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A bloody offal nuisance: The persistence of private slaughter-houses in nineteenth-century London
Abstract and Figures
British slaughter-house reformers campaigned to abolish private urban slaughter-houses and establish public abattoirs in the nineteenth century. Abolition of London's private slaughter-houses was motivated by the congestion created by livestock in city streets, the nuisance of slaughter-house refuse in residential neighbourhoods and public health concerns about diseased meat in the food supply. The butchers successfully defended their private slaughter-houses, illustrating the persistence of the craftsman's workshop and the importance of laissez-faire sentiments in opposition to municipalization in Victorian London.
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... Três anos depois, nomeou uma comissão para elaborar normas de funcionamento que garantissem as condições de higiene e, em 1818, não mais existiam matadores privados na cidade. Os cinco matadouros parisienses foram reunidos em um único estabelecimento em 1867, o grande La Villete, cujo modelo de organização passou a ser copiado em todo o mundo (MACLACHLAN, 2007). O conjunto industrial era formado por um complexo de edifícios que incluía pavilhões destinados ao abate, currais, laboratório, armazéns, oficina de máquinas, edifícios de descargas, escritório, casas de funcionários, estação ferroviária e um edifício em estilo neoclássico destinado a administração central. ...
O Matadouro Imperial de Santa Cruz, inaugurado em 1881, é um importante representante da arquitetura industrial relacionada ao processamento de carne no século XIX. Seus edifícios mais antigos foram construídos com alvenaria de pedra seguindo padrões higienistas recomendados no período. O trabalho apresenta uma análise da planta do matadouro em sua primeira fase de funcionamento e dos fatores que levaram a modificações do projeto original. As rochas utilizadas em sua construção, hoje expostas no Palacete Princesa Isabel e nas paredes de suas ruínas, guardam registro geológicos da antiga jazida, localizada no Morro do Cruzeiro. A pedreira e as características geológicas do terreno foram determinantes na escolha do local de construção. Os dados contidos nas alvenarias e cantarias do matadouro revelam incoerências em mapas geológicos regionais publicados e demostram a necessidade de mapeamentos mais detalhados dessa região. O trabalho também reitera a necessidade de ações que objetivem a recuperação, preservação e destinação das Ruínas do Matadouro.
The study examines the spatial distribution of slaughter slabs in Ilesa region South West, Nigeria. Survey research design was adopted for the study. Both primary and secondary data were obtained. The coordinates of the study area was generated from Google earth and imported to universal map downloader (UMD). Quantitative data were analyze with the aid of ArcMap to determine the spatial distributions of the slaughter slab locations and subsequently interpreted. The qualitative data were content analyzed. The study area revealed a total number of 44 slaughter slab locations in the study area. The study revealed that 43 of the slaughter slabs were owned and managed by private operators while only one was owned by the government. The analysis revealed that the majority of the slabs are situated close to the river. The nearest neighbor analysis of slaughter slabs operation revealed the observe means distance of 338.318 apart with expected means distance of 414.155. The nearest ratio Rn= 0.817 (R>1). This implies a cluster pattern in the distribution of slaughter slabs. This pattern of distribution is an indication of inadequate planning. The study therefore recommends that development of slaughter houses should be adequately planned to ensure equitable access by prospective customers within the region.
This chapter introduces the themes of the book by providing a historical and theoretical overview of the increasing invisibility of the modern abattoir and the animals slaughtered within. Relying on a broad selection of theorists to cover physical concealment as well as psychological avoidance of abattoirs, the chapter eventually turns to Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia. The slaughterhouse as a heterotopia creates the illusion that the rest of society is free from the violence and the animals that are found within, and which deviate from society’s purported norms. The chapter proposes that literature can help lift the abattoir out of invisibility by arguing that in fiction, what may be conceived as hidden or inconsequential space in the real world can become place as its perceived neutrality and liminality are eroded and it is (re)connected with values, emotions, and living presences. The chapter ends with a brief description of the other chapters of the book.
