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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What motivated Dr. Dugatkin to write *Nary a Horse Left Standing*?
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 Elcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Lee Dugatkin about a book that he's just published with MIT Press in 2026 titled Nary a Horse Left Standing: How a Nineteenth 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. For one thing, when we're discussing this 19th century epidemic, it really is about narry 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. And what that means when the horses can't do everything anymore, and the short-term and longer term, as the word transformation points to, um, outlooks and outcomes of all of this. So a lot of things really are all in this title for us to discuss. I think we're going to have quite an intriguing conversation. Lee, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
Oh, it's a pleasure. I've been looking forward to this very much.
Likewise, uh, but before our excitement carries us away, could you introduce yourself a little bit and then tell us why you decided to write this book? What about this epidemic kind of led you to go on this whole project?
Well, I am a professor of uh biology at the University of Louisville in the United States. I am um I wear a number of different hats. Uh I'm an evolutionary biologist and an animal behaviorist, but I'm also a historian of science. And um when it comes to the history of science, particularly when I'm trying to um tell the story of the history of science. To a very, very general audience. I'm always sort of looking for new projects that strike me. And I was basically searching through some newspapers from the late 1800s just to see what people were writing about and what was going on. Scientifically and historically. And I come across this flu epidemic in on horses that I see in a couple of articles, and then I start seeing in more and more articles as I kind of focus in on this time period of 1872.
And the big the more that I dig, the more The more that I find that in fact it turns out that There are hundreds, in fact thousands, of articles that are being written about this horse flu that that eventually becomes called the the Great Epizootic, um, that that strikes largely in the United States for for about nine months. And I'm I'm I'm discovering that it's basically shutting down all the major metropolises from New York to Boston to Chicago. to virtually every large city in the United States um over the course of a nine month period and Then I start finding out that it played a major role in sort of bringing animal rights and animal protection to the forefront, that it affected the evolution of transportation systems, that it had a large impact on the way that we think disease works.
And the more I read, the more interested I became. And for me, what made it especially interesting was above and beyond all of that. I love these stories where you have something that fundamentally shakes up society. And yet today, almost nobody knows about it. I I certainly didn't until I just sort of Was doing this survey of of newspapers of this period. It sort of shakes up society and then it basically fades from our collective memory. And so I was just absolutely fascinated, um, and then became arguably obsessed um with this and um dug in and started working on this book.
Well, you've definitely pinpointed one of the reasons I've been so excited to talk to you about the book, which is what do you mean this was such a big deal and we've never heard of it, right? That's such a compelling reason to investigate. And of course, you've got the other reasons and background that you bring to this too. So let's get into then our discussion about kind of why this epidemic was such a big deal at the time.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What motivated Dr. Dugatkin to write *Nary a Horse Left Standing*?
0:01–5:45
2
How did horse‑powered transportation shape American cities before 1872?
5:45–11:50
3
What were the origins and spread pattern of the 1872 horse flu epidemic?
11:50–17:33
4
How did the epidemic expose the limits of 19th‑century medical knowledge?
17:33–23:29
5
In what ways did the crisis accelerate the animal‑welfare movement and the ASPCA?
23:29–29:12
6
How did the horse flu force cities to rethink urban transportation?
29:12–34:47
7
What long‑term impacts did the epidemic have on medicine, animal rights, and city planning?
34:47–41:02
8
What new research projects is Dr. Dugatkin pursuing after this book?
41:02–46:04