Laboratory medicine and the identity change of veterinary medicine in Spain at the turn of the twentieth century

Abstract

This paper analyses the impact of laboratory medicine on veterinary medicine in Spain at the turn of the twentieth century. It is considered from a perspective that places the laboratory at the centre of a strategy for introducing the ideal of progress into veterinary medicine at a sensitive moment in its history. In the adverse context created by the steady replacement of horses —the principal recipients of veterinary care— by motor vehicles, an awareness grew that the time had come to reinvent the profession. The arrival of experimental veterinary medicine, especially the area linked to bacteriological laboratories, opened the door to explore new prospects for the future and became one of the bases for the discipline’s modernisation. A new professional was envisaged to attain this objective, the «scientific laboratory veterinarian», whose knowledge would be based on experimentation and who would master highly specialised technical skills. This vision of a profession in search of prestige would bring to light conflicting interests among the different healthcare professions and would emphasise the importance of adopting patterns of behaviour that led to identification of these new veterinary surgeons with the elite of society.