Abstract
Those who remember the fearsome Dr. Leon Saunders from pathology meetings may also know him as an acerbic veterinary historian with a jaundiced view of the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI; 1884–1953). The BAI was the forerunner of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. Dr. Saunders’s disgust with the BAI came across strongly in his Biographical History of Veterinary Pathology, determined in part by the small role pathologists were allowed to play in the bureau’s early history.
The book under review redresses that balance, at least for this pathologist. Arresting Contagion is a North American text written by 2 university-based economists. Its goal is to show how science, policy, and politics interacted as the BAI struggled to establish effective controls for infectious diseases in food animals in the United States. In current parlance, the BAI tried to balance conflicts among various stakeholders: animal producers, the medical profession, the packing industry, European importers of U.S. agricultural products, the public, and butchers (the ultimate stakeholders).
The text focuses on 5 major diseases: bovine babesiosis (Texas or Spanish fever), bovine tuberculosis, classical swine fever (hog cholera), trichinosis, and foot-and-mouth disease. Much of it is forgotten history. One chapter is devoted to the struggle to establish a federal meat inspection service before and after publication in 1906 of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Separate chapters address how the BAI came into being, the necessary tension between federal regulators and industry then and now, and the management of newly emerging diseases today. The early days of the BIA are told through its successful effort to control contagious bovine pleuropneumonia, which was eradicated from the United States in 1892. This was done in spite of the absence of laboratory tests, constraints on BAI’s regulatory authority, and the occurrence of contagious bovine pleuropneumonia in Chicago’s distillery stock yards and packinghouses (“the Chicago mess”).
There is a tendency for books on disease control to convey a notion of relentless progress, culminating in success. This text is more nuanced. Perhaps because the writers are economists and not veterinarians, the distasteful business of how disease-control legislation is piloted through congress and then implemented is related unvarnished. Setbacks and compromises are an important part of rule-making, as are misunderstandings about how specific agents were thought to be transmitted, and the unpredictable role of the courts. It would have been easy to depict Daniel Salmon, who helped create the BAI and then led it for 2 decades, as a perfect visionary. Instead Salmon is shown chiaroscuro. On one hand, he was an early promoter of the germ theory and of the importance of zoonoses, and a gifted judge of young researchers. On the other, Salmon triumphantly, prematurely, and mistakenly identified Salmonella cholerasuis (“bacterium suis”) as the cause of classical swine fever. The authors note the good grace that Salmon showed by promptly recognizing the conclusions of BIA chemists de Schweinitz and Dorset that classical swine fever was due to a virus that passed through ceramic filters obtained from Pasteur’s laboratory. Salmon had the good fortune to have at his side James Law, an Edinburgh graduate who headed the Cornell veterinary program. Law was given to straight talk when it came to dealing with the hard men who controlled the livestock industry. In his 1902 multivolume clinical medicine text, Law put on paper the components of an area eradication program. It reads well today, 100 years later.
The book has several themes. One was the importance of establishing an effective federal framework to respond to epizootics and poor practices in the meat industry. Others are the role of denialism, often by industry, in public debates, and the struggle between individuals predisposed to a philosophy of public interest versus that of public choice. The latter is the view of the influential Chicago school, which assumes that the market self corrects, with minimal need for regulatory oversight. One of the strongest of many good chapters is The Benevolence of the Butcher, detailing the fight to reform the Chicago meatpacking industry. Before the United States had an effective federal meat inspection act (1906), carcass condemnation rates by the city’s weak inspectorate was 0.025%. Even then, some carcasses were later fished out of the rendering tanks, butchered, and sold to the public.
Regardless of diagnostic discipline, you should find something of value in this detailed, thorough, and balanced text. It could have done with a few more illustrations of the players, but this is compensated for by multiple graphs, maps, and tables. The amount of background research that was done by the authors is remarkable. It would be an excellent foundation for a course on the history of veterinary infectious diseases. As any state veterinarian will tell you, efforts to persuade people to do what is in their own interest are not always greeted with tears of gratitude. Even Dr. Saunders might acknowledge: here is a pertinent work of scholarship indeed.