Lee Alan Dugatkin, "Nary a Horse Left Standing: How a Nineteenth-Century Epidemic Transformed Medicine, Animal Welfare, and the Modern City" (MIT Press, 2026)
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Lee Alan Dugatkin, "Nary a Horse Left Standing: How a Nineteenth-Century Epidemic Transformed Medicine, Animal Welfare, and the Modern City" (MIT Press, 2026)

B2Upper-intermediateSeptember 8, 202648 min
  • Interview
  • History

In Nary a Horse Left Standing: How a Nineteenth-Century Epidemic Transformed Medicine, Animal Welfare, and the Modern City (MIT Press, 2026), Dr. Lee Dugatkin chronicles this little-known crisis, revealing how the epidemic disrupted nearly every aspect of urban life. From coast to coast, livelihoods collapsed as horses lay sick, or worse dying, on stable floors, fires raged unchecked without horse-drawn wagons, and city development stalled for lack of horsepower. Just as the Gilded Age was dawning and industrialists were poised to amass fortunes, the flu slowed progress to a crawl. Yet the tragedy also catalyzed revolutions in medicine, an...

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about a book that he's just published with MIT Press in 2026 titled

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Transformed Medicine, Animal Welfare, and the Modern City.

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0:00

Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Brandon Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Lee Dugatkin

0:14

about a book that he's just published with MIT Press in 2026 titled Nary a Horse Left Standing, How a 19th Century Epidemic Transformed Medicine, Animal Welfare, and the Modern City. That title really has it all, right? There's so many things there that we're going to get to talk about.

0:32

For one thing, when we're discussing this 19th century epidemic, it really is about nary a horse left standing. Like this is an epidemic that seems to have the massive, massive effect of huge amounts of horses, which is kind of a problem in the 19th century because everything relies on them. So this book really helps us understand what that means

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