The Spanish Flu

Though once relegated to the proverbial dustbin of history, the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic is now widely recognized as the most devastating disease outbreak in recorded history. This cultural history sets out to reconstruct Spaniards' collective experience of the flu, and to trace the emergence of co [...]
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Though once relegated to the proverbial dustbin of history, the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic is now widely recognized as the most devastating disease outbreak in recorded history. This cultural history sets out to reconstruct Spaniards' collective experience of the flu, and to trace the emergence of competing narratives that arose in response to contemporary bacteriology's failure to explain or contain the disease's spread. As author Ryan A. Davis demonstrates, when a society loses its most significant means of understanding an event of this magnitude, it must turn elsewhere for answers. What Spanish narratives of the flu shared was a discursive anxiety revolving around the preservation of a particular notion of national identity - one that was particularly apparent in the journalistic accounts of the period.