Keir Waddington puts his book in the context of the recent past—the BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) crisis of the 1990s. Together, evocation of horror at the cannibalistic expediencies of modern agriculture and the invitation to us hamburger eaters to contemplate the rotting of our own brains brought a crash of confidence in British beef. But how much of this, Waddington asks, followed cultural and institutional channels that had evolved for the assessment and regulation of meat? His case is the Victorian and Edwardian regulation of the beef supply to prevent the (presumed) transmission of tuberculosis through ingestion of the meat of tubercular cattle. With smallpox having yielded to vaccination and the enteric diseases to sanitation, tuberculosis had emerged as the great focus of public health in the late nineteenth century.
At first glance Waddington's is the standard public health success story. Watchdog professionals (here, veterinarians, largely) bark, the sages assemble to investigate and debate, and aggrieved and interested parties protest, but the cumbersome apparatus of legislation rumbles into action and another picket of inspectors is set out. In a few decades, bovine tuberculosis has largely disappeared.
But this standard narrative of nineteenth-century government growth does not really work, Waddington makes clear. The prominence of the veterinarians is the first anomaly. In the 1860s and 1870s the most insistent drummers of crisis were neither the emerging state-medical community, then dominated by John Simon, nor the many medics specializing in tuberculosis, but rather a cadre of young and newly scientized veterinarians, who were attracted to the emergent germ theory of disease and were seeking to lift their profession into a position of cognitive authority—not just on the welfare of animals, but on any public matters that might be a function of animal health.
Along with interprofessional conflict, the need to find explicit rationales for environmental and social regulation is part of the story. Gruesome, malodorous urban slaughterhouses had been a long-standing target of common-law nuisances prosecution and of the first generations of medical officers of health and sanitary inspectors. Yet it was never quite clear where lay the boundary between clean and decent slaughtering and wallowing in filth, blood, and guts; similarly, in a prefiguration era, the boundary between good fresh meat and decomposing, dead flesh was obscure. The continuum of quality was evident in the retail meat market, which provided the poor with odder and older bits than the wealthy preferred. A focus on diseased meat (as opposed to that which was a bit old or off) provided foundation and immediacy for slaughterhouse regulation. It elevated undesirability and unsightliness into indecency, danger, and intolerability, if at the cost of depriving a portion of the population of access to cheap meat in their diet.
Yet while the tubercular meat supply was a popular theme for investigative journalists, and for the easy evocation of plausible horror, the several scientific questions associated with tuberculosis causation were exceedingly thorny. Among these: the diagnosis of tuberculosis in cattle (and humans); the identity of human and bovine tuberculosis; the determination of whether some or all parts of a diseased animal were dangerous and whether any of these could be made safe through postmortem methods of food preparation, and finally the broad question of the relative importance of the several sources of human tuberculosis. Even assuming human tuberculosis to be an infectious disease caused by a microbe identical to the bovine pathogen, it did not follow that particular cases and courses of the disease could be definitively attributed to meat: the long latency between the infection and symptoms, the variety of symptoms and courses, made it difficult to exclude other modes of exposure. Beyond these epistemic questions were equally formidable questions about the equity, propriety, and viability of control policies.
Hence bovine tuberculosis was a classic case for expert disagreement. There were experimental studies and plausible scenarios aplenty. Repeated inquires, coupled with a vast public commitment to research, only slowly narrowed the realm of possibility. Squabbling among, and sometimes within, professions over who could authoritatively declare the condition of cows or carcasses persisted; indeed it is likely that such fighting significantly helped to shape professional domains and hierarchies.
By century's end, the most widely respected fount of authority was German bacteriology. Koch awe was such that when in 1901 Robert Koch asserted that bovine and human forms of tuberculosis were distinct, English bacteriologists could not simply dismiss the claim. They undertook a lengthy and painstaking campaign of refutation, as much as anything to defend the propriety of their research and regulatory programs. Yet the policy that had by then emerged—to prohibit the sale only of the overtly tuberculous parts of the carcass of a tubercular animal, and happily to entrust the interpretation of that standard to local authorities—bears the stamp of political compromise more than that of scientific consensus. And even then, after all the professions had had a say, a verdict on the salability of a piece of meat fell finally to a magistrate, who might be immune to any form of science.
Koch ultimately admitted that his case had been wrongly and overstated but the problem of the relative importance of cattle-to-person (via meat or milk) versus person-to-person transmission of tuberculosis remained. Koch would downplay meat. British public health practitioners, of many different professions, who had gone to so much effort to establish the possibility of meat-borne tuberculosis, could not really make the case that meat regulation should have a high priority in tuberculosis control.
The revolution-in-government scholarship of a generation ago was predicated on a belief that social progress could be distinguished. It is a legacy of the Thatcher years and equally of the increasing sophistication of scholarship in social and cultural history, the history of the professions, and the history of science, that such narratives are no longer so persuasive. At the same time, one may ask whether Waddington has pushed hard enough. He has largely avoided the morass of nineteenth-century epidemiology, and the most technical aspects of the scientific debates of those and later times. He makes only brief allusions to the corresponding regulatory regimes and rationales of other nations. Of course, retrospective epidemiological assessments cannot explain actions taken in times of uncertainty and confusion. And, we are well advised to avoid selecting or privileging those who happened to get it right. Still, more work needs to be done to comprehend the modes of reasoning (and rhetoric) through which the meat-and-tuberculosis debates were conducted, and through which a remarkable confidence in the importance of this form of meat regulation was constructed.
