Pandemic of 1918: How History and Illness Intertwine

in January of 2018 I did an episode on the influenza pandemic of 1918 that episode was intended to recall what was then a largely forgotten historical event on the centenary of its occurrence and it episode talks a lot about the nature of influenza and the impacts of the 1918 influenza I highly suggest that you watch it but of course events in 2020 have led to renewed interest in the 1918 influenza pandemic and that has prompted me to take another look at the Spanish flu and specifically the way that disease interacts with history of course diseases can impact history they change populations and governments economies and industries and of course families but maybe even more interesting than the idea that disease impacts history is the idea that history can impact disease the 1918 influenza pandemic was intimately affected by its specific place in historical events and that relationship between pandemic and history deserves to be remembered you might think a pandemic is a pandemic what does a virus care about the date but disease cannot be separated from the context of the history around it in 1918 that meant the Great War you might think the influenza which some estimates assumed killed between three and four times as many people as a war would have had a greater impact but the war significally impacted the pandemic and the two are intimately linked one obvious impact was war news and propaganda the understanding response to the pandemic was powerfully affected by the conditions of news reporting caused by the war with a notable impact that it was war propaganda that gave the influenza it's deceptive name the Spanish flu the war impacted reporting on the pandemic in two important ways first war news was simply top of mind and pushed other news out of the way and second bad news including influenza pandemics was suppressed because of the war well there are some indications that the flu was already spreading in 1917 the first confirmed cases came in the spring of 1918 understand the world situation and spring of 1918 the German army began a series of tax called the Ludendorff offensive in March the common understanding is that the offensive was spurred by US entry into the war represent a determination by the German High Command that they needed to knock the Allies out of the war before the new supply of US troops could shift the balance there's plenty to discuss about the impact of the so-called spring offensives on the war but at the time it represented a massive attack that resulted in more than a million and a half casualties and significant territorial gains by the German army after nearly four years of brutal and costly war Farah flew simply could not attract readers like an offensive considered the u.s. as well in the spring of 1918 one of the first places the flu emerged was in the u.s. Midwest in US Army camps more than a hundred cases reported that can't Funston into Fort Riley Kansas in March but still the attention was on the war well the u.s. n officially declared war in April of 1917 and had troops arriving in France by June General Pershing commander of the u.s. Expeditionary Force insisted that US troops be trained before going to war thus US troops did not start arriving in mass until January 1918 and we're not being generally deployed into combat until May in January President Wilson had given his famous 14 points speech landing US goals in a war the public opinion that kept the u.s. Auto since 1914 again how did a flu compare to the entry of young American men into the meat grinder of the great war there was no response or hardly even acknowledgement of the epidemics that we're striking u.s. army camps in March and April this might be because the first wave of the pandemic was relatively mild it was very beer wood and infected lots of people but it didn't kill a lot of people still public health officials should have been concerned as if wounds it could be expected to return in the fall but war distraction the the mildness of the virus and a lack of policy coordination meant that almost nothing was done to prepare for the normal recrudescence of this particularly virulent influenza strain that could be expected come autumn but it was more than just war distraction news of the influenza was suppressed ever since the brutal casualties of 1914 new sources in all sides of the conflict too began censoring bad news out of a sense of patriotic duty supplemented by government action an example being provisions of the United Kingdom's defence of the realm Act passed in August 1914 which included the provision that no person shall by word of mouth or in writing spread reports likely to cause disaffection or alarm among any of his Majesty's forces are among the civilian population newspapers from belligerence it simply become used to reflexively suppressing or burying bad news including epidemics of influenza that represents were the odd impacts that the historical situation in 1918 had on the pandemic while there are many theories as to the actual origin of the Spanish flu there is one point of general agreement the origin of the flu was not Spain as a noncombatant nation Spanish journalists were able to report more freely on the progress of the virus and the press in belligerent nations while unable to report on the influenza in their own countries and among their own troops were free to report on the effect the virus was having in Spain by this means the pandemic became erroneously known as the Spanish flu the effect of war propaganda can best be seen by the increase in reporting that began in July as it became clear that the German spring offensive had failed in their goal of defeating the Allies and had instead exhausted the German army there was more optimism in the West that the war was coming to an end while planning for the post-war future was almost as distracting as the war itself the anticipation of war's end allowed the now called Spanish flu to become news somewhat ironically the offensives whose failures played a role in the Western presses new willingness to acknowledge the influenza partially failed because the effect that the influenza had on the Imperial German army although historians still disagree whether the virus which struck all sides affected the outcome of the war part of the reason for this new acknowledgment was the recognition that the second wave of the 1918 influenza pandemic was much more deadly than the first was just as barrel and it infected almost everybody but it mortality rates were 5 times what it had been in the spring but by the time that was recognized it was too late to do much of the planning that would have allowed public health officials to prepare for the virus in short the unique situation in 1918 meant that a particularly Bureau hland influenza epidemic in the spring of 1918 with largely unnoticed and thus the world was unprepared when it returned in a much more deadly form in the fall but that was not the only way that the war impacted the virus the spread of the virus was facilitated by the movement of troops supplies and displaced populations the influenza struck soldiers especially hard given their living conditions in close contact with highly mobile units the war meant much more contact between people both within and between nations and continents both by the massive mobilization of troops and because millions of non-combatants were displaced and became refugees even when they realized the risk of spreading the illness the