Disability and Race in British Literature, 1580-1833, examines the ways Both Spanish and English peasants and lower classes were regarded as intrinsically different from the nobility in which concepts of disability and race are deployed as human disqualifications in literary, medical, natural historical, and travel texts written between 1580 and 1833, the year Britain abolished slavery in its colonies. This long chronological spread allows me to demonstrate how informal taxonomies are recruited by empire in the service of defining, differentiating, and hierarchizing human bodies in the production of a “civilized” British subject. Using disability studies and critical race theory, my project specifically looks at how medical and colonial discourses work together to construct concepts of disability and race in ways that are at some points mutually constitutive and at others mutually aligned, often through references to animality. In the periods and discourses that I examine, disabled and racialized people are aligned in consistent but unexpected ways to stabilize definitions of the human, reflecting how white able-bodied British writers wanted to see themselves in an era of nascent nation and empire building. Across this chronological spread, I focus on three distinct cases of dehumanization and pathologization as they entail issues of race and disability, particularly around bodily difference and language use and ability. In the second chapter, I examine the way in which discourses of race are figured through the language of disability by looking at texts by George Best, Robert Burton, and Ben Jonson before centering my discussion on William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Covering the works of Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Bulwer, John Wallis, and John Wilkins, my third chapter demonstrates how discourses of disability and race were aligned in the construction of Enlightenment ideals of reason expressed through language. I examine the way in which “making signs” is deployed in deaf education manuals and travel literature as able to communicate reason. I consider the way in which race intersects with what Stephanie Kerschbaum refers to as the “presumed wholeness of a hearing identity” to analyze the writings of both deaf instruction manuals and the reception of the poetry of Francis Williams, a black Jamaican scholar who wrote poetry in Latin. In my fourth chapter, I demonstrate the deep continuities of thought between early modern scientific research and Romantic-era concerns surrounding health, disease, and blood. I argue that, in Frankenstein, Victor conceives of the creature in terms of pathology by examining the use of the slaughterhouse in the novel and the history of blood transfusion experiments. I use these histories to provide a matrix of meaning to understand how both health and disease are constructed through biocultural significations of blood. In the Coda, I do a comparative analysis of Caliban and Frankenstein’s Creature to consider the way in which eloquence intersects with the stigmatization surrounding disability.
A história humana sempre ocorre em um mundo cheio que deve ser caracterizado e compreendido por constantes interações entre: mundo biofísico, espécie humana e outras espécies animais. Interações entre espécies que são historicamente marcadas, mas não somente, pela dependência e voracidade da espécie humana para com outras espécies animais. Para explorar a densidade
histórica destes processos arregimentaremos: a história ambiental por se tratar de um campo que localiza os acontecimentos históricos não apartados do mundo biofísico, a história ambiental urbana por destacar que cidades não são cristais e, portanto, constituintes de um mundo onde natural e cultural não estão cindidos e a história humano-animal por considerar os animais não humanos como agentes
relevantes aos processos históricos. Campos historiográficos que, aliados e constituintes de uma tópica conceitual, servirão como lentes para evidenciar uma narrativa historiográfica dos três matadouros públicos do Rio de Janeiro entre 1777 e 1881: o matadouro da praia de Santa Luzia, o matadouro de São Cristóvão nos mangues ao norte da cidade e o matadouro de Santa Cruz por sobre as pastagens da então Fazenda Imperial. Utilizando fontes inéditas, novas leituras de fontes já conhecidas, por meio dos matadouros públicos na cidade do Rio de Janeiro e da voracidade humana em relação ao consumo da carne de outros animais, a tese trata de parte da história da cidade do Rio de Janeiro ao mesmo tempo em que dá forma a historicidade das constantes interações entre humanos
e animais não humanos que ocorrem em ambientes complexos e sempre emergentes.
