Discover Top Posts Tagged with #1918 flu

Reading this book, Plague Writing in Early Modern England by Ernest B. Gilman published in 2009 and this excerpt from the book is pretty eerie

Except for the few remaining survivors of the generation of the “Spanish flu,” we cannot (yet) “know,” as Donne and his generation did, what it was like (or will be like) to live and write in the shadow of a pandemic; but my hope in what follows is to reconstruct at least part of that knowledge.

#books #plague #book #pandemic #COVID #spanish flu #1918 flu

Pandemic 1918 review

4/5 stars Recommended if you like: epidemiology, history, 20th Century history, medical history, Spanish flu

I was fully onboard with this book, loved reading it, and was prepared to give it 5 stars, until...Arnold got the flu strain wrong. The Spanish flu wasn't H5N1, anyone interested in epidemiology worth their salt knows that. It was H1N1. Y'know, the same strain as the 2009 pandemic? Well, not the exact same strain, but there was actually a whole thing about it at the time and the point is that H1N1, one of the predominate flu strains every year, is the same one that mutated into a highly-pathogenic subclade in 1918. This is a fairly massive unforced error on Arnold's part and makes me question the veracity of the rest of the book, despite how much I enjoyed it.

The chapters are a decent length, I don't think any of them are more than maybe 25 pages (?), and each is balanced pretty well between anecdotal stories about the pandemic and medical fact (or 'fact'?). I obviously knew about the Spanish flu before reading this, but I had never taken the time to really learn about it, so I found the contents of this book to be pretty interesting. There's also now the obvious connection between the 1918 pandemic and the 2019 one. I was actually surprised about how much some of the symptoms of the Spanish flu matched with covid (air hunger, cytokine storm, etc.). But I was also surprised at just how brutal the Spanish flu was. I didn't know about the cholera-like cyanosis or the hemorrhaging.

I think Arnold really did capture the horror of what it was like living through the pandemic. It's hard to imagine what it must've been like at the time, though I think I'll probably check out some of the first-person accounts Arnold mentions. Testament of Youth is one that's been on my radar for a while, so maybe it's finally time to pick that one up. Again, it's eerily similar to covid, and just like how the Spanish flu 'vanished' from collective memory due to trauma, I kind of see covid going the same way.

Overall I did like this read, which is why it still has 4 stars instead of 3 or less, but the H5N1/H1N1 issue is a pretty glaring one.

One random history fact that I know is that the Spanish Flu was not originated in Spain, but in the Usa. But as Spain didn’t participate in WW1, the newspaper covered the pandemic without censoring it, so it seemed like it had started there and that had killed more people

#history #1918 flu

Spokane Chronicle, Washington, October 31, 1918 via WikiVictorian

#halloween #1918 flu #spanish flu #covid

The problem with doing historical research is that every so often some one will innocently say something like "I don't remember what year the first world war ended"

And my automatic reaction is "it was November 1918, you have no idea how glad I was to stop seeing ads telling me to buy victory bonds in the paper everyday"

And they'll give me The Look, and I'll have to explain that I'm absolutely not a vampire, but a lot of my research involves looking for contemporary information in old newspapers, so it sure felt like I was living in 1918 for a while there.

#research #history #1918 flu #this is why we are all slightly unhinged

RECENT ACQUISITIONS Artists’ Books: 1918 and Covid 2020

Throughout this strange year, we’ve continued to support local artists through purchases for the library’s Book Arts and Fine Press Collection. Two new acquisitions stand out as notable works representing our time and place: Covid 2020 by photographer Laura Migliorino and 1918 by printmaker Fred Hagstrom (Strong Silent Type Press).

Covid 2020 features photographs primarily of the Minneapolis North Loop neighborhood during the early months of Covid-19. We see shuttered doors, empty highways, and a few signs of hope.

1918 includes statistics and personal letters from the 1918 Spanish Flu, along with images from that pandemic which killed 650,000 people in the United States. The images and messages from over 100 years ago eerily relate to today’s pandemic. Fred notes in the colophon that the book was “printed in a socially distanced time with no assistants.”

Due to Covid-19, Hennepin County Library services are reduced. These two artists’ books have not yet been cataloged and are currently unavailable to view physically in the Special Collections department. In the meantime, Special Collections staff are happy to assist with your remote reference needs. Email [email protected].

#artists' books #Covid-19 #1918 flu #pandemics #book arts #book arts and fine press collection #book artists