The Construction of an Animal Plague: Foot and Mouth Disease in Nineteenth-century Britain

Abstract

British agricultural officials, veterinarians, and livestock owners currently regard foot and mouth disease (FMD) as one of the world’s worst animal plagues, a highly contagious and extremely costly disease that is only amenable to control by wide‐ranging and stringent legislative measures. However, for many years after its first appearance in 1839, commentators dismissed FMD as a mild and unpreventable ailment, and the introduction and extension of legislative controls in the wake of the 1865–7 cattle plague epidemic proved highly controversial. FMD was not generally viewed as a devastating disease until the 1880s and 1890s; a period in which the current regulatory framework came into being. In this article, I explore the late nineteenth‐century transformation of FMD from private, uncontrollable nuisance to state‐managed animal plague. I argue that, contrary to popular belief, the dangerous nature of the disease was not self‐evident, nor was legislation an obvious response. Rather, the changing economic, political, scientific, and agricultural context of late‐Victorian Britain and the wide‐ranging impact of early legislative disease controls served to reconstruct popular understandings of the nature, clinical effect, origin, and spread of FMD, and thereby generated support for more extensive state‐led regulations.