In recent years historians of a variety of stripes have turned their attention to the Spanish Influenza pandemic: Betty O’Keefe and Ian Macdonald have charted the work of Dr. Fred Underhill, Vancouver’s first full-time medical officer of health and a public-health pioneer;[1] using Winnipeg as a case study, Esyllt Wynne Jones has examined the “interrelationships between epidemic disease and working-class, gender, labour, and ethnic history in Canada”;[2] Kirsty Duncan, a medical geographer, in writing about the “Killer Virus” looks at both the urgent need – for future pandemics – to understand the 1918 virus, and the “dark side” of the politics of medical research.[3] Howard Phillips and David Killingray, and Niall Johnson have examined the pandemic from a social history perspective.[4] All of these were published in the twenty-first century.
These historical studies have appeared since 2003, the year in which Phillips published “The Re-appearing Shadow of 1918: Trends in the Historiography of the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic” in which he traced the way in which the pandemic had been “treated (or ignored) over the last 86 years”.[5] The author traces four phases. In the years immediately after 1918 the disease itself was the focus of attention resulting in a number of “one-dimensional” studies attempting to understand what it was and how to prevent its returning.”[6] In the 1960s the Spanish flu became source of high drama with the publication of such sensational titles as Invasion by Virus: Can It Happen Again?[7] By the mid 1970s a wider range of subjects for academic enquiry had become acceptable but, Phillips argues, there was a tendency to “focus on one particular feature of the pandemic”.[8] Finally, the Spanish flu, or more precisely the virus that caused the pandemic, has been the stuff of “scientific saga” as scientists have raced to find the exact nature of the virus.[9]
1. Betty O’Keefe and Ian Macdonald. Dr. Fred and the Spanish Lady: Fighting the Killer Flu. Surrey, BC: Heritage House, 2004.
2. Jones, Esyllt Wynne. Influenza 1918 : disease, death and struggle in Winnipeg. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.
3. Kirsty Duncan. Hunting the 1918 flu : One Scientist’s Search For a Killer Virus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
4. Howard Phillips and David Killingray, eds. The Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-19: new perspectives. London; New York: Routledge, 2003. Niall Johnson. Britain and the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic: A Dark Epilogue. London: Routledge, 2006.
5. Howard Phillips, “The Re-Appearing Shadow of 1918: Trends in the Historiography of the 1918–19 Influenza Pandemic”, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, Vol. 21:1 (2004), 121–134. http://www.cbmh.ca.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/index.php/cbmh/issue/view/24
6. Phillips. “The Re-Appearing …”. pp. 124, 125.
7. Phillips. “The Re-Appearing …”. p. 125.
8. Phillips. “The Re-Appearing …”. p. 131.
9. Phillips. “The Re-Appearing …”. p. 132.