One in four Americans was struck by the influenza virus of 1918–20
TACOMA, Wash. – Americans’ famous optimism and belief in progress can make them reluctant to remember parts of their history that do not fit the template. One of those ill-fitting stories, author and history professor Nancy Bristow writes, was the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic that killed 50 million people, including more than half a million Americans.
The story of the pandemic did have the requisite American heroes, the University of Puget Sound professor explains in her new book American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic (May 2012; Oxford University Press). But the calamitous event also exposed a deep vulnerability and weakness in the nation’s health and social systems—contradicting Americans’ favored understanding of themselves and their history.
What actually happened during those two dark years was summed up in an October 1919 lecture by Mazyck P. Ravenel, professor of preventive medicine at University of Missouri. He told a meeting of public health professionals that the pandemic “spread with lightning like speed, went where it listed, and ceased its ravages only when available material was exhausted. ... We must confess that on the whole we made a dismal failure in our attempts to control the spread of influenza.”
The suffering and the personal dilemmas experienced during the scourge were cruelly imprinted on the minds of those who were there—and few were spared. More than one in four Americans were infected by the so-called Spanish flu, and that infection was often from child to parent, spouse to spouse, and neighbor to neighbor.
Victims of the disease suffered severe symptoms; workplaces and schools were shut down; doctors, nurses, and gravediggers were in short supply; public buildings and churches were filled with the sick and the dead; poor and ill families starved because no one would help them; and bodies piled up and rotted in morgues, sometimes unclaimed because their families were too sick to bury them.
Such a catastrophe, which shook every institution and person in the country, might have been imprinted on the public memory for decades to come. Yet, Bristow notes, World War I and the epidemic “were soon conflated into a single struggle in many Americans’ minds, with influenza deaths subsumed under the broader category of wartime loses and the pandemic recast as a chapter in the epic tale of World War I.”
Along with the erasure of the full horror of the pandemic came the obliteration of lessons that could have been learned. Though Bristow acknowledges “there is no simple way to prepare for the pandemics of the future,” as each tends to unfold differently, she says there are human lessons that could serve us well.
Bristow points to the troubled doctors who were dissuaded from analyzing exactly what went wrong because it might clash with the triumphant narrative posed by their profession. She details the unequal treatment of families due to racism or poverty, and how they went unnoticed by a public enthralled with “a tale of shared suffering and a promising future.”
Perhaps most significantly, Bristow says, the optimistic scenario brought an expectation that people should “move on” from the tragedy of their losses. Americans who faced the death of a mother, husband, sister, or son “were left to suffer in silence, their suffering likely deepened by that very silence.”
American Pandemic makes its arguments through the stories of patients, families, doctors, nurses, public health experts—and the author’s own great-grandparents, who died from the disease. For her research Bristow turned to letters, diaries, oral histories, memoirs, newspapers, photographs, government documents, and health care literature. With this book Bristow gives voice to those who lived a lifetime in silence and questions our wisdom of choosing our history, rather than remembering it.
Press-quality photos of Nancy Bristow and the American Pandemic book cover can be downloaded from: www.pugetsound.edu/pressphotos
Photos on page: Top right: Book cover; Above left: Nancy Bristow, by Ross Mulhausen; Above right: Passenger without mask not allowed on Seattle streetcar, 1918 (Government archive).
Tweet this: American Pandemic, new book by Nancy Bristow @univpugetsound, reveals the 1918 influenza scourge as it truly was. http://bit.ly/JPn3ZQ
Follow us on Twitter! www.twitter.com/univpugetsound