Modern Flu

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.

Traces the influenza virus back to the 19th century to explore how it came to be defined as a viral disease Examines how British medical research shaped new virological ways of knowing influenza Provides a history of how a new medical consensus on the modern identity of influenza was forged

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

Klappentext

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 influenzäs 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.

Inhalt

Chapter 1. Introduction. Historicising Flu: Viral Identities of Influenza.- Chapter 2. Naming Flu: Classification and its Conflicts.- Chapter 3. Modernising Flu: Re-Aligning Medical Knowledge of the 'Most Protean Disease'.- Chapter 4. Fighting Flu: Military Pathology and the 1918-19 Pandemic.- Chapter 5. Mobilising Flu: The Pandemic and the Genesis of British Medical Virus Research.- Chapter 6. Modelling Flu: Dog Distemper and the Promise of Virus Research.- Chapter 7. Viralising Flu: Towards a New Medical Consensus.- Chapter 8. Globalising Flu: Systems of Surveillance and Vaccination.- Chapter 9. Conclusion: 'The Most Protean Disease'.- Chapter 10. CODA: Influenza and Covid-19