After watching researchers try to recover bodies from the 1918 flu in the Arctic, I went back to school to study the social history of epidemics. I couldn't understand why 1918 sparked no major memorials, no novels, no plays. How could societies collectively agree to forget mass death?
Welp.
Welp.
Comments
Wonder if WW1 overshadowed writing about the 1918 pandemic?
"The Spanish flu is remembered personally, not collectively. Not as a historical disaster, but as millions of discrete, private tragedies."
One example is how people stopped talking about the 1937 New London School explosion until the survivors realized that it was forgotten and started reuniting 40 years later. Even then, it took about 20 more years to make an impact.
https://upine.medium.com/the-vast-reach-of-right-wing-disinformation-fbcee2715db7
We would be required to put the work in and most would rather not.
When I was back in school I read a number of accounts that were essentially oral histories, collected from places such as the American West and the Canada prairies. Not literary, but really haunting.
https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article241812591.html
It is still possible to see the building where the servicemen were 'disinfected' from the influenza.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20200505-tasmanias-ruggedly-beautiful-quarantine-site
I was told that at an enterprising local farmer once collected and ground up some of the bones to feed to his chickens.
Oh, and it was 1918.
The best book about it is Pete Davies, "Catching Cold" (the US title), Penguin.
https://www.motherjones.com/coronavirus-updates/2020/05/the-1918-flu-pandemic-changed-literature-more-than-you-think/
And then I worked in a hospital during the recent pandemic.
Now I understand.
I did not work in a hospital but in a school where I caught covid & then developed long covid which has left me disabled, likely permanently as I got it in 2020.
Much as I would like to forget or escape, I cannot, & its omission feels like my erasure.
🤷🏻♂️
Empathy exhaustion or compassionate crisis, they all add up.
1914-1918 🙄
It didn't kill feudalism or anything like that (the whole tied to the land thing was dying out already, and was never as systematic as the myth says). But it created images that still resonate
It's a cultural ghost.
The researcher I was following to the Arctic was led to an interest in 1918 because of that disease.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC340389/#:~:text=Both%20contemporary%20epidemiological%20studies%20and,Riley%2C%20in%20Kansas.
$3/m Maybe $8. It was worth it.
Sidenote: I would argue that COVID is also very political
https://www.ngataonga.org.nz/search-use-collection/search/23785/
But the most famous pre-covid work is the book (& play based on the book) Black November, but there have been others.
https://www.canterbury.ac.nz/news-and-events/news/uc-emeritus-professor-helps-pm-unveil-national-1918-flu-pandemic
They never mentioned the flu. Because they got sick and died from
All of this was common among working class families in the 1930s. Staying alive was the goal.
You see the problem.
The funny thing is that none my 'blood' family in the uk got Covid 19 but husbands of my nieces did. Did we get some immunity from the 1918 pandemic?
Does this count?
https://www.canadianplayoutlet.com/products/unity
And also, publishers may not feel comfortable accepting those works yet
I think the reason is simple. More men than women die in a war. More women and children than men die in a pandemic.
It's always the misogyny.
Unquestionably, however, dying in the war was treated as heroic, dying of the disease wasn't.
Indeed, many men died of dysentery in the trenches, and that's shameful as well.
(I know from family history that many women died from flu)
For pregnant women the flu pandemic was the most deadly.
Because of the many dead men during ww1 and also the flu (where I think men actually were overrepresented), there was about 80 to 100 ratio of men to woman in the age range 20-40 in many European countries.
But to your point, that epidemic was all but erased from public memory, leaving us doomed to repeat it. So much of Covid was avoidable.
The wars sapped a huge amount of emotional energy from anyone who would’ve made the art, & the sheer burden of death & grief given the numbers dying
1/
Anyway—it’s fascinating and I’d love to know more
"I had a little bird, and its name was Enza, I opened the window, and in flew Enza."
Which was apparently a skipping rhyme?
Slim pickings though!
A pocket full of poses
A tiss ue
A tiss ue
We all fall down
Pocket full of Posies.
Ashes, Ashes.
We all fall down
It's about the Bubonic Plague in the middle ages.
Ring around the rosie was the pustule. Posies to disguise the stench of rotting flesh. Ashes for the burned bodies. We all fall down... because it killed so, so, so many.
https://eu.chillicothegazette.com/story/news/2020/03/31/1918-spanish-influenza-and-schools/5093316002/
I was reminded of it by the research showing ventilation PREVENTS spread of COVID-19 (see @trishgreenhalgh.bsky.social passim)..
Odd, but then it’s a children’s rhyme!
The Flu took out the very young, old, and those in their prime.
Those who survived were often rendered disabled and relied on their families for care.
Those who survived unscathed or uninfected felt superior. Since survivability was tied to access to care and medication...
Thus, the Eugenics movement was born. The adherents of which touted the virtue of racial cleanliness, (re. Inbreeding) which led to the American and European Fascist movements. ...
Yes, the concept existed. However, it reached its heights after the pandemic and is gaining popularity among racists again.
To acknowledge any of the victims would be admitting they were wrong, and that's a bridge too far for those in power.
I like to think that someday, somewhere, some researcher will find my words useful.
In Downton Abbey A New Era (2022), film star Myrna Dalgliesh reveals to Daisy that she had an older sister who died of the Spanish Flu
Musk & the Senile Decayed Yam Sock Puppet:
"Let's cripple the CDC and find out, shall we?"
Everybody gets very scared and a bunch of people die. A lot of empty chairs. Usually randomly.
You want to remember that?
I think this plays a much bigger role in the cultural silence than acknowledged.
But I bet a lot of these idiots partied, got infected, got just a bit sick, killed grandpa, but never realized they were the cause.
It makes me remember why I stick around here and have tried hard to make this place work better for all of us. :)