ABSTRACT
What are the fundamental lessons to be gained from the histories of public health when they are applied to pandemics in national contexts? (Porter, 1994). As a way of offering insight into this question, this chapter situates itself in recent scholarship that examines connections between science, medicine and the military (Harrison, 1996; Cooter, Harrison and Sturdy, 1999; Cooter, 2004); it provides a broad framework for exploring the relationship between knowledge about disease, public health interventions and cultural representations of infection. The 1918–1919 pandemic in France saw a shift in ways of thinking about the influence of the bacteriological laboratory and about the understanding of infectious disease as a public health problem.
