The Spanish Flu: Lessons

I look at the history of the Spanish Flu of 1918 - the worst pandemic in history - asking what lessons we can learn. Avoiding a traditional approach to the story, I look at history’s worst pandemic from a number of perspectives. As a preface, I think about the memory of the flu and remembrance of World War One – why was the Influenza forgotten, while the war memorialised by poets like John McCrae? Then, institutional, looking at the two main institutions involves in the response: the military and the bacteriologists. Then, material, looking at the ways it spread and how quarantines were attempted to stop it. Third, ideologically, how did ideas of the time distort the response. I look in particular at cinemas, religion in Africa, and apartheid.

Ultimately, there is a theme that runs through memories of the Spanish Flu: Failure.

The historian Niall Johnson sums up Britains failure like this:

‘the perception of disease, the fact that it was ‘only’ influenza, the relatively mild nature of the first wave in the spring of 1918, Imperialist or racist views and the ‘superiority’ of the English, the confidence in scientific medicine to find a vaccine, the quest for professional status of the profession, the power of ‘scientific’ medicine prevailing over preventive, and the rejection of state intervention. Many of these contributed to a delay in the reaction and recognition of the existence of a problem, particularly when the second wave arrived in the autumn of 1918.’

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Credits:

Stock footage provided by Videvo, downloaded from

Sources:

Mark Honigsbaum, The Pandemic Century: 100 Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris

Niall Johnson, Britain and the 1918 Influenzas Pandemic: A Dark Epilogue

In Influenza and Public Health Learning from Past Pandemics, ed. Tamara Giles-Vernick and Susan Craddock

Anne Rasmussen, Prevent or Heal, Laissex-faire or Coerce? The Public Health Politics of Influenza in France, 1918-1919.

Patrick Zylberman, Comment: Influenza Epidemics and the Politics of Historical Analogy.

Ilana Lowy, Influenza and Historians: A Difficult Past

Michael B.A. Oldstone, Viruses, Plagues, and History: Past, Present and Future.

Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck, and Emil Verner, Pandemics Depress the Economy, Public Health Interventions Do Not: Evidence from the 1918 Flu