ABSTRACT

Within the framework of a global political and sanitarian crisis that broke out in March 2020, this book proposes a new contemporary look at the great pandemic of the 20th century, the Spanish flu of 1918-1919.

Based on its impact in Spain, the book offers a comparative and transatlantic perspective focused on the political and cultural impact of the pandemic in Europe and Latin America. The book focuses on three aspects: the overwhelming presence of influenza between 1918 and 1920, its oblivion and its political and cultural traces in the interwar decades and even more, and its reappearance in the face of the COVID-19. These three aspects are interconnected through a comparative analysis of the crisis of liberalism and democracy of the 1920s and 1930s and the current populist wave that is affecting the world.

As such, this book is of great value to those interested in social and medical history across Europe and Latin America through offering a fresh outlook on the effects of the pandemic of the 20th century in the wake of the COVID pandemic that swept across the world.

chapter 1|14 pages

Introduction 1

chapter 2|19 pages

Spain and the impact of the 1918 influenza

From the Great War to the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera

chapter 4|20 pages

The 1918 flu in Barcelona and Catalonia

Borders, social emergency and “regionalist fever”

chapter 5|15 pages

The 1918–19 pandemic in Portugal

Memory and forgetting

chapter 6|15 pages

The “Spanish” flu

The Italian case

chapter 8|28 pages

The awareness of death

Portraits and literary memories of the 1918 flu