The Tyee has published my review of Laura Spinney's excellent book Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World: Pandemics, Politics and the Spanish Flu. Excerpt:
“The Spanish flu,” Laura Spinney tells us, “infected one in three people on earth, or 500 million human beings. Between the first case recorded on 4 March 1918 and the last sometime in March 1920, it killed 50-100 million, or between 2.5 and 5 per cent of the global population — a range that reflects the uncertainty that still surrounds it. …It was the greatest tidal wave of death since the Black Death, perhaps in the whole of human history.”
Yet when it was over, a kind of stunned silence fell on the survivors. People might talk about the carnage of the First World War and the resulting revolutions, but not about the much greater slaughter they had personally witnessed in their own homes and workplaces. My own grandparents, who had small children in 1918 and ’19, never mentioned the flu pandemic.
Part of that silence is thanks to the human tendency to pay more attention to some deaths than to others. The 3,000 deaths in the 9/11 attack are trivial compared to the 64,000 drug-overdose deaths the U.S. suffered last year, or the 660,000 worldwide malaria deaths so far this year. The 9/11 deaths changed the world, while we shrug off far greater death tolls.
But the silence after the pandemic was also like many soldiers’ PTSD: the survivors didn’t much want to talk about an experience that seemed to have neither cause nor remedy.
