Modern Flu: British Medical Science and the Viralisation of Influenza, 1890-1950

ISBN-13: 9781137339539 / Twarda / 2023 / 490 str.

Michael Bresalier

Spis treści

Acknowledgements

 

List of Figures

 

List of Tables

 

Abbreviations

 

Chapter 1. Introduction. Historicising Flu: Viral Identities of Influenza

 

Chapter 2. Naming Flu: Classification and its Conflicts

 

1. Naming influenza

2. New classifications

3. Epidemic catarrh

4. Hippocratic and ‘heroic’ treatments

5. Epidemic identities

 

Chapter 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 the clinical, public health and laboratory medicine

 

Chapter 4. Fighting Flu: Military Pathology and the 1918-19 Pandemic

 

1. The war and the pandemic

2. War pathology

3. A new disease?

4. Disputed germs

5. Mixed vaccines

6. Reckoning and reconstruction

 

Chapter 5. Mobilising Flu: The Pandemic and the Genesis of British Medical Virus Research

 

1. Competing Visions

2. New agents, old problems

3. Experimentalising pathology

3. The virus scheme

4. Uses of the pandemic

 

 

 

Chapter 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

 

Chapter 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

 

Chapter 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

 

Chapter 9. Conclusion: ‘The Most Protean Disease’

 

Chapter 10. CODA: Influenza and Covid-19

 

Selected Bibliography

Index

O autorze

Michael Bresalier is Lecturer in the History of Medicine and co-director of the Medical Humanities Research Centre at Swansea University, in the UK.

Blurb

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.

Michael Bresalier is Lecturer in the History of Medicine and co-director of the Medical Humanities Research Centre at Swansea University, in the UK.