ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the national hygiene research institutes operating in European countries during the interwar years. Once the state and public administrations assumed the responsibility for the health of the nation, this commitment needed to be institutionalised. National institutes researched public health and agreed regulatory norms to decide upon vaccines, prioritised the most urgent problems, kept epidemiological records, and regulated initiatives to avoid intrusion, quackery, and bad practice. National hygiene institutes represented a new age in which health, the state, and experimental science represented the ties that bound together scientific concepts, medical practice, and social and political intervention. Their legitimacy was mainly based on laboratory technologies and social surveys – blood analysis, body exploration, bacteriology, serology, parasitology, vital statistics, and epidemiology. Experimental laboratory techniques played an essential role as an instrument to identify and conceptualise disease, explore bodies, stake out the boundaries of health, identify risk, and isolate threats. The main objective of national institutes was to coordinate social hygiene policies. Most of those institutions were organised and oriented following the same model. This happened not because of a centre-periphery emulative dynamic, but due to transnational influences.
Comparative research on the structure, research programmes, organisation, and facilities refers to the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, the National Institutes of Hygiene and Public Health in Warsaw, Budapest, Belgrade, Prague, Zagreb, Bucharest, Cluj, Madrid, and Oslo. Supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore served as an institutional model and a locus of expertise. All of these institutes were founded to work for the health and wealth of the nation.
