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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

veterinary medicine, horse body, equine medicine, veterinary science

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

History

Abstract

It is not an overstatement to claim that the work Dr. Michael MacKay and I were able to conduct through the benevolence of the ORCA programme represents the cutting of history of medicine research. We have engaged a field that is strikingly underdeveloped, yet extremely relevant to early modern history. Within the last five years the World Association for the History of Veterinary Medicine has fostered new interests in veterinary history throughout this world. Our scholarship questions current interpretations of the emergence of veterinary science and demonstrates that through the creation of organized horse hospitals systematized veterinary medicine developed almost a century earlier than historians have previously claimed. The evidentiary basis upon which we have made these claims is quite robust, but it was determined at the outset of our research that a more thorough study of archival records from the eighteenth century was required in order to assert our findings conclusively. Over the course of the year our focus shifted from the development of horse hospitals in general in eighteenth century England to the work of Andrew Snape, whom Dr. MacKay and I have conclusively shown to be the founder of systematic equine medicine in England. Our research has clearly shown that Andrew Snape leveraged changing perceptions about the value of equine flesh into a new discipline of medical study, veterinary medicine – a discipline that heretofore has been misidentified by historians of medicine as arising in the nineteenth century.

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