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1918-19 flu pandemic

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    1918-19 flu pandemic

    You can get a sense of how much the world, and in particular attitudes to life, death and government, have changed over the last 100 years by reflecting on how people seem from the historical record (supplemented no doubt in some cases by personal memories of things our grandparents might have told the older amongst us when we were young) to have reacted to the “Spanish” flu pandemic.

    There are obvious reasons for that of course, the biggest three probably being (a) the time overlap with a world war which itself brought death on an industrial scale, (b) the much greater prevalence of premature death more generally in those days from a range of causes and (c) the fundamentally more limited conception pre mid 20th century of what could and should be the role and the ambition of national government. But the difference is still startling.

    One proxy for how much the pandemic occupied the minds of parliament and government in the UK might be the attention it receives in biographies of the leading UK politicians of the time. In Roy Hattersley’s biography of the then PM Lloyd George the flu gets one mention only - a few lines in passing on a single page, when DLG catches the flu himself and is confined to bed for nine days, Hattersley mentioning in passing that the epidemic claimed 150,000 lives in Britain. I also checked the indexes of biographies of the Asquith family (who to be fair had suffered major war bereavement) and of Bonar Law, and apparently the pandemic doesn’t get a single mention in either.

    #2
    There's a good docu on the iPlayer at the moment about it. One minor nugget is that the makers posit that the 'Spanish' flu started in the USA, although Wikipedia disputes this.

    On the historical memory point, the 68-69 'Hong Kong' flu pandemic that killed 80,000 in the UK had pretty much fell down the memory hole here.

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      #3
      It started in Haskell County, Kansas, according to Charles Emmerson's 'Crucible' which I'm currently reading (an uneven but intriguing book that covers world events of the years 1917-24 by constantly jumping from place to place as time rolls on, pulling it all together by focusing on figures who were or would become significant - the Kaiser, the Bolshevik leaders, Mussolini and Hitler, but also Einstein, Freud and others). The specific source cited by Emmerson is John M. Barry's 'The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History' from 2005.

      '"Most everybody over the county is having la grippe or pneumonia", a local paper reports. At Camp Funston, near Kansas City, where soldiers are trained up for France, a thousand young men fall sick over the next few weeks.'

      As you'd expect, the flu gets more mentions over the next couple of years of Emmerson's narrative, but for the most part remains a shadowy background presence. I'm still in 1920 though.

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        #4
        Until recently, all I knew of the 1918-19 flu was that it was the first time the Stanley Cup wasn’t awarded. Until the strike year. And, probably, this year.

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          #5
          Some recent discussion has suggested 2 alternative sources as well as Kansas (in France and China). I will have a look at the books mentioned above, thanks.

          My grandmother Annie Dillon died from the illness. She was 32 and left 5 children- the Da was only a baby. I used to ask my aunt (1908-89) about it. One nice touch is that her grand daughter (born 1978) is the spit of Annie

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            #6
            My grandmother was a nurse in London during it.

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              #7
              Barry's book is excellent, though it focuses on the US experience (which evokes the current situation in many ways, as well as being rather terrifying in terms of the way in which wartime censorship was used to keep the populace in the dark).

              One reason for the relative lack of mention in journals may be that it peaked and killed very quickly, often within 48 hours.

              Here's a review from a medical journal

              https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC450178/

              BTW, because of his knowledge of the 18-19 influenza, Barry was part of the team that put together the US pandemic response plan that Trump dismantled.
              Last edited by ursus arctos; 08-04-2020, 13:31.

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                #8
                I'm technically a product of the Spanish flu - my great grandmother was war widowed with 2 young children, but then my great-grandfather lost his first wife to the flu, and so the two widows hooked up, got married and produced my grandmother.

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                  #9
                  There was an interesting article in The Grauniad last week on the rush by Quinine in London at the time, in the belief it was a cure. Uncannily similar to the Hydroquinone rumour today.

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