A – Z Challenge: V — Viruses

The 1918 pandemic earned the moniker of the ‘Forgotten Pandemic’ due to its apparent absence from both public consciousness and historical memory. Of course, it was not entirely forgotten – the fact that it is considered ‘forgotten’ at all indicates that it has been at least partially remembered, and my research on virological science has proven that the spectre of the 1918 pandemic has haunted virology from its earliest 1918 laboratory days. However, the pandemic’s general absence from the historical record is notable. Outside of medical circles, there was very little engagement with the pandemic till later flu pandemics, as well as the emergence of HIV/AIDS rekindled a public interest in 1918 experiences.  

The cause of this historiographical dearth was a topic of much discussion at the first conference on ‘Spanish Flu’ held 80 years after the pandemic in 1998. Suggestions offered for the lack of historiographical engagement included: the overshadowing of the pandemic by the First World War’s Armistice, which fell during the second, deadliest wave; the omission of the medical profession’s failure to cure, or even isolate with certainty the cause of the pandemic due to it not fitting the triumphalist medical narrative of the 1914-18 conflict; or, as a 1921 article in The Times suggested the very fact that  ‘‘So vast was the catastrophe [of the pandemic]…that our minds… refused to realize it’.[2]

Beyond these reasons, however the conference and its accompanying edited volume also highlighted broader historiographical trends that contributed both to the pandemic’s initial exclusion, and its increasing re-emergence within historical thought. Within the edited volume’s introduction, editors Howard Phillips and Edward Killingray identify how in the years following the 1918 Influenza, histories of the pandemic were considered ‘utilitarian objects[s] for quite specific epidemiological investigation and, consequently…[were] seen through a narrowly medical science lens.’[3] Epidemic histories were treated as medical case histories, diagnostic tools intended at shedding light on the causes of the pandemic’s devastation but not offering commentary on its political, social or cultural impacts. Surveys of the pandemic’s statistical impacts were undertaken between the 1920s and 1960s, with some also beginning to engage with the pandemic’s social impacts, however for Phillips and Killingray it was the ‘changing intellectual climate in universities from the mid-1970s onwards’ that stimulated a true advancement in historiographical representation of the pandemic.[4] The Cultural Turn of the 1970s facilitated the development of new methods of historical study, including an increased focus on social history, gender studies and the practice of ‘history from below’. Phillips and Killingray highlight this alongside mention of the emergence of environmental history and the social history of medicine as not just new sub-disciplines but also ones which were considered ‘respectable’, thus allowing epidemics to begin to ‘be perceived as part of the mainstream of history and not as some quirkish phenomenon in the margins of the past.’[5]