Uses of a Pandemic: Forging the Identities of Influenza and Virus Research in Interwar Britain

Abstract

This paper counters the tendency to retrospectively viralise the 1918-19 pandemic and to gloss the important historiographical point that, in Britain, such knowledge was in-the-making between 1918 and 1933. It traces the genesis of influenza's virus identity to British efforts in 1918-19 to specify the cause of the pandemic and it examines how, in the 1920s, the British Medical Research Council used the connection between a virus and the pandemic to justify the development of virus research and to make influenza a core problem around which it was organised. It shows that the organisation of medical virus research was inextricably linked to the pandemic before the actual discovery of flu virus in 1933. Recognising that the relationship between the virus and the disease itself has a history demands we rethink the pandemic's medical scientific legacy and the crucial role of virus research in shaping its history.

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