The history of humanity is intimately bound up with that of the animal world:not only do they share a common past but they share a common disease pool. The microorganisms that ravaged one was often hosted by the other, a familiarity of exchange more usually associated with family members. It is somewhat strange, therefore, to find that veterinary medicine has not received more widespread attention and scholarly interest. After all, our afflictions and those of our companions are a constant source of consternation and conversation. All this makes Karen Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle’s Healing the Herds a most welcome addition to the literature. Using case studies drawn from the United States of America, Western Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and Australasia, the contributors to this volume offer fascinating insights into the role and importance of veterinarians and their science over the last three centuries. While the editors claim to place the human–animal relationship at the centre of their endeavours, it is a pity, however, that the latter play such a passive role in the narrative. It is a book much more about healers than herds.

The diversity of topics covered here testifies to the myriad ways that veterinary science is bound up in the wider historical context. State building in both the metropolitan and colonial settings, the dissemination of Old World pathogens, the susceptibility of European-bred livestock to new sources of infection, the fostering of settler economies, and the structuring of colonial societies are all represented by contributions that range from epizootic diseases in the eighteenth-century Netherlands, to veterinary administration in twentieth-century Trinidad and Tobago, from maximising milk production in Britain, to the characterisation of Bororo Zebu cattle in Niger. To do this, the ‘vet’ had to wear many hats: policeman in Germany, ‘horse doctor’ in the US, colonist in Manchuria, pastoralist in Outback Australia or economist in Kenya. In the meantime, of course, he also looked after animals in Java and New Zealand, or fought fevers and plagues in East Africa and Southeast Asia. The chapters roam over time and place much as their subjects did and do over the landscape.

The great strength of this collection lies in the breadth of its investigation and the scholarship of its contributors. There simply isn't any other volume quite like it. More than simply its worldwide panorama, it is the detailed case studies that offer such instructional points of comparison. While the broad outlines of the development and professionalisation of veterinary medicine follow recognisably similar trajectories in most places, it is the particularities of place that make the chapters so absorbing: the relationship between geographical space and infection in Australia; or between ‘races’ and breeds in the Caribbean and Africa. Everywhere, though, veterinarians were clearly at the forefront of nation-building and instrumental agents in the colonial venture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, helping mould the fabric of state structures, and even the contours of class interests; and just as veterinary medicine was very much integral to the colonial and neo-colonial enterprise, so local knowledge about animal behaviour and welfare was often viewed as subversive, a ‘weapon of the weak’ and made a matter of bitter contention between parties. All these complex interrelations are vividly brought to life by the first-rate scholarship and well-written prose of the contributions.

Of course, the book could do better; that is only in the nature of such compilations. For an excellent critique of the volume, one could do little better than read Karen Brown's comprehensive conclusion. She points out the absence of women; the preoccupation with certain livestock – horses, cattle and sheep; the need for more detailed studies about the interrelationship between animal and human health; the hybridisation of knowledge; and the institutionalisation of veterinary medicine. To this list might be added the role of the military, the geography of infection and more, much more about the animals themselves. The latter are depicted as just too passive, unresisting bodies upon which veterinarians apparently wrought their wills without let or hindrance. I am not sure, too, whether the collection really lives up to the claim of its title to be about the globalisation of veterinary medicine. The globalisation conceived of here seems to be more about isolated events in disparate geographies rather than about world-encompassing processes that transformed peoples, animals and environments. Readers are somewhat left to their own devices to weave these threads together rather than being presented with a finished tapestry.

Even if the animals remain somewhat muted in these pages, the same cannot be said for the vets and their science. As this book clearly shows, healing the herds was as much about making nations and empires as it was about animal welfare and disease control. Veterinary medicine and its practitioners were very much at the service of the state and those who pulled the levers of power. That is a salutary message for us all to remember.