IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB294752241

The “Spanish” Flu and the Pandemic Imaginary (2023)

Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 114
Issue: S1
Pages: S143-S161
Publication date: 2023
Language: English

DOI: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/726984

URL: https://isiscb.org/special-issue-on-pandemics/essay.html?essayID=15

Publication Date: 2023
Edition Details: IsisCB Special Issue: Bibliographic Essays on the History of Pandemics

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Few diseases are extensively diffused as influenza, but though flu pandemics occur with regularity throughout history the bibliography is dominated by the 1918-1919 “Spanish influenza” pandemic. This review argues that this preoccupation is largely a product of historical epidemiology and retrospective statistical analysis which has made the Spanish flu the reference point against which other modern respiratory pandemics, including COVID-19, are measured—hence the Spanish flu’s importance for the 21st century pandemic imaginary. The review identifies six distinct thematic areas within the historiography of H1N1 Spanish influenza. These include medical writings which attempt to read the history of the Spanish flu backwards to “learn” public health “lessons” for the mitigation of future pandemics, and ecological writings in which influenza is seen as the paradigm of an emerging infectious disease and a model for the genesis of epidemics and pandemics from zoonotic reservoirs. Scholarship since 1997 also reflects a growing interdisciplinarity, one in which bioarchaeology and molecular dating techniques have furnished new insights into the history of influenza and the Spanish flu’s evolutionary origins, bringing the life sciences into closer dialogue with the medical and environmental humanities. These scientific insights have spurred both academic and popular writings on the Spanish flu, rendering its characterization as the “forgotten pandemic” something of an oxymoron. Indeed, if anything, the centenary of the Spanish flu in 2018 and the 2019-2023 COVID pandemic have provoked renewed interest in several of the themes identified in this review: including, most particularly, the writings of social historians of medicine, cultural historians, and disease demographers.

...More

Included in

Article Weldon, Stephen P.; Sankaran, Neeraja (2023) Scholarship in the Time of COVID-19: An Introduction to the IsisCB Special Issue on Pandemics. Isis Bibliography of the History of Science (pp. 1-5). unapi

Citation URI

stagingisis.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB294752241

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Lukas Engelmann; (2023)
Coinfection, Comorbidity, and Syndemics: On the Edges of Epidemic Historiography

Article Heiner Fangerau; Ulrich Koppitz; Alfons Labisch; (2023)
A Survey of Historical Works on Pandemics in the German Language

Article José Ragas; (2023)
History of Pandemics in Latin America

Article James Stark; (2023)
Making Microbes: Theorizing the Invisible in Historical Scholarship

Article Maria Conforti; (2023)
History of Epidemics: A Bibliographical Essay on Secondary Sources in Italian and on Italy

Article Matheus Alves Duarte Da Silva; Jules Alexander Skotnes Brown; (2023)
Emerging Infectious Diseases and Disease Emergence: Critical, Ontological and Epistemological Approaches

Article Michael F. McGovern; Keith A. Wailoo; (2023)
Epidemic Inequities: Social and Racial Inequality in the History of Pandemics

Article Robert Peckham; Mei Li; (2023)
Epidemic Histories in East Asia

Book Honigsbaum, Mark; (2014)
A History of the Great Influenza Pandemics: Death, Panic and Hysteria, 1830--1920

Thesis Bresalier, M C; (cited 2010)
Transforming Flu: Medical Science and the Making of a Virus Disease in London, 1890--1939

Article James J Harris; (2020)
H1N1 in the ‘A1 Empire’: Pandemic Influenza, Military Medicine, and the British Transition from War to Peace, 1918–1920

Article Brian Dolan; (2020)
It Wasn't Supposed to Be a Coronavirus: The Quest for an Influenza A(h5n1)-Derived Vaccine and the Limits of Pandemic Preparedness

Article M. Kemal Temel; (2020)
The 1918 “Spanish Flu” Pandemic in the Ottoman Capital, Istanbul

Article Rosamaria Alibrandi; (2018)
When Early Modern Europe Caught the Flu. A Scientific Account of Pandemic Influenza in Sixteenth Century Sicily

Article Jahn, Stefanie; (2014)
Die Grippe-Pandemie nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg und die Homöopathie im internationalen Vergleich

Article Ospina Diaz, Juan Manuel; Martinez Martin, Abel Fernando; Herran Falla, Oscar Fernando.; (2009)
Impacto de la pandemia de gripa de 1918--1919 sobre el perfil de mortalidad general en Boyacá, Colombia.

Article Maciel-Lima, Sandra Mara; (2015)
The Impact that the Influenza a (H1N1) Pandemic Had on News Reporting in the State of Paraná, Brazil

Book Bristow, Nancy K.; (2012)
American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic

Book Carlo Caduff; (2015)
The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger

Article Kavita Sivaramakrishnan; (2020)
Endemic risks: influenza pandemics, public health, and making self-reliant Indian citizens