Inventing utility: Public and professional presentations of bacteriology before the Second World War

This article compares the manner in which the image of bacteriology was being created and reproduced during the first half of the twentieth century in two different types of popular discourse: in the descriptions of progress and utility of bacteriology published in Scientific American and in the presidential speeches to the Society of American Bacteriologists. The observed differences are explained in terms of the growing distance between the professional and the popular discourses on science and the attempts of bacteriologists to create a common professional identity around the concept of “fundamental bacteriology.”;