Ninety years after the discovery of human influenza virus, Michael Bresalier’s new book, 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 this discovery 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 bookis a history of how virus researchers, clinicians, and epidemiologists, medical scientific and public health bodies 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 is the first systematic study of how influenza became viral and how virological knowledge re-shaped medical, epidemiological, and public health policies and practices that inform approaches to the disease to this day.
The ebook will be available to Swansea University students and staff through iFind: https://whelf-swansea.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma998643562602417&context=L&vid=44WHELF_SWA:44WHELF_SWA_VU1&lang=en&search_scope=MyInstitution&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine&tab=Stacked&query=any,contains,Modern%20Flu&offset=0