Historyzine – The Spanish Flu Series – Episode 01 – The 1918 Pandemic

History is a series of recurrences.

Over and over again we see much that is similar. While history doesn’t exactly repeat itself, it does often rhyme (wish I’d have said that but it was actually Mark Twain). We are currently (spring 2020) in the middle of a global pandemic, the like of which we could not have imagined only a few short months ago.

However, I wonder if we could – if we should have been able to imagine it.

In 1918 there was a pandemic that was very similar in scope to what we see now, although we have to hope, that we don’t match the scale of that one. The flu pandemic of 1918 (widely known as the Spanish Flu) killed between 17 and 100 million people. It spread extremely fast and affected almost every part of the world.

Our current Coronavirus pandemic, although a different virus, is affecting us in extremely similar ways.

In this series I intend to look at the similarities and the differences between the two outbreaks and maybe see if there are useful lessons that we could learn from the 1918 flu epidemic.

This first episode sketches out some of the basic facts behind the Spanish Flu to provide us a base, to probe a little deeper into the lives of those who went before us, and how they coped with this horror.

We will explore how it started, how it progressed and how destructive it was.

In future episodes we will look at the ways in which people reacted, and the actions that governments took to combat the virus. There will be letters from the period, advertisements for bizarre medicines and conspiracy theories as tangled and strange as those we see today.

I invite you all to accompany me on this journey as we explore this comparison between our present Coronavirus and the 1918 Spanish Flu, and see how alike, or unalike they actually are.