Humans, Other Animals and ‘One Health’ in the Early Twenty-First Century

Cassidy, Angela

As we saw in Chapter 5, Calvin Schwabe initially undertook undergraduate and postgraduate training in zoology, before gaining a veterinary qualification (doctor of veterinary medicine) in 1954, then moving on immediately to retrain in tropical public health, and launching a successful research career in parasitology and epidemiology. He explained in his address to the AVEPM in 2002 that this unorthodox career progression was borne of his desire to combine veterinary practice and scientific research, and 'to help people in need within poorly "developed" areas of the world'. 27 It was in 1964, while undertaking consultancy work for the WHO Communicable Diseases Programme and researching the parasitic tapeworm E. granulosus at the AUB, that he published the first edition of his most famous work, Veterinary Medicine and Human Health (VMHH). A combination of textbook and magnum opus, VMHH was a product of an age in which (as described in Chapter 4) interactions between veterinarians and public health experts were increasing. It was intended to advance Schwabe's view that 'the veterinarian possesses unique qualifications which can not only be increasingly directed to the investigation of human diseases, but also to their management'. 28 Written with the support of a Fulbright fellowship and grant from the WHO, the book did not use the term OM. However, its structuring around the well-established domains of public health, epidemiology and comparative medicine, with additional sections on food hygiene and research methods, foregrounded those areas of medicine where animals frequently brought vets and doctors together. The book was reviewed widely in veterinary and medical journals on both sides of the Atlantic (including at least three times by Schwabe's friend and collaborator James Steele), and it was republished in a second edition in 1969. Later in his career, with the support of a Rockefeller Foundation writing retreat, 29 Schwabe revised, updated and extended VMHH into a third edition, published in 1984. It was here that OM first featured-as a central organizing framework for the volume, in several chapter headings, and throughout the text. As shown in Fig. 6 .2, a citation search for VMHH suggests that its impact at the time of publication was relatively limited, at least on research publications, and it was not until the mid-2000s that the book was widely cited. The third (1984) edition accounts for about half of the post-2000 citations of VMHH and is often referred to in support of the idea that Schwabe devised the concept of OM. 30 However, searching bibliographic databases reveals that in fact Schwabe was not the first Schwabe's VMHH, 1964 , 1969 , 1984 . Source Web of Science, searched January 2017 person to use the term OM in the context of human and animal health. 31 The earliest reference it identifies is an editorial by the physiologist Carl F. Schmidt published in the journal Circulation Research in 1962, which extolled the benefits of the OM approach, particularly in the context of space medicine. 32 Schmidt, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania, cited traditions of veterinary-medical collaboration at the institution going back to the early nineteenth century. Following Schmidt, a series of other references discussing OM were published, mostly by authors associated with the University of Pennsylvania. 33 Today the leaders of the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine proudly cite thes