American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic

"What Nancy Bristow manages to do is really capture the way in which there isn’t one general American experience of the 1918 flu—that the many ways people experienced it constitute ‘lost worlds’ rather than one, neglected national history of a ‘lost world.’ She begins the book by talking about her own family connection to Spanish flu: she had two great grandparents who died, and her grandfather was orphaned, something she only learned as an adult. Thinking about how that once unknown, discrete, family story is part of a broader, global event—one lost world—is a very effective way to set up a history that talks about a global pandemic at many different levels: personal, local, regional, and national. Bristow considers the pandemic from a variety of angles, pondering how life changed in ways that varied based on class, gender, profession, race, and locality. She’s thinking about what kinds of events were cancelled, what sorts of disagreements doctors had, how doctors and nurses diverged in their reactions, how cities grappled with various practical problems—some of which, very unnervingly, we’re seeing again: morgues filling with bodies, not knowing how to deal with funerals, that kind of thing. What also makes Bristow’s work resonate now is the way she focuses on how ad hoc the response was. Officials and doctors had to adjust as time went on. That gets at something frustrating I’ve found with coronavirus, which is that it’s hard to settle into a routine when the rules keep changing. Even when you think they’re at their most severe, there still are tweaks; you feel constantly unsettled. I think that certainly comes across in Bristow’s work. “City officials didn’t want to acknowledge how bad it was, and were resistant to cancel events” During the short, sharp shock of the flu—the most intense period was the so-called ‘second wave,’ the relatively short period in the fall of 1918, when cities really saw astronomical death rates—she shows us how city officials didn’t want to acknowledge how bad it was, and were resistant to cancel events. Events were only cancelled in a very non-systematic way. We keep comparing the current crisis to that epidemic, I think more than any other. That’s definitely part of the reason I think it’s instructive to read and think about Bristow’s book. It’s full of rich anecdotes, dizzyingly so. As a book, it really is making a conscious effort to include the perspectives not just of government officials, but of doctors and nurses, women and men. Bristow takes pains to emphasize not just that an African American family experienced the 1918 pandemic differently to a middle class white family, but how that was so. She tries to include as many perspectives as possible, and I think that’s what makes this an excellent book. I don’t think ‘Spanish flu’ was endowed with so much racial dog whistling as, for example, Donald Trump’s insistence on calling Covid-19 ‘the Chinese virus.’ I believe the conventional reason given for why it was called the Spanish flu is that news during the war was less censored in Spain, so reports about influenza were particularly detailed there. People thought, okay, it must be coming from Spain. Actually, we could think about another disease, syphilis, to get a good sense of the intense politicization of naming things. It’s not an accident that that malady was called ‘the French disease’ in Britain, the ‘English disease’ in France, and ‘the Spanish disease’ in Italy. It’s never obvious what to call something, and controlling that narrative is difficult. That’s why it’s problematic when someone’s actually making an effort to keep insisting that, you know, this is a Chinese virus, even now that the US has surpassed China in terms of the number of cases."

"This is a fascinating book about a pandemic that, about a hundred years ago, was estimated to have caused perhaps as many 100 million deaths worldwide, with almost 700,000 deaths in the U.S. The scale of death was staggering. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The most interesting part of Bristow’s book is that she so clearly shows the ways in which both the medical profession and municipal officials had no idea what they were dealing with. Something like this hadn’t happened before on that scale. Few really understood how viruses worked at the time. Many thought the flu was a bacterial infection, when in fact it was a virus. She shows that the country was caught unaware. People panicked. The pandemic called into question the efficacy of modern medicine. And movingly, Bristow shows how so many Americans dealt with tragedy of losing multiple members of their family. Bristow tries to investigate why an event that killed an enormous portion of the population in a very short period of time and affected every part of the country left so little mark on the American imagination and memory. Far fewer Americans died in World War I , yet we think of it as a keystone American event. Why doesn’t the flu pandemic hold a similar place in the national memory? It’s an interesting question."