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

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