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I was 45 years old before I really grasped the Spanish flu. My entire family is medical, and medicine has been a family profession for generations. I mention this because one would expect that, in such a family, the occurrence of major medical events and trends would be discussed. Yet I have no memory from when I was a child of hearing anyone speak of the pandemic of 1918. They talked about the medical impact of the First World War, the Depression, the Second War, and Korea, often in what nonmedical friends called “clinical detail.” They talked about polio and smallpox and measles. As I grew older, the conversations around me shifted to “Civil Rights,” the “60s,” “the War”—Viet Nam—the pill, women’s rights, gay rights, and abortion.
But nowhere in this mix, across what for me is now four generations, was there much about an event that killed an estimated 675,000 Americans, and as many as 30-50 million people worldwide, all in the course of a single year, 1918 and 1919.1, 2 Nor, as far as I can tell, have there been many such conversations on this subject in the lives of my friends and their families. I had to learn about the Spanish flu in a book bought at a jumble sale early one Sunday morning.
Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
November 2005 (Vol. 1, Issue 6, Pages 433-436)
