Meat, Medicine and Human Health in the Twentieth Century

This collection of essays explores some of the complex relations between meat and health in the twentieth century. It highlights a complicated array of contradictory attitudes towards meat and human health. They show how meat came to be regarded as a central part of a modern healthy diet and trace critiques of meat-eating and the meat industry.

David Cantor is Deputy Director of the Office of History, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. His scholarly work focuses on the twentieth-century history of medicine, most recently the histories of cancer and medical film. He is the editor of Reinventing Hippocrates (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) and Cancer in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), and series editor (edited collections) of the series in which this book appears: Studies for the Society of the Social History of Medicine published by Pickering and Chatto., Christian Bonah is Professor for the History of Medical and Health Sciences at the University of Strasbourg and holds at present a research professorship at the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). He has worked on comparative history of medical education, the history of medicaments and vaccines, and the history of human experimentation. Recent work includes research on risk perception and management in drug scandals and courtroom trials as well as studies on medical film. Recent publications include: L'expérimentation humaine. Discours et pratiques en France, 1900-1940 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2007); 'Packaging BCG: Standardizing an Anti-Tuberculosis Vaccine in Interwar Europe', Science in Context, 21:2 (2008), pp. 279-310. He has co-edited volumes on Harmonizing 20th Century drugs: Standards in pharmaceutical history (Paris: Glyphe, 2009); Histoire et médicament au XIXe et XXe siècle (Paris: Glyphe, 2005) and Nazisme, science et médecine (Paris: Glyphe, 2006). Matthias Dörries is Professor for History of science at the University of Strasbourg, France. His research and interests focus on the geophysical sciences and most recently climate change with an interest in linking these issues with health, medicine and the health sciences at large. His most recent research includes articles on the history of volcanism and climate change, and the nuclear winter theory.