Ninety years after the discovery of human influenza virus, Modern Flu traces the history of this breakthrough and its implications for understanding and controlling influenza ever since. Examining how influenza came to be defined as a viral disease in the first half of the twentieth century, it argues that influenza’s viral identity did not suddenly appear with the discovery of the first human influenza virus in 1933. Instead, it was rooted in the development of medical virus research and virological ways of knowing that grew out of a half-century of changes and innovations in medical science that were shaped through two influenza pandemics, two world wars, and by state-sponsored programs to scientifically modernise British medicine. A series of transformations, in which virological ideas and practices were aligned with and incorporated into medicine and public health, underpinned the viralisation of influenza in the 1930s and 1940s. Collaboration, conflict and exchange between researchers, medical professionals and governmental bodies lay at the heart of this process. This book is a history of how virus researchers, clinicians, and epidemiologists, medical scientific and public health bodies, and institutions, and philanthropies in Britain, the USA and beyond, forged a new medical consensus on the identity and nature of influenza. Shedding new light on the modern history of influenza, this book is a timely account of how ways of knowing and controlling this intractable epidemic disease became viral.
Author(s): Michael Bresalier
Series: Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History
Edition: 1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: xxvii; 458
City: London
Tags: Biomedical Sciences; Medicine--Modern History; History--Epidemiology--Viral disease--Influenza; History of disease; Medical History
Acknowledgements
Contents
Abbreviations
List of Figures
List of Tables
1 Historicising Flu: Viral Identities of Influenza
2 Naming Flu: Classification and Its Conflicts
1 Naming Influenza
2 New Classifications
3 Epidemic Catarrh
4 Hippocratic and ‘Heroic’ Treatments
5 Epidemic Identities
3 Modernising Flu: Re-aligning Medical Knowledge of the ‘Most Protean Disease’
1 Making Influenza Communicable
2 Proteus in the Clinic
3 The Influenza Germ
4 A New Influenza
5 Re-aligning Clinical, Public Health and Laboratory Medicine
4 Fighting Flu: Military Pathology and the 1918–1919 Pandemic
1 The War and the Pandemic
2 War Pathology
3 A New Disease?
4 Disputed Germs
5 Mixed Vaccines
6 Reckoning and Reconstruction
5 Mobilising Flu: The Medical Research Council and the Genesis of British Virus Research
1 Competing Visions
2 New Agents, Old Problems
3 Experimentalising Pathology
4 The Virus Scheme
5 Uses of the Pandemic
6 Modelling Flu: Dog Distemper and the Promise of Virus Research
1 Making Virus Instruments
2 A Proxy Disease
3 Translating Viruses into Vaccines
4 The ‘Flu Problem’
5 Limits of Control
7 Viralising Flu: Towards a New Medical Consensus
1 Virus Neutralization
2 Ferret Flu
3 Putting Mice to Work
4 A Virus Disease?
5 Collaboration and Consensus
8 Globalising Flu: Systems of Surveillance and Vaccination
1 ‘A New Complicating Factor’
2 Experimental Vaccines
3 Harnessing the Chick Egg
4 American Methods
5 World Influenza Programme
6 Test and Tensions
9 Conclusion: ‘The Most Protean Disease’
10 Coda: Influenza and Covid-19
1 Which Influenza?
2 Challenges of Control
3 Zoonotic Connections
4 System Failures
5 Cautionary Lessons
Select Bibliography
Index
