From Periphery to Placeless: Modernising the Laboratory “Animal House” to Better Serve the 20th-Century Biomedical Sciences in Britain, from 1950 to c. 1960s

In 1950, the biomedical sciences were experiencing a rapid period of expansion, which revealed the inadequacy of auxiliary infrastructures such as the laboratory animal house. Hitherto a peripheral space, often located in basements or old buildings and staffed by low or unskilled workers, improving the animal house was increasingly viewed as essential to harnessing the full potential of the biomedical sciences. This paper charts efforts to modernise the mid twentieth-century animal house, involving efforts to transform the material culture of the animal house, to improve the quality of laboratory animals, enhance the skillsets of those who cared for animals, deepen the knowledge that underpinned animal care and change the everyday social relations that made animal research possible. Yet more than the needs of science were at stake. Reaching for a literary allusion, one contemporary of Parkes reflected how in ‘the old days Sarah Gamps were the only nurses in hospitals, and today trained nurses are indeed skilled people [now] a similar raising of the standards of animal house attendants is highly desirable, not only in the interests of research but in meeting any criticism that may arise from the general public on the care of experimental animals’. Whilst modernisation was conceived as reconfiguring the animal house so that it operated on the same scientific principles that historians have argued framed the laboratory as ‘placeless’, this paper show how efforts to standardize working practices of the animal house were shaped by public concerns and limited by the prominent role of emotion and the perceived need to possess a feeling for the animal that were considered to be integral components of ‘good’ animal care.