Comparative medicine
The first documented mention of comparative pathology comes from Hippocrates (460 - 370 BCE) in Airs, Waters, Places where he describes relevant case histories for horse herds and human populations.
[7] Aulus Cornelius Celsus (25 BCE - 50 CE) wrote of experimental physiology in De Medicini Libri Octo detailing numerous dissections and vivisections he performed and pointed out specific interventions as well, such as cupping to remove the poison of a dog's bite.
[11]: 11 The Persian physician Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (865 - 925 CE) was the first to describe smallpox and measles and prescribe treatments, making his discoveries largely through animal dissection.
[12] Due to the far flung nature of their travels the Crusaders imported the Oriental rat flea carrying the bacterium Yersinia pestis and eventually initiating the Black Death.
[14] Girolamo Fracastoro (1478 - 1553 CE) outlined a concept for rapidly multiplying minute bodies (germs) transmitting infection in De contagione et contagiosis morbis.
[15] The beginnings of microbiology, and thus serious use of comparative medicine, were finally enabled by Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek's refinement of the microscope and subsequent observation of animalcules.
[16] The first real basis for the structured and regular exchange of knowledge of science and medicine in the western world was established with the 1660 founding of the Royal Society in London.
Robert Doyle (1627 - 1691) published key experiments in their classical journal Philosophical Transactions among them interspecies blood transfusion, including from sheep into men.
[18] Emanuel Timone (1665 - 1741) was the first westerner to publish anything on inoculation, which he called grafting, although it's unclear if he developed it de novo (as new) or inferred it from previous work.
[20] This and other work paved the way for Mortimer Cromwell, a secretary of the Royal Society, to raise plagues as a national health issue enabling a general policy of quarantine, isolation, fumigation, and slaughter.
In 1802 French physiologist François Magendie (1783 - 1855) became the first person to prove interspecies transmission of disease by inoculating a dog from rabies using human spittle.
[23] With their usefulness to human health and respectable scientific standing established there were veterinary colleges founded in France, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, and Germany throughout the 18th century.
[29] Subsequent conferences, such as one on animal vaccination in 1880, led George Fleming to propose in The Lancet that a chair of comparative pathology be established in all medical schools.
He made observations based on experiments in animals that led to specific medical interventions for humans, a hallmark of comparative medicine.
[35] Comparative medicine in the form of experimentation on rhesus monkeys was key to one of the crowning achievements of modern medical science: Jonas Salk's development of the polio vaccine.
The idea takes the existing interdisciplinary nature of comparative medicine a step further and considers veterinary and human healthcare to be sufficiently overlapped as to be different aspects of the same thing.
[59][60] Some of the reasons for the lack of reproducibility in many studies are: The theory of utilitarianism and the concept of greater good is most often used as a rationale for animal research in comparative medicine and elsewhere.
