I am currently writing a book about the history of veterinary medicine in eighteenth-century Italy. The book focuses mainly on Venice, but the last two chapters compare the many differences between the veterinary school at Padua and the one in Turin. Venice is an exceptional case because the veterinary school at Padua is the only eighteenth-century school housed in a university. Elsewhere in Europe, veterinary schools tended to be either standalone institutions, or housed in a cavalry school or royal stable. Each of these institutional locations came with its own demands and challenges. But for Giuseppe Orus, the first chair at Padua, justifying his presence in an august medical faculty required him to make a case for veterinary as medicine, and not merely as an important branch of technical knowledge.

Veterinary medicine was a new professional and scientific category at the time. The first schools, were established in France in the 1860s, first at Lyon and later at Alfort in the Paris suburbs. Every other school, including the first two Italian schools (Turin and Padua) were founded by graduates of the either Lyon or Alfort.

In the book I situate the establishment of the veterinary school at Padua in the context of an active agrarian reform movement in Venice's mainland state in the 1760s and 70s. The chair of veterinary medicine (1773) was one of a handful of new chairs established at Padua in these two decades. All of these new professors worked in relatively new fields of applied knowledge. Most of these applied sciences were connected in one way or another to agriculture: applied botany, agronomy, applied chemistry, and veterinary medicine. And in what might seem an all too familiar story, these new subjects were replacing chairs in older, theoretical disciplines.

Other Projects

I am also working on two other book projects. The first is a microhistory centered around a fourteenth-century Florentine farrier who wrote a work of vernacular humanism about the care of horses. The second is a book based on a course I have been teaching about environmental literature from antiquity to the present. The book examines the different ways that both ancient and modern texts approach the question of how we learn (or don't learn) about non-human nature. In this project I am trying to avoid the intellectual history approach employed by sholars like Collingwood, Glacken, Coates, and others, and focus instead on how these texts reflect the material conditions that determine what we can and cannot know about nature.