Every year around 80 million scientific procedures are carried out on animals globally. These experiments have the potential to generate new understandings of biology and clinical treatments. They also give rise to ongoing societal debate. This book demonstrates how the humanities and social sciences can contribute to understanding what is created through animal procedures – including constitutional forms of research governance, different institutional cultures of care, the professional careers of scientists and veterinarians, collaborations with patients and publics, and research animals, specially bred for experiments or surplus to requirements. Developing the idea of the animal research nexus, this book explores how connections and disconnections are made between these different elements, how these have reshaped each other historically, and how they configure the current practice and policy of UK animal research. -- .

The leech is one of nature's most tenacious yet mysterious animals. Possessing a hold on the human body and culture, few creatures feature so unexpectedly yet consistently in human history. Popularly thought to be a formidable bloodsucking parasite, armed with razor-sharp teeth and capable of drinking many times its volume of blood, the leech is a most unlikely candidate to turn to as a cure for ill-health. Yet, this is precisely the role leeches have occupied in human medicine, Western and Eastern, from earliest recorded history to the present. Yet for every leech that served as a symbol of hope and progress, there is a pessimistic twin. In fiction, film and popular culture, from Bram Stoker's Dracula and twentieth-century B-movies to a video game-player's nemesis, the leech is shown to have embodied what is darkest in human nature, representing fears of science and nature run amok. In Leech, Robert G. W. Kirk and Neil Pemberton explore how this creature repeatedly surfaces throughout human history, featuring in radically different practices; from the humoral medicine of the ancients to twenty-first-century cosmetic surgery, from nineteenth-century meteorological barometer to twentieth-century biomedical tool that helped to win a Nobel Prize, the leech has been often present and always surprising. A horror and a healer, the leech has reared its head in many unexpected places and practices, revealing this creature to be among humanity's most enduring and peculiar companions.