Fleck's Multiple Collectives

This week's post comes from a first-year graduate student, John Heydinger, who, after a earning his B.A. in history, briefly became a field and conservation biologist working in South Africa. He has since returned to our own thought collective of the history of science, and plans to work on the relationship between the sciences and the humanities in higher education. His post is about Ludwik Fleck, whose book we read in a seminar about theories in/of history, led by Susan Jones.
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Ludwik Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact is a text both rich in meaning and illuminating in application for the budding historian of science; it seems to grow in strength with increasing familiarity. Amongst our graduate student community Fleck provides fodder for conversations both broad and deep. Echoing one such discussion I wanted to recapitulate a difficulty found in Fleck’s work, along with a tentative hypothesis for how this difficulty in applying Fleck’s philosophy to the history of science might be overcome.

A Matter of Meat and Democracy: A Crisis in Veterinary Public Health

Jeannette Vaught is a former equine veterinary technician and current PhD Candidate at the University of Texas. Her dissertation, "Science, Animals, and Profit-Making in the American Rodeo Arena," documents the scientific enhancement and redefinition of rodeo animals over the second half of the twentieth century, and maps how professional rodeo navigates the tensions between tradition and modernity through a strategic use of animals. Susan D. Jones is a member of the dissertation committee. This post derives from her presentation at the September 2014 World Association for the History of Veterinary Medicine Congress in London, and provides a veterinary perspective of the effects of deregulation on the meat animal industry in the 1980s based on archival materials that did not make it into the dissertation. Follow her on Twitter: @JeannetteVaught.
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In September 1985, veterinarian and long-time United States Department of Agriculture meat inspector Carl Telleen penned a letter to his former USDA colleagues:  “To my former fellow Review Officers,” he began, “It has been a most painful experience for all of us but one which we had to suffer in order to maintain our own integrity as well as to be able to expose the evils in government.” [1] The painful experience to which he is referring is a four-year battle between Telleen, the USDA, and the conglomerate of companies making up the lion’s share of the modern American meatpacking industry. In 1981, after serving for 20 years as a meat inspector, Telleen charged the USDA with instituting meat inspection policies that broke longstanding food safety laws and endangered the public. To his view, these changes were made for commercial and political reasons at the expense of public health. By 1985, Telleen’s whistleblowing campaign, steeped in acrimony and intimidation, had brought him national notoriety and made him a polarizing figure in the agricultural veterinary world. When the USDA deregulated its inspection policies, he was horrified that the public would consume contaminated meat, and lost faith in the government’s role in protecting citizens from harm. To Telleen, the principles of American democracy were centered on healthy meat, and both were at risk.