ABSTRACT
While influenza (and ‘influenza-like’ illnesses) occur throughout our medical history, they rarely appear in the written histories. For example, Cartwright’s 1972 discussion of diseases and their role in human history contained no mention of influenza and William McNeill’s 1977 study only just acknowledged the pandemic of 1918-19 and the potential for future epidemics. More recently, Peter Baldwin’s examination of the divergent public health approaches of Sweden, Germany, France and England, as expressed in their responses to contagious disease in the period 1830-1930, managed to avoid any assessment of the single greatest outbreak of infectious disease in that timespan, focusing instead on diseases such as cholera, smallpox and syphilis (Baldwin 1999). Cartwright may have overlooked influenza in his earlier work, but this was corrected in later work (Cartwright 1983), where he ranked the influenza pandemic among the three worst pandemics in history, alongside the Justinian plagues (c.AD 540), and the Black Death (the fourteenth century).1 Kenneth Kiple’s lavishly illustrated history of disease summarises the salient points of each of these episodes (Kiple 1997). Kiple recognises distinct similarities between the plagues of the sixth and fourteenth centuries in terming the earlier event ‘The Plague of Justinian: an early lesson in the Black Death’ and noting that ‘[o]verall mortality was placed by contemporary observers at 100 million’ (Kiple 1997: 29).
