Long discussion of epidemiology 101, social distancing, masks, vaccine controversies etc. All familiar now but would have read like science fiction when this book came out. It’s weird to read about this stuff covered with reference to 1918 with academic distance.
Conversation
Feeling of not deja vu exactly but something like it. As in “omg they already knew all this stuff 100y before Covid and we’re just learning it under live fire and relitigating 1918 arguments like they’re new?”
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Must be weird for authors like Spinney to suddenly see their obscure interests take over headlines.
It’s like if 2x2s suddenly took over headlines and everybody started citing my 2x2 stuff.
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This part is a bit boring but would have been interesting in 2019. Authoritarianism vs democracy, role of newspapers, minorities and marginalized populations suspicious of health measures. All stuff we’ve been through live.
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One difference is that keeping schools open was a better bet then since kids otherwise lived in crowded tenements or ran around unsupervised.
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Extended description of New York’s relatively good performance despite early fumbles. It was full of particularly vulnerable Italian peasants at the time, living in slums and already disproportionately suffering from respiratory diseases like TB. Pandemic led to improvements.
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...Paired with similar extended description of events in Mashed, Persia, where things went much worse. At the time it was a medieval pilgrimage center and Persia was in a partial vacuum due to the collapse of Tsarist Russia and the Great Game.
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The British were filling the vacuum and doing their usual thing of simultaneously raiding the country (for troops) and trying to govern it. Two bad harvests and the people were already starving. It was set up to be a shitshow and it was.
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Weird time machine aspect here. 1918 was around the beginning of global synchronized time. Local stories ranging from nefyevsl to modern. Governance systems with similar range of vintages.
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Mashed appears to have been somewhere between Shanxi and South America in development terms. New York comes off most modern so far.
As in Shanxi, Christian missionaries played a significant role. Targeting a Shiite holy spot for evangelism and being tolerated for medicine.
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That Mashed vignette was interesting. A sense of modernity arriving alongside missionaries and medicine. Persia modernized shortly after in 1921 under Reza Khan.
Seems like Spanish Flu triggered a lot of modernity arrivals. Covid might trigger a lot of anthropocene arrivals.
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We stop here tonight. Gotta check on what the Discourse is saying about Trump having Covid. This seems like an awful development to me. He might win on sympathy votes or die and trigger a civil war from the grave. Ugh.
BoJo, Bolsanaro, and now Trump. Hmm.
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We return to 1918, and the next chapter, titled The Placebo Effect.
Conventional medicine had just recently been privileged by law over alts like naturopathy and faith healing. There were no antibiotics or antivirals. Drugs were artisan. No double-blind or animal trials, no QA.
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Aspirin was the big deal and heavily overprescribed in unsafe doses, which may have caused some deaths. Quinine too which may have caused some of the reported loss of color vision as a side effect. Digitalis, strychnine... sounds like an Agatha Christie medicine cabinet.
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Arsenic, Epsom salts, castor oil...
Some doctors fell back on older techniques. Bloodletting etc.
Galenic “humors” medicine was still strong.
Medicine was closer to astrology than astronomy in 1918.
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Temperance movement was big so alcohol was controversial as a treatment. Some thought cigarette smoke killed the virus.
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Le Corbusier “retreated to his rooms in Paris” drinking and smoking and reflecting on how to impose Modernist Authoritah on the world. Gee thanks Spanish Flu.
Wonder what bad ideologies are taking shape in Covid domestic cozy retreat right now 🤔
I’d better get Raoism codified.
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Lots of dubious patent medicines flourished since there was no regulation. Dr. Kilmer’s swamp root was one. americanhistory.si.edu/collections/se
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Traditional home remedies also thrived. Mustard poultices and stuff.
This stuff is living memory even for me. When I was sick with coughs and colds and bronchitis as a kid in the early 80s (often), I was often administered Ayurvedic remedies like Starbucks turmeric lattes.
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So basically all treatments being tried were placebos at best (hence the chapter title). Many were nocebos it actually harmful. The only worthwhile advice was to stay hydrated.
