Flu, by Gina Kolata. Chapters 1-2 (The Plague Year; A History of Disease and Death)

[rachelmanija]

If anyone's wondering why the hell I'm reading about historical pandemics, apart from curiosity, the answer is this: they are proof that this too shall pass.

This book could not be more different from Barry's. Reading them concurrently was a good choice. Kolata's focus is twofold: why the 1918 flu pandemic was so much less written about than pretty much every other pandemic before and since, and the scientific mystery of what it was and how both historical and modern researchers tried to unravel that.

So far, at least, Barry had not touched on the first subject at all and is interested in modern research only insofar as it illuminates what was done by the Great White Men during the pandemic. Conversely, Kolata only mentions the greatness of historical white men to place them in context, noting that Welch was very well-regarded at the time to explain why he was dispatched as an old man to investigate the flu outbreak and why the fact that it alarmed even him was notable.

Kolata starts with her history as a student of microbiology to note that the influenza pandemic was barely touched upon compared to other pandemics she studied, and that she got curious as to why such a huge event seemed comparatively lost to history. Then she plunges straight in to an incredibly whirlwind account of it, which conveys its impact without really explaining the how and why. (Notable to me: Tucson, AZ mandated the wearing of masks by everyone.)

Chapter two is not actually a history of all disease THANK GOD, but a brief history of the chronicling of historical plagues, to point out that there was a noticeable lack of that for the 1918 epidemic. She goes into some detail about how little the 1918 epidemic was chronicled at the time and afterward in relation to its immense impact - the doctors who were central in dealing with it barely mention it in their memoirs, a 500-page of William Welch gives it two paragraphs, etc. She surmises that the reason for this is that it was overshadowed by/subsumed into the trauma of WWI, did not leave a large number of disabled survivors, and vanished after running its course, making it both inviting and easy to not dwell on.

Kolata leaves me wanting historical detail and context, which Barry provides. Barry leaves me wanting modern context and perspective, which Kolata provides.

Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

Comments

[minoanmiss]

A good balance, then.
At least you want to read about the pandemics. My roommate wants to watch TV about them, and we only have one TV.

[recessional]

Damn, she does the audiobook herself and her voice is unlistenable for me. Alas.

[duskpeterson]

I have to wonder whether all those people who were forced to shut down their organizations - shops, churches, bars, etc. - were utterly silent afterwards. Not to mention the thousands of people who partook in those organizations. Because I looked over the news headlines at the online encyclopedia on the 1918 flu and, man, they sounded straight out of today's news.

And there's a lot of headlines. Could it just be that historians were falling down on their job, less interested in illness than in battles?

[kathmandu]

I am wondering if it was just relatively un-studied in microbiology classes?

Still leaves the question of *why*, but it was covered extensively in newspapers and stuff at the time. I would think it was much more documented, overall, than, say, the Black Death.

[rachelmanija]

It was covered in contemporary newspapers but, according to Kolata, notably underrepresented in memoirs and histories - very much unlike the Black Death. That is, it wasn't that it wasn't written about at the time, it was that it wasn't much written about afterward.

[jenett]

There's a great episode of Backstory, an American history podcast, that looked at why the 1918 flu got so ignored historically. (The short version is, basically "massive societal trauma" and "inability to have words to talk about something that immense.")

Here's the episode, which includes a full transcript. Recorded in November 2018.

[duskpeterson]

One would think so! I was so amazed, when I got around to looking up the 1918 flu this year, that I'd heard nothing about this historical event, other than passing references. It must have had a major impact on that generation.

long comment is long

[recessional]

(Eta: >.> apologies for equivalent of emphatic hand-flailing. It's all enthusiasm and interest in the subject not meant to be anything else)


Mmmm I think it has a lot more to do with "there was nothing but horror to write about, but also it only lasted a year and didn't completely and totally catastrophically derail our entire society, so we COULD forget it."

While in terms of sheer numbers the Great Influenza killed many more than the Black Death (which is the epidemic everyone compares it to and which, as a mediaevalist, makes my brain hurt), percentage-wise, the Black Death killed half the people in Europe.

That's not half the people who got infected died. That's half the people in Europe died. It took 200 years for the population to recover. The death toll in China may have been worse.

There is honest to gods no remote comparison for the effect on society of the Black Death, vs the effect on society of the Great Influenza. The Great Influenza was horrible and traumatic, it is absolutely true! The Black Death killed up to 60% of Spain's population over the course of two years.

