| dc.description.abstract | Both the 1918-19 ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic and the 1889-93 ‘Russian’ influenza
pandemic resulted in widespread morbidity and the deaths of hundreds of
thousands of Britons. Yet although the mortality from the pandemics exceeded
those of earlier nineteenth century cholera epidemics, it has been argued that neither
the Spanish flu nor the Russian flu had pronounced social impacts. Indeed, the
1918-19 outbreak has been called the ‘forgotten’ pandemic, and although in recent
years there has been a huge growth in academic studies of the Spanish flu this
scholarship has not usually extended to the 1889-93 pandemic or to the
interpandemic period.
Rather than interrogating the supposed ‘absence’ of social impacts to the
pandemics, this thesis takes a narrative approach by tracing how in the late
nineteenth century influenza became an object of biomedicine and biopower. The
central contention is that influenza’s character is a palimpsest: a product of medical,
cultural and historiographical discourses. Drawing on official publications,
newspaper reports, medical journals, and the accounts of prominent doctors and
celebrity patients, I argue that the ‘modern’ notion of influenza is a product of new
scientific ways of ‘knowing’ the disease that first emerged in the 1890s. By the
middle 1890s these narratives increasingly focused on the respiratory and nervous
complications of influenza. At the same time, these discourses were amplified by
new telegraphic technologies and competition between mass market newspapers,
making the Russian flu a site for sensation and a barometer of fin-de-siècle social and
cultural anxieties.
These anxieties were partly a product of medical statistics, partly of
bacteriology and theories of emotional pathology, and can best be understood
4
through an examination of medical discourses aimed at regulating the ‘dread’ of
infectious diseases. Tracing these discourses through the interpandemic period, I
argue that while Britain was at peace, dread of influenza was a tool of biopolitics
and biopower. By 1918, however, Britain was at war, resulting in the politicisation
of dread and the stricter policing of negative emotions. The Spanish flu, I argue,
both drew on these discourses and undermined them, disrupting the propaganda
effort and destabilizing medical attempts to regulate civilian responses to the
pandemic. | |
