Open Secrets: Silence, Suppression, and Memory in the History of Canada’s 1918–20 Influenza Pandemic-Reference-Cited by-同舟云学术

Open Secrets: Silence, Suppression, and Memory in the History of Canada’s 1918–20 Influenza Pandemic

Published:2022-04-01 Issue:1 Volume:39 Page:99-124
ISSN:2816-6469
Container-title:Canadian Journal of Health History
language:en
Short-container-title:Canadian Journal of Health History

Author:

Jones Esyllt W.¹

Affiliation:

1. Esyllt Jones – Department of History, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Abstract

For several decades, the 1918–20 global influenza outbreak has been called “the forgotten pandemic.” Although recent scholarly and public interest in the pandemic has complicated the narrative of forgetting, the label has stuck. Highlighting historical evidence of influenza’s long-term impact upon survivors, family, and community in Canada, the flu stories presented here, diverse in form and content, verify that a key question in pandemic influenza history is not whether the pandemic was forgotten or remembered, but by whom, and in what ways, it has been suppressed – or foregrounded. By moving beyond the classic epidemic plot line, with beginning, middle, and end, historians can find new methodologies and evidence with which to more fully understand the influenza pandemic’s unfolding intersection with colonialism, war, social inequality, and labour struggles in the 20th century.

Publisher

University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)

Link

https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/cjhh.547-092021

Reference64 articles.

1. Alfred W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). In 1976, Crosby published a study of the 1918 influenza outbreak in that country, entitled Epidemic and Peace. Just over a decade later, in 1989, the book was reissued with a new title reflecting an emerging theme in historical interpretation of the influenza pandemic: America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918. A second edition of the book (with a revised preface) was released in 2003 under the same title.

2. Samuel K. Cohn Jr. “The Great Influenza: A Forgotten Pandemic?” chap. 19 in Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS (London: Oxford University Press, 2018).

3. Guy Beiner, Pandemic Re-awakenings: The Forgotten and Unforgotten “Spanish” Flu of 1918–1919 (London: Oxford University Press, 2021). This volume was released at the end of 2021, after this article had been submitted for review.

4. A sampling of recent work asserting and/or exploring the question of forgetting not covered in more detail in this article includes Bert Hoffman, “Repressed Memory: Rethinking the Impact of Latin America’s Forgotten Pandemics,” European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, no. 109 (2020): 203–11; Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu and How It Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2018); and Jeremy Youde, “Covering the Cough? Memory, Remembrance, and Influenza Amnesia,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 63, no. 3 (2017): 357–68.

5. Guy Beiner, “Out in the Cold and Back: New-Found Interest in the Great Flu,” Cultural and Social History 3, no. 4 (2006): 496–505; Ryan Davis, The Spanish Flu: Narrative and Cultural Identity in Spain, 1918 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Mark Honigsbaum, A History of the Great Influenza Pandemics: Death, Panic and Hysteria, 1830–1920 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013). From gender and literary studies, see Jane Fisher, Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War: Women’s Narratives of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).