So you really, really REALLY can't compare the two, as epidemics that affect society. They're just not even remotely on the same scale, and the effects that something lke the Black Death had on a society are not at all indicative of what effects a pandemic "normally" have on a society.


When it comes to the Great Influenza, well, bluntly: 1917-1918 were already stuffed fucking full of traumatic events! And where the Great War hadn't over the last several years killed off a million or more people, and possibly involved the physical military occupation and massive destruction of people's actual homes (the ravages of the Great War on Northern France were appalling), like in the USA, governments HAD still been doing things like horribly abridging rights, stirring up horrible paranoia and so on, and otherwise more subtly traumatizing their populations.

And while yes, the GLOBAL death-rate for the Great Influenza was more than the total deathrate for the Great War, the death toll in Britain, for example, was 228,00 people, vs 744,000 deaths from combat (and yes that's excluding influenza deaths: specifically killed, died of combat wounds, or permanently MIA). France, Germany and other countries with fighting on their actual soil, that goes up CONSIDERABLY.

So honestly no: the war was still a much bigger proportionate killer. Where the influenza gets its much higher death toll is because it killed lots of people in countries that had nothing to do with the war, and lost little to no population from it.

On top of that, there were no heroes or GOOD stories about the Great Influenza. The government and public health authorities were absolutely useless and in some cases much worse than useless. People who tried to help each other died. No vaccine, no treatment, no cure, no even effective succour ever happened. Those communities that did weather it without significant harm did it overwhelmingly by ruthlessly cutting off from the rest of the world - and I do mean ruthlessly.

It lasted a year and then it was over, and none of it had anything to do with anything anyone did: the virus just lost its virulence and the epidemic died down. Meanwhile Versailles was in the middle of being its messy self, the war-traumatized were coming home, and there was plenty ELSE to think and talk about - stuff that had more to it than "we flailed about uselessly, a lot of people died, we succeeded at nothing, then it stopped."


But conversely UNLIKE the Black Death, it . . . .then stopped and went away and wasn't a problem anymore. It lasted one year, and its kill rate was less than 5% of the population (a higher percentage than that of those INFECTED, but not the whole population anywhere was infected).

So it was horrible, and ugly, and had no redeeming features and at the time no narrative and nothing to usefully learn from it, but was still often eclipsed significantly by, or just folded into, the societal trauma from other factors, but on the other hand did not in and of itself catastrophically upend society, so it was way more subject to people just . . . .avoiding talking about it and focused on other things.

It started gaining wide societal attention when we hit a point of epidemiology that both offered us Things We Can Do About Major Pandemics AND we got scared of the possibility of a pandemic again (to whit: the late 1990s, when everyone suddenly went "oh shit we could have another influenza pandemic" because we started some epic bird flu and swine flu out of Asia).

Re: long comment is long

[duskpeterson]

I wasn't thinking about the death toll, actually (nor about the Black Death). I was thinking about the economic and social consequences of the flu - which, as we've been seeing, can be just as devastating as the flu itself. There must have been many, many people whose livelihoods were crushed by the shutdowns. Many others would have been deprived of social comforts during that period.

My grandfather was a laborer during the Great Depression. He was emotionally devastated by it. To the end of his life, he was on edge, waiting for another Great Depression to hit. Meanwhile, the nation had gone through WWII, but for my grandfather, WWII meant he was able to get a job finally.

Your assessment makes perfect sense: this was the wrong period for books about a meaningless illness, plus WWI overshadowed everything. But regardless as to whether people wrote books at the time, this is something that historians should have been writing about, to the point where the event became a standard, important part of history textbooks around the time that social history was first incorporated into textbooks. Historians have spent decades digging up information about the lives of people for whom there is little documentary evidence - I hardly need tell a medievalist that. :) We have entire university departments devoted to African American history, to women's history, to LGBTQ history. Meanwhile, I'm rereading a 1939 Sue Barton novel in which the protagonist is trying to prevent a typhoid epidemic, and I'm thinking: When did I hear mention in school of typhoid? Or polio? Or tuberculosis? I cannot remember any medical historical event that was given more than passing mention in my schooling. (The Black Death might have been an exception, but my memories of that come from museum exhibits, not school lessons.) Even the fact that a large proportion of the native people of the Americas were wiped out by European diseases was only mentioned briefly (and not because my high school history textbook lacked sympathy with the victims; we learned quite a lot about the Trail of Tears).

I'm inclined to blame, not the people who were so traumatized by the 1918 flu that they failed to write about it, but my educational system, which sharply divided humanities from the sciences. In a proper educational system, I'd have learned about diseases in science class and learnt about historical diseases in history class.

