The Spanish Flu

Narrative and Cultural Identity in Spain, 1918

R. Davis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137339201
• eBook ISBN: 9781137339218
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The 1918 Spanish flu epidemic is now widely recognized as the most devastating disease outbreak in recorded history. This cultural history reconstructs Spaniards' experience of the flu and traces the emergence of various competing narratives that arose in response to bacteriology's failure to explain and contain the disease's spread.

N O T E S

Introduction: Epidemic Genre and Spanish Flu Narrative(s)

1. This and the subsequent quotations from Vergés come from her personal correspondence with Richard Collier, which is part of the Richard Collier Collection housed at the Imperial War Museum in London. Richard Collier Collection. “Spanish Influenza” (Spain) 63/5/4. Imperial War Museum. All translations throughout the present study are mine unless otherwise indicated.

2. Josep Pla, The Gray Notebook, trans. Peter Bush (New York: NYRB Classics, forthcoming).

3. Lluís Bonada, “Com que hi ha tanta grip, han hagut de clausurar la Universitat,” Revista de Girona 180 (1997): 66.

4. Ibid., 67.

5. Ibid.

6. Bonada, El Quadern Gris de Josep Pla (Barcelona: Editorial Empuries, 1985), 11.

7. The number of studies comes from Alfred Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 265. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 2001), 71.

8. On the ebb and flow of interest in the Spanish flu, see Howard Phillips and David Killingray, The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919: New Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2003), 12.

9. In Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic, 321–22.

10. Lucy Taksa, “The Masked Disease: Oral History, Memory and the Influenza Pandemic, 1918–19,” in Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia, ed. K. Darian-Smith and P. Hamilton (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994); Myron Echenberg, “‘The Dog that Did Not Bark’: Memory and the 1918 Influenza Epidemic in Senegal,” in Killingray and Phillips, eds., The Spanish Influenza Pandemic; John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (New York, Viking Penguin, 2004), 231, 232, 236, 241.

11. K. F. Cheng and P. C. Leung. “What Happened in China during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic?” International Journal of Infectious Diseases 11 (2007): 363.

12. World Health Organization, Avian Influenza and Human Health: Report by the Secretariat, April 8, 2004, EB114/6, 114th Session, Provisional agenda item 4.5, October 10, 2006, http://www.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/EB114/B114_6-en.pdf 5.

13. Catherine Belling, “Overwhelming the Medium: Fiction and the Trauma of Pandemic Influenza in 1918,” Literature and Medicine 28, no. 1 (2009): 56. (Emphasis is mine.)

14. Niall Johnson and Juergen Mueller, “Updating the Accounts: Global Mortality of the 1918–1920 ‘Spanish’ Influenza Pandemic,” Bulletin of History of Medicine 76, no. 1 (2002): 115, doi:10.1353/bhm.2002.0022.

15. Jeffrey K. Taubenberger and David M. Morens, “1918 Influenza: The Mother of All Pandemics,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 12, no. 1 (2006): 15.

16. A more recent example of scholarship that takes advantage of the correspondence collected by Collier is Mark Honigsbaum’s Living with Enza: The Forgotten Story of Britain and the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918 (London: Macmillan, 2009), which focuses on Britain.

17. Terrence Ranger, “The Influenza Pandemic in Southern Rhodesia: A Crisis of Comprehension,” in Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, ed. David Arnold (New York: Manchester University Press, 1988), 174.

18. John Case, The First Horseman (New York: Fawcett, 1998); Edward Rutherfurd’s 1997 novel London references the epidemic, but does not deal exclusively with it.

19. Kevin Kerr, Unity (1918) (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2002); Kaye Gibbons, Divining Women (New York, Putnam, 2004); Myla Goldberg, Wickett’s Remedy (New York: Anchor, 2005); Thomas Mullen, The Last Town on Earth (New York: Random House, 2006).

20. Films include Pandemic, DVD, directed by Armand Mastroianni (New York, NY: Hallmark Entertainment, 2007) and the made-for-TV Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America, directed by Richard Pearce (New York, NY: American Broadcasting Company, 2006). Documentaries include Black Dawn: The Next Pandemic, DVD, directed by Stuart Coxe (Ottowa, Canada: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2006); Influenza 1918, DVD, directed by Robert Kenner (Washin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Epidemic Genre and Spanish Flu Narrative(s)
• One A Mundane Mystery: Framing the Flu in the First Epidemic Wave
• Two Of Borders and Bodies: The Second Wave Begins
• Three A Tale of Two States: Between an Epidemic and a Sanitary Spain
• Four Figuring (out) the Epidemic: Don Juan and Spanish Influenza
• Five Visualizing the Spanish Flu Nation: Citizens, Characters, and Cartoons
• Conclusion: A Telling Epidemic, A Storied Nation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index