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Section on fate of Odessa, which had been curiously unaffected by Bolshevik revolution and the only city to even detect the flu. Couldn’t do much with knowing because it kept changing hands through the war and revolution.
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The city was half Jewish and a prominent Jewish doctor/bacteriologist Yakov Bardakh led what efforts could be undertaken. The city was reeling under a flood of refugees from the revolution. It was apparently a famous cosmopolitan city of its time, known as Marseilles of Russia
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The Russian silent movie star Vera Kholodnaya retreated to Odessa and died of the flu there at age 25.
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A Jewish “black wedding” was held in a cemetery to ward off the flu. Between beggars. Apparently many such were held around the world
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Next chapter, titled “Good Samaritans” begins with observation that your best strategy was to to be selfish and isolate yourself and hoard food. This would starve the flu and it would die out. Then as now, people mostly didn’t do that.
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Generally adaptive strategy of “social resilience”
(coming closer together in a disaster) is maladaptive in a pandemic. Apparently there’s lots of theories why. Force of habit, fear of ostracization later for bring antisocial, all-in-this-togetherism, expanded sense of self...
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With few exceptions people generally pitch in to help each other. Notable exceptions were in colonial conditions (Africa, India) where the colonized had learned to distrust white behaviors in crisis and deserted.
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“At some point... group identity splinters and people revert to identifying as individuals. It may be at this point — once the worst is over, and life is returning to normal — that truly ‘bad’ behavior is most likely to emerge”
Ah shit. The assholery hasn’t even really started.
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Rio carnival in 1919 was more out of control than before and there was a spike in rapes it seems.
And reports of a related ‘sons of flu’ baby boom (“hard to confirm”).
Spinney cites Decameron for similar effects after Black Death.
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Long bleak account of ravages of flu among Yupik of Alaska. Already dwindling from other European diseases, the Spanish flu hit them hard, wiping out entire villages. Relief ships found dogs eating bodies in some. Weird subplot of Russian orthodox vs American Protestant missions.
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300 orphans were brought to town of Dillingham of population 200. Today most inhabitants claim descent from flu orphans.
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This was a messy story, hard to summarize. Weird mix of Russian-American-native history, transition to modernity, decidedly mixed role of relief ships that appear to have done some looting of dead villages, but helped others... there’s an Oscar-worthy movie in this episode.
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Next chapter, “hunt for patient zero”. We stop here tonight.
This is an oddly choppy book. Lots of jump cuts and impressionistic dabs. It’s not as enjoyable as Tuchman’s more classical renaissance-painting tale of 14th century but in some ways more effective and comprehensive.
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The origins of the Spanish flu are uncertain. We begin with the hypothesis that it emerged in Manchuria in 1910 when China was weak and sick. The mandarins appointed the first western educated Chinese doctor, Wu Lien-Teh, to try and do something
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That appears to have been pneumonic plague and looked similar to the another in 1917 that Wu thought was also plague but is contested. Hard to do autopsies due to tradition.
300k men from this region served as a labor force in the European theater the following year.
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This region = northern provinces hit by the thing that might have been either plague or flu in 1917.
This is the modern Chinese origin hypothesis, not the speculation during the Spanish flu itself, which was more yellow peril mindset than a hypothesis.
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So Hypothedys A is Chineze laborers. brought the flu to WWI.
Hypothesis B is that it broke out on the western front of WWI (and infected the Chinese labor contingent after it arrived)
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Case for both is circumstantial, since there were not tests for the virus and records are poor. So it’s a case of a time-space jigsaw puzzle of outbreaks in 1917 that presented vaguely like the pandemic proper a year later.
Hypothesis C is similar — it cane from Kansas.
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These 3 are the most likely hypotheses. Apparently the one thing that’s nearly certain is that Spain is not a candidate.
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Next chapter on death toll. Already in the 1920s the best estimate 21.6m, 20x the Russian 1890s epidemic of 1 million. Revised up to 30m by 1990d, but likely still an underestimate especially for Russia and China.
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