Influenza Encyclopedia

In recent years, as a succession of epidemic scares have grabbed headlines, panicking politicians and the public alike, historians of medicine have found themselves in unusual demand within policy-making circles. For no group is this more true than for historians of the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic, which, according to the latest estimates, killed some 50 million people worldwide—550,000 in the United States alone. Largely ignored at the time—partly because the mortality was overshadowed by World War I—this pandemic has become a template for the public health community's worst fears of a potential viral Armageddon—hence, the interest in studying the “forgotten” pandemic to draw lessons for the management of future pandemic threats. Thus it was that in 2006—worried about the spread of bird flu from Southeast Asia and cognizant that producing a viable vaccine would take at least six months—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked the University of Michigan's Center for the History of Medicine to examine whether school closures and other nonpharmaceutical measures had made an appreciable difference to the spread of flu in 1918. After a yearlong study of the records of forty-three U.S. metropolises, the Michigan group was able to report that the American cities that embraced social distancing and other public health measures early tended to suffer lower average death rates than those that did not. That could well have been the end of the exercise, but, to its credit, the University of Michigan realized that it was sitting on an historical treasure trove that included important insights into the political, social, and cultural responses to the flu

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