[EN] Human history always takes place in a full world that must be characterized and understood by constant interactions between the biophysical world, human species, and other animal species. Interactions between species that are historically marked, but not only, by the dependence and voracity of the human species on other animal species. To explore the historical density of these processes, we will add: the environmental history because it is a field that locates
historical events not separated from the biophysical world, the urban
environmental history because it highlights that cities are not crystals and, therefore, constituents of a world where natural and cultural are not split and human-animal history for considering non-human animals as agents relevant to historical processes. Historiographic fields that, allies and constituents of a conceptual topic, will serve as lenses to evidence a historiographical narrative of the three public slaughterhouses in Rio de Janeiro between 1777 and 1881: the
slaughterhouse on the beach of Santa Luzia, the slaughterhouse of São Cristóvão in the mangroves to the north of the city and the slaughterhouse of Santa Cruz over the pastures of the then Imperial Farm. Using unpublished sources, new readings from sources already known, through public slaughterhouses in the city of Rio de Janeiro and human voracity concerning the consumption of meat from
other animals; the thesis deals with part of the history of the city of Rio de Janeiro at the same time that it shapes the historicity of the constant interactions between humans and non-human animals that occur in complex and always emerging environments.
Junto das fábricas, fazendas, laboratórios e zoológicos, os matadouros de animais para o consumo humano de carne foram alguns dos ambientes predominantes nas mediações das relações entre humanos e animais no século XIX e que podem ser analisados com o aparato teórico e epistemológico da história ambiental e da animal-human history. Isto posto, buscaremos tratar no presente artigo da história do matadouro da praia de Santa Luzia, o primeiro matadouro público do Rio de Janeiro, e compreendendo o mesmo enquanto espaço de constantes interações entre mundo biofísico, espécies animais destinadas ao consumo humano e da cidade com seus habitantes. Em 1853, durante as epidemias dos anos 1850, o matadouro foi desativado e depois transformado em Albergue, de modo que as práticas de matanças seriam deslocadas para outro lugar, trocando-se a praia e o mar pelos manguezais da cidade.
Such as factories, farms, labs and zoos, the slaughterhouses were some of the most prominent environments regarding the mediations between humans and animals in the 19th century and that can be analyzed with the theoretical and epistemological apparatuses from the environmental history and the animal-human history. That said, we will seek to address in this article the story of the slaughterhouse on the beach of Santa Luzia, the first public slaughterhouse in the city of Rio de Janeiro, and comprehending that slaughterhouse as a place of constant interactions between the biophysical world, the animal species meant to be edible and the city with its inhabitants. In 1853, during the 1850’s epidemics, the slaughterhouse was deactivated and later transformed into a hostel, so that the butchering would be moved to another place, changing the beach and the sea for the city's mangroves.
Kill and Chill: Restructuring Canada's Beef Commodity Chain. Ian McLachlan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2002.
From the 1850s in Britain, concerns were growing about the role of animals in transmitting disease to man, whether through the food chain or through infection. While London is often seen as providing a model for public health reform, it was the great provincial cities that initiated veterinary involvement in public health in the closing years of the century. The emergence of this new strand of public health activity is the subject of this paper.
The 1854 English cholera outbreak led to reform of Victorian public health legislation, including the Nuisances Removal and Diseases Prevention Act. The reforms threatened the closure of many factories whose fumes were considered hazardous to the public's health. The second witness to appear before the Parliamentary committee considering the reforms was Dr. John Snow. Snow testified on behalf of the manufacturers threatened by the reforms. He stated that the fumes from such establishments were not hazardous. He contended that the workers in these factories did not become ill as a result of their exposures, and therefore these fumes could not be a hazard to the general public's health. Snow also presented data from the 1854 cholera outbreak as the basis for his belief that epidemic diseases were transmitted by water, not air. Although the data concerned cholera, Snow extended the inference to all epidemic diseases. When the committee's report was published, The Lancet chastised Snow in a stinging editorial. Parliament subsequently revised the bill in favor of the manufacturers and passed it into law. The implications of this particular episode in the history of epidemiology are discussed.