When France opened the world’s first veterinary schools in the 1760s the Crown changed its relationship to non-human animals and reconfigured a new set of social and scientific categories for livestock. The principle innovation of veterinary medicine was not the act of healing animals – a project arguably as old as domestication – but rather the production and regulation of medical professionals who could act as intermediaries between individual estates and the state. European rural economy guides published throughout the long eighteenth century focused on the farmscape’s diverse inhabitants – horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, dogs, cats, chickens, geese, and falcons. These animals were situated in a vast landscape of external threat, including miasmas, wolves, and snakes. The attention to national interests that directed veterinary practice, however, newly divided the kingdom’s animal population into those that merited systematized and regulated medical attention and those that did not. Veterinarians segmented their focus upon those animals associated with the national economy – horses, cattle, and sheep. While veterinarians reordered the value of life within the estate, they also grew increasingly concerned with multispecies corporeal interactions, especially those of bodily mites and “parasites”. I argue that the re-grouping of “healable-animals” was accompanied by new views about threat that focused on the bodily integrity of the individual animal patient. A part of moving veterinarians into the individual estates was reflected in further individualization of individual animal bodies themselves, even as their “healability” hinged on their placement in a particular economic category.
