Brilliant responses thank you!
I now have
parapath = "../Kaggle Datasets/cell-images-for-detecting-malaria/cell_images/Parasitized/"
parafiles = readdir(glob"*.png", parapath)
paraimages = hcat(reshape(map(load,parafiles),:))
and the same for the uninfected images. I then use
X = vcat(paraimages,unimages)
to get my input array. Is this the standard input type for flux?