VIRUS Band 23, pp. 33-52, 2025/04/24
Schwerpunkt: Mensch - Tier - Gesundheit
What do MERS, SARS, BSE, HIV, Zika, Ebola and Covid-19 have in common? Animals play(ed) an important role in the transmission of pathogens, and with the recent covid pande-mic, animals – in this case pangolins at a market in Wuhan – have come to the fore as vectors. However, it would be wrong to reduce the role of animals in the animal-human relationship solely to that of an intermediate host or possible carrier of disease. They are also part of the so- lu tion: In the laboratory, animals model human diseases, or in the pharmaceutical industry, they served as “donors”, as biological or organic sources in the production of serums and vaccines. The role of animals in the development and control of diseases, and in medicine in general, has long been overlooked in (medical) history. The article examines the complex relationships bet-ween animals and humans in medicine (and especially in bacteriology and related sciences) and explores various aspects relevant to this relationship, such as risk and biopolitics, public health, knowledge production, food and pharmaceutical industries. Starting with a dubious turtle tuber culosis serum developed by Friedrich Franz Friedmann in Berlin in the decade after 1900, the article asks what relationships exist between animals and humans in medicine, how these relationships can be categorised (animals as vectors, animals as patients, animals as economic or epistemic objects, etc.) and, above all, how the different levels of relationship are interrelated.
Keywords: Human-animal relationships, epidemics, epizootics, veterinary medicine, tuberculosis cure, 19th and 20th century
