Of Bodies, Families, and Communities: Refiguring the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

Abstract

Spanish influenza of 1918 has been called a forgotten pandemic, lost in the archives amidst records of the War, the armistice, and the new era of modernity ushered in by these cata- clysmic events. was not Spanish flu did not keep pace with the war in terms of destruction of life. Estimates of the flu's death toll hover around fifty million people in a single year, while World War I was responsible for about eight and a half million casualties. 1 was the war had such a powerful hold on cultural memory. As Paul Fussell (quoting Vernon Scannell's poem, The War) observes in War and Modern Memory, 'The war was called invades the mind . . .' and war detaches itself from its normal location in chronology and its accepted set of causes and effects to become in another sense—all-encompassing, all- pervading, both internal and external at once, the essential condition of consciousness in the twentieth century. 2 Great Influenza, it seems, made for a less compelling story. Alfred W. Crosby points out its conspicuous absence from modern history textbooks and from the oeuvres of the great American writers in the 1920s. John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway—none of these authors treated the flu in any detail in their work. 3 It is especially puzzling, says Crosby dryly, that among those Americans who let the pandemic slip their minds were many members of group of supposedly hypersensitive young people who were to create some of the greatest masterpieces of American literature, i.e. 'the lost genera- tion' for so many of whom World War I, the other great killer of the era, was the central experience of their lives. 4 In his account, by the end of the decade, the pandemic seemed destined to become a mere footnote in literary history.