I attended school in the 1970s. I hope that, with the strong emphasis in American K-12 education these days on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), including the history of STEM, that sharp division is starting to change. I specialize in writing children's educational books, and I fully expect that this will cause publishers to bring out a large number of educational books about historical diseases. I hope that this will also renew historians' interest in the topic. But one does need the proper educational background in order to tackle such topics, and I fear that most historians don't receive that.

Re: long comment is long

[recessional]

I mean to be honest: history and historiography are both genuinely emerging disciplines and the perception of the point of history has changed wildly even over the last hundred years.

And we work off things from the time. So if the survivors aren't writing about it, there's relatively little for us to work with. Written and dissected history comes out of the examination of stuff from the time and from the period just after the time - that's . . . what we have to work with.

Moreover there . . . were honestly historians doing the dry-as-dust work about this shit: that's why now that there is interest that there's stuff to read. But "historians" don't set your highschool curriculae: those are set by teachers at best and politicians at worst. So, uh. How were they supposed to be getting that study to you?

This also has to be then put in the context where up until more or less the 20th century, epidemics and their consequences were such a common part of life that they were unremarkable - and all of them had the same factors as the Great Influenza: for the most part there was no one (that they knew of) to really blame, the epidemic was an act of god, while they had consequences the consequences were generally much less obvious than the consequences of, say, a war, and there was no real agency involved.

So epidemics are much more like natural forces, "acts of god", and are only of interest to historians prior to the shift in what history is ABOUT that happened in the early and mid C-20 (and is still going on, and is unfinished) if they are an obvious direct contributing factor to a big event that they recognized as significant.

(The Black Death is, in fact, so atypical because it was much more known as A Great Dying That Really Mattered.)

I mean: every single war you've ever heard of came with co-occurring significant epidemics. The end of just about every war came with bringing at least one of those epidemics back to the civilian population. It was taken for granted, and thus in many ways invisible, and reconstructing the layers of effect in retrospect is actually both quite difficult, and is often in the forefront of history and historiography - which takes about twenty to twenty-five years if not more to trickle down into stuff taught to non-history-majors.

tl;dr: It's, um. A bit funny to read "renew historians' interest in the topic" and "I fear most historians don't receive [the proper educational background]" when you're literally commenting on a post about a book on the topic written for the popular audience (which means that not only are there are a quite a lot of historians working on the topic but also that at least one of them is interested enough in teaching laypeople that they've made a publicly accessible text instead of publishing for the academic audience).

I mean.

https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=1918+influenza&qt=results_page

Here's the WorldCat results for a simple search of "1918 influenza".

I don't think the issue here is a lack of historians writing about it.

(If you'd like some recommendations for books out of the wide array of approachable-by-layperson histories on pandemics out there, I'd be happy to give some! Just let me know which diseases in particular you're interested in. Cholera is often particularly interesting, but typhus and typhoid also both shaped the world, and smallpox is of course a given.)

Re: long comment is long

[duskpeterson]

I seem to be doing a poor job communicating that I think the educational system is to blame. I mean, historians are products of the educational system too. I don't know at what point the American K-12 school systems routinely began to integrate the humanities and sciences, but that is the point at which I expect a generation of American historians was raised to have a potential interest in medical history. Before then, historians would have going against the grain of their own educations to have an interest in such topics.

I speak from experience here as a history writer: it was my college education that exposed me widely to the history of science, which is one of the topics I write about now. But my college was and is atypical.

"But 'historians' don't set your highschool curriculae"

I can't speak to how curriculae are set by counties and states and the federal government, but I can say that, as someone who writes books that are used in schools, my writings are darned well shaped by historians. I'm working under tight deadlines; I don't have time to do a good deal of primary-source research. I depend heavily on the findings and conclusions of historians.

So if I'm writing a book, say, about the 1910s, and the historians' books that I read have little mention of the 1918 flu, then I'm likely not to mention that topic in my much shorter book. If, on the other hand, a historian devotes an entire chapter to the subject, I'll think, "Hmm - this is obviously important," and I'll be sure to make prominent mention of the 1918 flu in my own book.

Just to be clear: I've never written an educational book on the 1910s (though it's one of my periods as a fiction writer, which is why I've written TB fic). If I did get an assignment to write a book with the title "America in the 1910s," I might well find that historians are writing extensively now about the 1918 flu. But if, as you say, there wasn't a lot of scholarly interest in the topic until the 1990s, that explains why the high school history textbook that I read in the 1970s made little or no mention of the subject. Whoever wrote the history textbook - whether it was a historian, history writer, history teacher, or simply somebody making a living as best they could - would have been drawing upon the scholarship of that era.

