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This article explores the decisive role of British military medicine in shaping official approaches to the 1918 influenza pandemic. It contends that British approaches were defined through a system of military pathology, which had been established by the War Office as part of the mobilization of medicine for the First World War. Relying on the bacteriological laboratory for the identification and control of pathogenic agents, military pathology delivered therapeutic and preventive measures against a range of battlefield diseases, and military and civilian authorities trusted that it could do the same with influenza. This article traces how it shaped efforts to establish the etiology of the pandemic and to produce a general influenza vaccine. It highlights the challenges involved in both strategies. Understanding the central role of military pathology helps make sense of the nature, direction, scale, and limitations of medical mobilization against the pandemic in Britain and the authority accorded to specific medical bodies for elaborating and coordinating strategies. Crucially, it demands that we rethink the relationship between the war and pandemic as one about the social organization of medical knowledge and institutions.

In reviewing 50 years of personal research on influenza, I have journeyed, literally and figuratively, from an army camp epidemic in Fort Monmouth NJ in 1947 to a (literal and figurative) Valhalla, where I now conduct my research. Having entered the field as a physician, I have always sought practical applications of my work, yet in every instance, such applications have led me to seek further answers in basic research as new questions arose. I entered the area of influenza virus genetics by the back door through an interest in the effects of corticosteroid hormones on viral replication, used the genetic approach in analyzing the morphological variation of the virus and, in so doing, exploited the finding of a linkage of high-yield growth to spherical morphology. Today, all influenza vaccine viruses are high-yield genetic reassortants. Subsequent study of reassortant viruses facilitated the identification and isolation of the two major antigens of the virus in antigenic hybrids and showed their differing functions in the induction of immunity. In turn, a new approach to influenza vaccination has been discovered and is presently under clinical investigation.