ABSTRACT
During the interwar years a surprisingly important event happened in most European nations: the spread of hygiene as a professional issue led to the establishment of national institutes of hygiene and national schools of public health. The institutionalisation of public health served as an instrument to establish research programmes around the new experimental medicine. The objective was to scientifically improve health standards, accelerate technical developments to fight disease, and implement national policies derived from transnational expertise and consensus. Consequently, biopolitics emerged as a powerful instrument of control and action against the social and demographic crises of the interwar years. During the interwar years, social hygiene and social medicine were in the forefront of the international political agenda. National and international biopolitics launched a technical response to health problems caused by poor living conditions and social-economic crisis suffered in many European countries. However, experimental hygiene and social medicine strategies attempted to resolve socio-medical problems by combining social reformism and laboratory technology.
