ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Caring for Animals: Farmers, Farriers and Veterinarians in the Making of Scientific Animal Husbandry in Bologna (18th-19th Centuries)

• In Event: Local Practices, Contested Knowledge: Making Animal Sciences in Rural Europe (17th-19th Centuries)

English Abstract

Between the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century cattle husbandry in the Bologna area was characterized by growing tension between traditional empirical practices and emerging scientific knowledge. The Assunteria di Sanità of Bologna and the Protomedicato, which until the late eighteenth century entrusted livestock care to empirical healers and farriers, had to face severe bovine epizootics spreading from the Danubian regions. These health crises drew attention to the need for formal veterinary instruction, and in 1785 a veterinary course was established within the Medical Class. The foundation of the Agricultural Society of Bologna in 1807, led by Filippo Re, marked a crucial moment in this process of “rationalization.” Through its periodical publications, the Society sought to educate landowners, stewards and farmers, who were still seen as bound to a “blind practice” learned through “servile imitation”. Yet the sources reveal a more complex reality: the knowledge of farriers and cheese-makers - though labelled “empirical” by learned culture - embodied sophisticated understandings of animal behaviour, everyday care, and the extraction and processing of milk. This paper explores the relation between two systems of knowledge - which were often, though not always, conflictual. It examines the process of appropriation and reconfiguration in which traditional expertise was simultaneously devalued in scientific discourse and incorporated into the emerging science of veterinary medicine and, later, zootechnics.

Author

• Miriam Borgia, University of Bologna/EHESS-CRH