u.s. decided against suspending troop movements overseas concerned that stopping the supply of American reinforcements might bolster enemy morale many of the people thus exposed were more susceptible to illness as they were suffering from malnutrition for access to necessities like shelter and clean water and general ill health associated with being a war refugee some soldiers were also more susceptible because their lungs had been damaged by exposure to poison gas that is the influenza not only brought people together to spread viruses it brought together people more susceptible to them even populations that hadn't been displaced were suffering because of war stresses and shortages particularly acute in places like Germany but reaching across oceans and even to neutral States who still suffered from disrupted commerce the influenza was further aided by disruption of medical services the problem is obvious for displaced refugees but even across the Atlantic in the u.s. there was a shortage of doctors and so many had been taken away enlisted in the war there was also a shortage of nurses as medical systems were already strained treating soldiers returning with war wounds and mustard gas burns one social impact of the influenza was that the army was prompted to lift its prohibition on employing african-american nurses in fact the war might itself be responsible for the high mortality rates of the deadly second wave in normal flu years the virus usually becomes less deadly with time this is because people with milder cases tend to continue to go to work and about their daily life whereas people with more severe cases are more likely to stay home thus it tends to be the milder cases that spread at this same time more severe cases tend to flatten quickly burning out as they kill their hosts in the war however the soldiers with milder cases stayed at the front while those with more severe cases were brought back packed on crowded troop trains and ships and crowded into hospitals there the more deadly strains affected more soldiers whose movements then spread the more deadly version of the illness the movement of sick troops also constantly spose new and healthy troops to the virus this allowed the virus to mutate and grow more Berlin without burning out the nature of the war might have meant a more deadly virus the war affected the course of the pandemic on the homefront as well on September 28th despite the fact that the influenza was raging at nearby military bases some two hundred thousand people gathered for a war bond parade in Philadelphia the expression of patriotic fervor exposed a massive population to a virus that struck fast hard every bed in Philadelphia's hospitals was full within just 72 hours of the parade 2,600 people died in Philadelphia from the flu or its complications within a week of the parade that number increased to more than 4,500 the following week public health officials had partly ignored warnings because the great pressure to meet bond drive quotas a month and a half later a spontaneous celebration in the city over the artist that into the war resulted in yet another outbreak there is some evidence that public health officials were reticent to take appropriate measures and willing to establish quarantines to protect war industries although other historians argue that the war allowed greater public acceptance of public health responses because people become used to limitations based on public interest citizens had already come to accept the drafting of soldiers government control of industries and rationing of goods so actions like quarantines and closing businesses might have been easier to enact the war represented a time of extreme nationalism and patriotism while those impulses might have been the cause of the censorship that prevented an initial public health response they likely aided in deploying Public Health responses in some locations the effect of the 1918 pandemic on the economy has been relatively understudied but again what we know is that the effects of the virus and history are intertwined one of the unique aspects the 1918 influenza was that it significantly affected people in the prime of their lives this was caused by a cytokine response where the body's own immune responses cause informations in the lungs this caused significant economic impact says families often lost breadwinners but the impact was more significant at the time because it was already an industry labor shortage due to the war many businesses were at least temporarily crippled by the combination generally the economic impacts have been described as being significant in the short term but also short-lived the reason is that despite killing more people than the war the economic impacts of the war from industries devastated in the war zone to substantial growth in government and taxation to setting the groundwork for the growth of Bolshevism two new waves of isolationism and trade protectionism so dramatically changed the world economy then it simply dwarfed the impact of the pandemic epidemics in history are always going to be intertwined epidemics occur in the context of the time and which they occur consider for example medical technology at the time the 1918 pandemic came at a time when there was very little understanding of viruses which had just been discovered in 1898 and which still could not be seen under microscopes of the time there was no such thing as antiviral medication many of the people that died in the pandemic actually died from bacterial pneumonia because the influenza would attack the lungs and the brachial tubes and would make them more susceptible to bacterial infection but just a decade after the 1918 pandemic Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin which might have saved those lives and just a decade after that Joseph sock developed the first vaccine against flu viruses others may have died from overuse of aspirin as doctors prescribed high amounts to treat the fever caused by the influenza high amounts of aspirin can exacerbate the problem of fluid in the lungs actually worsening flu symptoms this was again impacted by a coincidence of the times the patent on aspirin held by Bayer expired in 1917 leading to competition to sell the drug aspirin was heavily marketed to doctors especially by Bayer who was trying to retain his control of the market but doctors had a limited understanding of its use and packages generally did not include instructions about its use or safety had the same influenza struck a decade or two later you might have tread an entirely different path right now there are expert some pundits of all types trying to glean from the experience in 1918 and 1919 everything they can find that might be useful in 2020 and there might be some useful information there about public health responses but the fact that we're still looking for those answers 102 years later suggests thing might not be so easy to find but as historian the experience in 1918 teaches us something different it teaches us perspective it teaches us that we are not just victims of historic events but that we shaped them by the way that we react to them in a way you can say that history really is just the way that people respond to things like viruses [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered

Views: 264,883

Keywords: history, the history guy, history guy, 1918 pandemic, spanish flu, wwi, the great war, world war i

Id: AbXolvI70e8

Length: 14min 24sec (864 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2020