Medicine and the culture of command: the case of malaria control in the British Army during the two World Wars.

Perhaps more than any other disease, malaria serves as a potent symbol of the struggle between humankind and the natural world. Scientific and technical advances-from Ross's identification of the malaria vector to the application of DDT during the Second World War-have promised much but have so far failed to provide any lasting solution to the devastation caused by the disease. Yet at the close of the Second World War it was confidently expected that malaria could be not only controlled but eradicated, since newly-developed drugs and insecticides had seemingly paved the way for Allied victory in Italy, South East Asia, and the Far East. The official histories of the Allied medical services, written in the first decade or so after 1945, were justly proud of this achievement and celebrated the work of the scientists and medical officers that had effected it. But this triumphalism never entirely obscured a more critical rendering of events, which saw the successes of military medicine not as the inevitable outcome of scientific progress but as a hard-won battle over military ignorance. The medical officer was portrayed as an heroic figure, battling against "red tape" and incompetent commanders, whose cause was vindicated by the "victory" over malaria and ultimately over the Axis Powers. These histories are free of the distortion and bias which characterizes so many official histories of the First World War but they are unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. Firstly, whilst giving credit to "enlightened" military commanders, they still tend to exaggerate the role of the medical officer vis a' vis his combatant counterpart. They also exaggerate the military importance of the medical contribution to the war effort which, though considerable, was less marked than the official histories would have us believe. Thirdly, they do not attempt any systematic analysis of the relationship between technological innovation and diffusion in the armed forces. The benefits of new technologies are seen as self-evident and any reluctance to utilize them as proof of the ignorance or incompetence of the commanders concerned. Their story is one of "lessons learnt" and "forgotten", with very little consideration of why these lessons were learnt or forgotten.