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.

In investigating how particular organisms became standard objects of scientific study, historians have tended to focus on the role of particular research communities (Kohler 1994) or institutions (Rader 2004) in these processes. More difficult to conceptualize are the forces shaping scientific organisms that extend beyond these units of analysis. This paper will examine the “reproducibility crisis”—a recent phenomenon where scientists across fields have found findings to be difficult to replicate on subsequent analysis—and how this crisis intersects with the evolving life courses of experimental organisms. Specifically, the paper will focus on attempts to standardize mouse housing and testing conditions, such as recommendations to harmonize variables such as the temperature in mouse housing rooms. Over the last ten years, numerous institutions have begun advocating for increased standardization in animal research in the name of enhanced reproducibility, including major funders (eg. the National Institutes of Health), major journals (eg. Science magazine), and professional organizations (eg. the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research). The impact of these initiatives extends far beyond the boundaries of any particular research community, however defined. This paper will argue that analysis at the level of the institution or the community fails to adequately characterize the reproducibility crisis, which derives its ability to shape scientific organism and practices from the alignment of multiple institutions, much as a magnet derives its strength from aligning the polarity of individual atoms.

In 1960, veterinarians discovered an unknown toxic substance in poultry feed to have caused the death of hundreds of thousands of British turkeys. Veterinarians collaborated with nutrition scientists, chemists, toxicologists, and mycologists to identify what became known as aflatoxin, a carcinogenic poison produced by Aspergillus molds. Soon, researchers in India, Africa, and elsewhere reported finding aflatoxin and other mycotoxins in peanuts, corn, and other crops. Many of them were important foodstuff, fodder, and export commodities for the new postcolonial nations. As aflatoxin became a global problem, because it arose in many different areas and affected major internationally traded commodities, the substance also emerged as a scientific object that would drive interdisciplinary and transnational collaborations for the next sixty years. The researchers investigated aflatoxin’s effects on human and animal health as well as which relations of crop, mold, environment, and humans’ agricultural practices resulted in the formation of mycotoxins. This paper argues that multispecies relations, Cold War and postcolonial geopolitics, and global trade influenced which regions and disciplines were involved in the collaborations that shaped the knowledge about aflatoxin. Focusing on the 1960s, this paper shows how concerns over the production and supply of animal- and plant-based protein-rich food to populations in postwar Great Britain and the newly independent nations in Asia and Africa shaped scientists’ interdisciplinary collaborations across Great Britain, India, and the United States.

The common names of insects in use in Europe from the late Middle Ages through the middle of the eighteenth century did a poor job of capturing their immense diversity. While folk names for culturally relevant plants and vertebrates generally name a Linnaean genus, many insect folk names designate a family (such as “ant”) or even an order (“beetle,” “roach”). Hence, the artists, naturalists, and collectors who turned their attention to insects beginning in the sixteenth century faced a problem: how to designate their objects of study and description. The artists Maria Sibylla Merian, Johannes Goedaert, August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof, and Moses Harris, and the naturalists Francis Willughby, John Ray, Johann Leonhard Frisch, and René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, employed a variety of strategies to name and distinguish insect species. The approach that each took was shaped by their place in the world of early modern natural history, but also by the nature of their interest in insects: indeed, it was possible to take an intense, life-long interest in them without feeling a need to name individual species at all. Early modern perceptions of insect diversity varied widely; they both shaped and were shaped by practices of naming.

Telling scientific stories is a multispecies affair. Non-human animals have been instrumental to studies of the world’s natural order, as model organisms for the human body, as experimental objects, as livestock to be cared for, and as theoretical proxies for human social organizations. Furthermore, the role of animals in labor, sustenance, and commerce has driven the concerted research of biologists, veterinarians, naturalists, and ethologists. These papers collectively examine the particular ways in which scientific practitioners have taken an interest in non-human organisms from the Early Modern period to today. From amoebae to megafauna, this session addresses the scientific production of knowledge regarding non-human life forms, and in turn queries the ways such knowledge feeds the construction of new forms of life. By spanning a broad range of morphologies – amoebae, insects, small mammals, and large mammals – these papers pay attention to how scientific knowledge is shaped by the bodies of creatures themselves and constructs relationships between species. By uniting early modernists with modernists, this panel explores the deep history of multi-species relations, while highlighting how changes in scholarly practices, economies, ontologies, and political concerns intersect across species divides.