id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
cord-027752-xcpv9k22	Bresalier, Michael	Uses of a Pandemic: Forging the Identities of Influenza and Virus Research in Interwar Britain	2011-12-15		.txt	text/plain	10132	753	56	In May 1922, Walter Morley Fletcher, Secretary of the Medical Research Council (MRC), organized a secret meeting of pathologists at the War Office to outline a new scheme of research on 'diseases probably caused by filter-passing organisms.' 1 Created in 1913, the MRC had used the war to apply laboratory science to military medicine. The pandemic had ignited interest in the nature of filterable viruses, however, the way forward was unclear, as Fletcher observed: 'The chief problem which the investigator of [filterable viruses] meets is the difficulty of proceeding by sound experimental methods.' 3 The purported influenza agent was one of a group of pathogens that could not be seen with light microscopes or studied by the culture methods that had been so successful with bacteria. 11 Especially important were military pathology investigations, supported by the War Office and MRC, into the bacteriology of the pandemic and, in due course, into the role of a 'filterable virus'.	./cache/cord-027752-xcpv9k22.txt	./txt/cord-027752-xcpv9k22.txt