This is fascinating. Apparently horses rather than birds used to be the main flu reservoir. There’s a chance mechanization/cars and the retreat of horses from human life made birds the reservoir. Very circumstantial evidence but I like the story.
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In general the world got healthier from the cull. Especially men. But babies conceived during the flu, and exposed to it prenatally were weaker, and had poorer life outcomes. Many adults who got it had chronic conditions after, just as already seen for Covid. Darwinian
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We’re only now seeing Spanish Flu effects erased as the last of those born during it die. The acute phase of the disease often had anxiety attacks and suicidal behavior. The chronic phase often had lingering depression.


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In Norway, 7x higher asylum admissions related to flu every year in the 6 years following the pandemic. It’s going to be 7x the fun till 2026 people.
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Tanzania had a famine because people were too depressed to plant stuff. General high incidence of “sleepy sickness” encephalitis lethargia, EL, 1917-25. War+flu I guess. A third died within weeks, a third recovered, a third went on to develop Parkinson’s-like paralysis.
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The causal link is unclear but it seems these were the Oliver Sacks’ L Dopa patients in Awakenings. Damn.
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We end this chapter with the story of a Xhosa woman, Nontetha Nkwenkwe, who started a religious movement out of her Spanish flu visions and ran afoul of the white state that saw her movement as subversive, and kept putting her into an asylum till her death https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontetha
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This chapter rhymes the most witch Black Death aftermath. Mental illness, long-term social malaise, cults... Not pretty. The core of it seems to be extended post-viral fatigue syndrome and complications, compounded by unraveling societies where the toll was high in % teens.
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We stop here tonight. That chapter totally bait-and-switched. “Green shoots of recovery” my ass. That was more “red veins of long-term damage.” Repent ye sinners. 7 years of pain are upon us.
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This is the least entertaining of the books I’ve read do so far, but the most reality checking. It’s like reading a travel book about a country by a foreigner after being blind-teleported there. She’s the expert, but all of us now know more than she did when writing this.
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This chapter is about what-ifs of interrupted lives. Survivor lives that turned out different due to someone close dying. Insurance companies paid out $100m ($20B today). One death was Trump’s grandfather. The real estate slumpire started with his Spanish Flu insurance payout
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Due to prime-of-life fatalities many breadwinners died. In Sweden, for every death, four people ended up in the poorhouse. Do we have poorhouses anymore?
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Countries like a France and UK passed adoption laws soon after the flu, possibly due to flu orphans. 500k orphans in South Africa alone
. Black ones didn’t do so great.
20 languages went extinct in Vanuatu which apparently now still has 130.
Some Alaskan tribes crippled.Show this thread -
Baby boom + orphans in 1920s. States with highest death rate had highest growth in per capital income after
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Yupik word: nallunguarluku, “pretend it didn’t happen.” Apparently elders advise young people to do that to their recent history. Looks like the Spanish Flu was the last of several epidemics that destroyed their way of life completely. Welfare-alcohol spiral.
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A lot of people are going to have to nallunguarluku 2020. Not me I think. The flu culled not just physically vulnerable individuals but demographically vulnerable cultures and languages. Wonder if it happened in civilizational core. Like music or literary scenes culled.
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Next chapter, science and anti-science. The flu caused backlash against germ theory triumphalism, and alt medicine types claimed higher cure rates and grew in popularity and legitimacy after. Le sigh. Expecting an anti-vaxx spike myself, post-Covid.
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That was a quick chapter. Back to nature movements, loss of faith in Victorian science but rise of more modern ethos. Kinda weak connection to flu as one of the causes. Medicine regained credibility with ruse of virology, antibiotics etc. Overall the flu created postmodernist.
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Next chapter a whistlestop tour of rise of universal healthcare and modern public health surveillance in the wake of the Flu. The Soviets pulled it together first. Socialism and public health got all mixed up and the US got set on its death-before-socialized-medicine course.
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Naturally, eugenics was also invented alongside in both left and right editions. International Red Cross was founded and global public health became a thing.
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Rockefeller foundation was the main non-socialist catalyst of public health and was of course suspected of a neocolonialism agenda. The Bill Gates conspiracy stuff today is spectacularly unoriginal.
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Rockefeller was tarnished by involvement in Nazi eugenics. The era’s public health ideas had openly eugenicist flavor, but that had become not-PC by the time League of Nations collapsed so WHO was founded on non-eugenics principles. Of course socialists continued with it into 60s
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We stop here tonight. Big lesson: science had made big leaps since Black Death and has made more big leaps to 2020. But people stay the same. And they suck. Everything social/cultural/political happening today has clear rhymes in 1918 and 1348. Long science, short people.
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The purpose of science is to make the world suck less despite the fact that humans on average suck exactly the same in 1348, 1918, 2020.pic.twitter.com/NXCRGvHf5y
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Chapter 20, war and peace, is kinda weak and all over the place. Starts with a good account of why Spanish Flu might have swung the war in the allies favor (it hit Central Europe harder due to malnutrition etc), then unravels as it surveys global post-flu geopolitics.
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Wilson got the flu, Gandhi got the flu, dealing with the flu was part off the story of political leadership everywhere obviously. But it’s unclear if it was decisive anywhere. The flu was big but other big stuff was going on too. It probably accelerated slide to WW2 though.
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Chapter 21, melancholy muse, is about why the flu didn’t inspire much art though it did create a huge break from past tradition. No major creative of the lost generation really tackled the subject though all were personally affected by it.
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So in romantic tradition that preceded the modernist tradition (?), disease was a boring everyday reality and mainly used in symbolic ways in literature like in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain where it represents Europe’s decay. After the flu/WWI it was a literal central concern.
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Virginia Woolf consciously pioneered this shift. Though the Spanish flu wasn’t a special focus, disease and illness generally took center-stage. She wrote an essay On Being ill in 1925. Hadn’t heard of it
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This was another rushed, whistle-stop tour chapter. Unsatisfying. Again there’s a vague pattern here globally. A shift away from romanticism to unsentimental realism plus introspective orientation. But it just sort of gestures at Spanish Flu accelerating existing artistic trends.
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I do think we’ll see an equally sharp acceleration of artistic trends and it will be similar in tone, from expansive neoliberal romanticism of 1997-2015 to a post-Covid unsentimental interiority. And an equally studious avoidance of explicit and direct engagement.
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