willigen, Adriaan, Parijs in den Aanvang van de Negentiende Eeuw, 3 vols., Haarlem: A. Loosjes, 1814, vol. 3, pp. 129–130Google Scholar.
98 de Neufchâteau, François, ‘Discours prononcé par le Ministre de l'Intérieur à l'Ecole vétérinaire d'Alfort, le 10 Germinal an 7’, in Recueil des lettres circulaires, instructions, programmes, discours, et autres actes publics, 20 vols., Paris: Imprimerie de la république, an VII, vol. 2, pp. 312–317Google Scholar.
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