"So if the survivors aren't writing about it, there's relatively little for us to work with."

We were talking about books earlier. What about newspaper interviews, oral histories (back when those were possible), diaries, letters, photographs, recordings . . . ? Lord, I could go on forever.

Look, I spent a couple of years researching the history of American gay leather from the 1940s to the 1960s. I don't want to talk about how difficult that was. All of these clubs were engaged in hidden, illegal activities. Many of the leathermen from that period died of AIDS during the 1980s and 1990s.

And yet there were primary sources. There were articles hidden away in tiny little magazines in fairly obscure archives. There was club memorabilia. There were photographs of early leather bars. There were passing mentions of leather in published memoirs. People in the leather community were working asiduously to preserve the memories of the remaining survivors. There were even a few documents in national publications. If you looked, the stuff was there; it was just a matter of doing the work to find it.

Compare that to the amount of evidence that must have been left from the 1918 flu survivors, and compare the number of AIDS survivors who survived till the 21st century with the number of flu survivors who survived till the 1970s. Heck, my own grandparents, granduncles, and grandaunts must have lived through the flu; if I'd known about the 1918 flu and realized how important it was, I could have interviewed them myself in the 1970s. So you can see that a relative lack of documentary evidence could not have been the reason that I don't remember learning anything about the 1918 flu in school.

"I mean: every single war you've ever heard of came with co-occurring significant epidemics. The end of just about every war came with bringing at least one of those epidemics back to the civilian population. It was taken for granted, and thus in many ways invisible, and reconstructing the layers of effect in retrospect is actually both quite difficult, and is often in the forefront of history and historiography - which takes about twenty to twenty-five years if not more to trickle down into stuff taught to non-history-majors."

This is really fascinating! I expect this to have a big impact on educational publishing as time goes on.

Speaking of which, this isn't an educational title, but I ran across this book last year, and it's the sort of book I wished I'd read as a kid:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25898508

Re: long comment is long

[duskpeterson]

"A bit funny to read "renew historians' interest in the topic" and "I fear most historians don't receive [the proper educational background]" when you're literally commenting on a post about a book on the topic written for the popular audience"

My apologies; I was conflating my thoughts about education in the 1970s with the current period when I said that. (Though by "renew" I really did mean renew, not that historians writing about the 1918 flu was something entirely new.)

But do I believe that Americans - including historians - learn enough in school about the history of science? Heck, no. I think the appalling lack of ignorance shown by many Americans currently to how epidemics work (and I include myself in that assessment) shows that the history of medicine is still poorly taught in schools, and that those books you point to aren't being read enough.

[sara]

It's interesting to me to see it framed as "this thing people forgot," because in my family, the 1918 flu is this big horrible thing that...well, it keeps impacting us, honestly. It's kind of our origin story.

[gwyn]

Yeah, I've wondered sometimes if this is an age cohort thing, too. We absolutely learned about it in school, but I'm pretty old compared to most people I know in fandom, and our textbooks in the early-mid seventies would likely have been written in the sixties by people who'd been adversely affected by it and the Depression, and thought it important for younger people to know. It had a huge impact on my dad's family, as his mother was a field nurse in WWI and came home to field hospitals set up to deal with the flu, and lost a number of her co-workers and friends and family to it.

[sovay]

Kolata leaves me wanting historical detail and context, which Barry provides. Barry leaves me wanting modern context and perspective, which Kolata provides.

I'm glad you have access to both of them.

[toastykitten]

NYT just published an article on how social distancing came to be in the modern era. You might be interested. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/social-distancing-coronavirus.html

[oyceter]

WOE I am still #15 in line for 9 copies at the library. This sounds super interesting, though, especially the historiography bits!

[rachelmanija]

Guess you're in for a lot more "WOW these men are awesome. Awesome awesome men!"

Regarding the historical forgetting of the 1918 pandemic

[kathmandu]

I just ran across this reference: "Alfred Crosby's classic monograph on the pandemic - America's Forgotten Pandemic - has a good afterword on historical memory and the forgetting of the virus."

Have not read Crosby myself; cannot vouch personally.

[lokifan]

Kolata sounds very interesting! And thanks for summing up why she thinks the 1918 pandemic was so under-discussed, which I really noticed in 2018.