Why was it called ‘Spanish flu’?

Why was it called ‘Spanish flu’?

The Russian flu had acquired its name because it was thought to have originated in Bukhara in Uzbekistan (at that time, part of the Russian empire). The pandemic that broke out nearly 30 years later will always be known as the ‘Spanish flu’, though it didn’t start in Spain.

Unlike the United States and France, Spain was neutral in the war, so it didn’t censor its press. The first Spanish cases were therefore reported in the newspapers, and because King Alfonso XIII, the prime minister and several members of the cabinet were among those early cases, the country’s plight was highly visible. People all over the world believed that the disease had rippled out from Madrid – a misconception encouraged by propagandists in those belligerent nations that knew they’d contracted it before Spain.

Indian tensions

The terrible consequences of this line of thinking are illustrated nowhere better than in India. That land’s British colonisers had long taken the view that India was inherently unhygienic, and so had invested little in indigenous healthcare. As many as 18 million Indians died in the pandemic – the greatest loss in absolute numbers of any country in the world. But there would be a backlash. The underpowered British response to the spread of flu fuelled resentment within the independence movement. Tensions came to a head with the passing into law in early 1919 of the Rowlatt Act, which extended martial law in the country. This triggered peaceful protests, and on 13 April British troops fired into an unarmed crowd in Amritsar, killing hundreds of Indian people – a massacre that galvanised the independence movement.

The Spanish flu prompted uprisings elsewhere. The autumn of 1918 saw a wave of workers’ strikes and anti-imperialist protests across the world. Disgruntlement had been smouldering since before the Russian revolutions of 1917, but the flu fanned the flames by exacerbating what was already a dire supply situation, and by highlighting inequality. Even well-ordered Switzerland narrowly avoided a civil war in November 1918 after leftwing groups blamed the high number of flu deaths in the army on the government and military command.

There were still parts of the world where people had never heard of either Darwin or germ theory, and where the population turned to more tried-and-tested explanations. In the rural interior of China, for example, many people still believed that illness was sent by demons and dragons; they paraded figures of dragon kings through the streets in the hope of appeasing the irate spirits. A missionary doctor described going from house to house in Shanxi province in early 1919, and finding scissors placed in doorways – apparently to ward off demons “or perchance to cut them in two”.

Even in the modernised west, people started to question science. Death often seemed to strike without rhyme or reason. Many still remembered a more mystical, pre-Darwinian era, and four years of war had worn down psychological defences. Seeing how ill-equipped their men of science were to help them, many people came to believe that the pandemic was an act of god – divine retribution for their sins. In Zamora – the same Spanish city whose newspaper stated with such confidence that the agent of disease was Pfeiffer’s bacillus – the bishop defied the health authorities’ ban on mass gatherings and ordered people into the churches to placate “God’s legitimate anger”. This city subsequently recorded one of the highest death tolls from flu in Spain – a fact of which its inhabitants were aware, though they don’t seem to have held it against their bishop. Instead they awarded him a medal in recognition of his heroic efforts to end their suffering.

The 1918 pandemic struck a world that was entirely unprepared for it, dealing a body blow to scientific hubris, and destabilising social and political orders for decades to come.

⇐ Предыдущая 1 2 3 45