Pests, Plagues, Pleurites, and Pébrine: the History of Invertebrate Pathology from Antiquity to 1900

This short account cannot do justice to the long and rich history of the genesis and evolution of invertebrate pathology. The emphasis in the succeeding text, therefore, is to draw attention to the early dawning of interest in the lives—and in the deaths— of “les petites bêtes” (as the French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre [1823–1915] termed them) and to summarize, with examples, advances in knowledge over the centuries that led to the emergence of the discipline of “invertebrate pathology” as we know it now. As the following text illustrates, the subject did not evolve spontaneously. Its growth mirrored the history of other forms of pathology whereby initial studies on anatomy and physiology, often supplemented by behavioral observations, led to an understanding of the causes and mechanisms of disease in a wide range of taxa.