ABSTRACT

Pasteurisation and immunisation are two public health practices, not usually considered together, which have become normalised during the last seventy years. I examine the nature of these instruments and ask how they came to be near-universal practices. Pasteurisation refers to the heat treatment of milk to kill harmful bacteria. Immunisation refers to the introduction of disease material into the body in order to stimulate the body’s internal production of antibodies to the disease.1 The first would therefore seem to operate through a logic of sterilisation, and the second, as Bashford argues in this volume, through a logic of contagion.2 Entirely different as procedures, I argue that the two were historically related and that their commonalities illuminate important shifts in the logics of prevention structuring modern Australian public health. Adopted more or less contemporaneously, they signified a new form of public health which both incorporated, and superseded, the strategies that preceded their introduction. Pasteurisation and mass immunisation were primarily constructed through a logic of risk reduction and population protection, different to other infectious disease control policies. Above all, they were signs of the perceived failure of sanitary strategies which were focused on locating and controlling dangerous individuals, and a sometimes reluctant shift to population-level preventive policies based in social protection and risk minimisation. Described in their own terms, they shifted public health policy from practices that aimed at cleanliness to those ensuring safety.