The Birth of Hirudiculture: Parisian Medicine, Leech Farming and the Transformation of Marshland in Nineteenth-Century France

IF 0.8 3区 历史学 Q4 ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
ROBERT G. W. KIRK, NEIL PEMBERTON, THIBAUT SERVIANT-FINE
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

This article examines health, human–animal relationships and environments within nineteenth-century France, focusing on Hirudo medicinalis , the medicinal leech. Drawing upon medical, environmental and ‘more than human histories’, we investigate how a ‘mania’ for bloodletting in the wake of Parisian medicine and what Michel Foucault has characterised as the ‘birth of the clinic’ produced a trade in leeches that threatened to push the species to extinction. While urban-educated naturalists, physicians, pharmacists, merchants and politicians worried over the scarcity of what was widely considered a commodity of national economic and medical importance, rural ‘leech gatherers’ quietly developed ways to breed leeches artificially. The outcome was hirudiculture: the farming of leeches on an industrial scale. We argue that the birth of hirudiculture was more than a practical and commercial response to the needs of medicine; it reflected and embodied similar shifts in knowledge and reveals the complex and diverse ways in which rural and urban environments, human and non-human relationships, have shaped each other in the pursuit of shared visions of health.
水田农业的诞生:19世纪法国的巴黎医学、水蛭养殖和沼泽地的改造
这篇文章考察了19世纪法国的健康、人与动物的关系和环境,重点是药用水蛭。借助医学、环境和“超越人类的历史”,我们调查了巴黎医学兴起后对放血的“狂热”,以及米歇尔·福柯(Michel Foucault)所描述的“诊所的诞生”是如何导致水蛭交易的,从而威胁到水蛭物种的灭绝。当受过城市教育的博物学家、医生、药剂师、商人和政治家担心这种被广泛认为对国家经济和医疗具有重要意义的商品的稀缺时,农村的“水蛭采集者”悄悄地开发出人工养殖水蛭的方法。其结果是农业:以工业规模养殖水蛭。我们认为,农业的诞生不仅仅是对医学需求的实际和商业反应;它反映和体现了知识方面的类似变化,并揭示了农村和城市环境、人类和非人类关系在追求共同的健康愿景时相互影响的复杂多样方式。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
1.30
自引率
0.00%
发文量
46
期刊介绍: Environment and History is an interdisciplinary journal which aims to bring scholars in the humanities and biological sciences closer together, with the deliberate intention of constructing long and well-founded perspectives on present day environmental problems. Articles appearing in Environment and History are abstracted and indexed in America: History and Life, British Humanities Index, CAB Abstracts, Environment Abstracts, Environmental Policy Abstracts, Forestry Abstracts, Geo Abstracts, Historical Abstracts, History Journals Guide, International Bibliography of Social Sciences, Landscape Research Extra, Referativnyi Zhurnal, Rural Sociology Abstracts, Social Sciences in Forestry and World Agricultural Economics.
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