The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public Health in Canada

Abstract

Despite its unprecedented mass mortality and recent popularity among historians, the 1918–19 Spanish influenza pandemic rarely figures into national histories. Similarly, national, social, and political histories rarely inform histories of this pandemic. Mark Osborne Humphries attempts to fill these gaps in The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public Health in Canada by examining the effect of the 1918–19 epidemic on the development of Canada's public health system. The devastating influenza epidemic, Humphries argues, was the catalyst that helped change the relationship between state and citizen in the realm of public health beginning in late 1918. Prior to the epidemic, the federal government focused on protecting the Dominion from external, foreign threats. After the epidemic, however, the federal government would take responsibility for the health and social welfare of its people. Humphries's narrative traces public health ideology and strategy in Canada from the nineteenth century through the 1918–19 epidemic. For most of the book, this is a narrative about the continuities in public health practice. Following the cholera pandemics of the early and mid-nineteenth century, federal public health officials established maritime quarantine as their primary strategy for protecting Canadians' health. Even though doctors and public health officials accepted a variety of understandings of disease throughout the century, federal quarantine continued to be basis of Canadian public health. Moreover, federal health officials continued to work separately from underfunded provincial and municipal public health boards responsible for maintaining local sanitary conditions. Quarantine persisted as the federal government's main strategy not only because it addressed political anxieties over increasing immigration, but also because epidemics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not devastating enough to call the effectiveness of quarantine into question. While the rather mild first wave of the 1918–19 influenza epidemic did not expose the limits of maritime quarantine, the second wave did.