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The Bovine Scourge: Meat, Tuberculosis, and Public Health, 1850-1914. By Kier Waddington. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2006. 240 pp., $85.00, hardback, ISBN 978-1-84383-193-7.
Drawing parallels to recent experience with mad cow disease, The Bovine Scourge directs our attention to an important and hitherto little explored strand of the history of contagion: fear of disease transmitted through meat. To accomplish this, its author documents the history of concerns about and responses to tuberculosis, which was by the late nineteenth century considered to be caused by consumption of the flesh (and later still, the milk) of diseased cows.
The chief questions animating The Bovine Scourge are: how and under what circumstances did tuberculosis in cattle become a public health issue? How was this issue conceptualized, and hence how were...