Overview
- 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
Part of the book series: Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History (MBSMH)
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (10 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
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.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Michael Bresalier is Lecturer in the History of Medicine and co-director of the Medical Humanities Research Centre at Swansea University, in the UK.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Modern Flu
Book Subtitle: British Medical Science and the Viralisation of Influenza, 1890—1950
Authors: Michael Bresalier
Series Title: Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-33954-6
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2023
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-33953-9Published: 10 September 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-67400-8Due: 13 November 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-33954-6Published: 09 September 2023
Series ISSN: 2947-9142
Series E-ISSN: 2947-9150
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXVII, 458
Number of Illustrations: 30 b/w illustrations, 15 illustrations in colour
Topics: Modern History