ABSTRACT
The 1918–1919 influenza pandemic (as well as earlier outbreaks of this disease, especially in 1889–1890) was simultaneously a highly visible and a partially hidden event. It was difficult to hide the full hospitals and nearly paralysed economies, mounting piles of cadavers and coffin shortages. Yet these relatively brief epidemics of an acute illness did not favour the development of disease-centred identities: the effects of the 1918 pandemic blended with other war-related disasters; the global number of the dead was very high, but most sick people recovered, and high mortality in ‘peripheral’ countries such as India was not immediately visible in the West. Despite numerous articles in professional journals and the general press – important direct and indirect political consequences of the ‘Spanish flu’ – it became a forgotten pandemic, or as Anne Rasmussen aptly puts it, an event that was invested in strongly by memory, but weakly by history. The oft-repeated statement, ‘the Spanish Flu killed more people than World War I’, provided a glib and superficial conclusion that masked the absence of serious scholarship. But this is no longer true. Over the last 20 years, there has been a growing interest in past influenza pandemics, and particularly that of 1918, among virologists, molecular biologists, epidemiologists and demographers, as well as historians.
