12 - The Pasteur Institutes between the two world wars. The transformation of the international sanitary order

Summary

Throughout the nineteenth century the international sanitary order had relied on quarantine and the surveillance of travellers and goods. More than half a century of international sanitary conferences, in all twelve meetings from 1850 to 1912, can be summarised as leading to the establishment of sanitary cordons against all pestilences coming from the East and an attempt to control migration, in particular the great pilgrimages.

The First World War fostered a new type of interest in international health with the recognition of the devastating potentialities of epidemic agents on multitudes thrown together in a giant battlefield. The Balkan experience was crucial in that it exposed millions of men, coming from all countries in the world, to a wide range of epidemic hazards, including water-borne diseases, typhus and malaria.

Two kinds of considerations, political and epidemiological, rendered the sanctuarist view pointless:

the vagaries of battlefields illustrated the similarities of epidemiological conditions across borders and the necessity of co-ordinating national actions in the domain of public health;

health was posited as an important factor in the planning of a future and, it was hoped, better world in a new geopolitical space.

The pacifist wave after the Treaty of Versailles led to the perception of public health as an ingredient of civilisation and a condition of international peace.