The Spanish Flu Killed More Than 50 Million People, but We're Only Now Beginning to Rec... - 0 views
-
virus was a novel concept in 1918, and there was no diagnostic test for flu. That means that there was no such thing as a laboratory confirmed death from the disease,
-
Until the 1990s, people thought that around 22 million people had died. It wasn’t until 1998, the 80th anniversary of the disaster, that Australian historian and geographer Niall Johnson and German flu historian Jürgen Müller came up with the current estimates, which means that for 80 years humanity only had a tiny inkling of its loss in 1918. It was really only in the 21st century that people realized the full impact of the Spanish flu.
-
Scholars in the humanities, who have long been interested in collective memory, point out that impact is not the same as meaning. Meaning depends on language—that is, on having the language available to describe exactly what happened and why.
- ...8 more annotations...
-
That language was lacking in 1918. In large swathes of the world, people still viewed epidemics as acts of god and considered themselves helpless against them.
-
the plague’s lethality didn’t only vary across time, it varied across space too. If you lived in certain parts of Asia, you were 30 times more likely to die of the Spanish flu than if you lived in certain parts of Europe. New York City lost 0.5 per cent of its population, Western Samoa 22 per cent.
-
We now have the vocabulary to explain these troubling disparities. Concepts like immune memory and genetic predisposition have taken over that task from divine retribution. We understand that social and economic factors shape health as much as biological ones—something that was much less well appreciated at the time
-
we have it in our linguistic toolbox to explain other features of the pandemic too, that were inexplicable then—features such as the subsequent wave of lethargy and “melancholia” (depression) that washed over the world. Today, we call this postviral syndrome.
-
As these concepts were recognized and labelled, the pandemic began to acquire meaning—or rather, a different meaning: the one we recognize today. But it took time.
-
wars and pandemics are remembered differently. Collective memories for war seem to be born instantly, fully formed—though subject, of course, to endless embellishment and massage—and to fade over time.
-
Memories of cataclysmic pestilence therefore build up more slowly, and once they have stabilized at some kind of equilibrium—determined, perhaps, by the scale of death involved—they are, in general, more resistant to erosion.
-
There is a precedent in the 14thcentury Black Death, after all. Like the Spanish flu, it overlapped with a war—the Hundred Years’ War, in its case. Like the Spanish flu it was far more lethal than the war with which it overlapped. But unlike the Spanish flu it is not treated as a mere footnote to that war.