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
Conversation
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.
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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.
Replying to
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.
GIF
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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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Spinney mainly surveys literary fiction and poetry around the world as indicator species. From T. S. Eliot outwards. Freud thrown in (clever to include him and his death drive theory in art chapter). Plausible case that mood shift was sharpened by flu. Today I’d track memes+TV.
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Interesting insight into Hindi literature of the period (Premchand, Nirala) of the progressive movement of the time as a break from Tagore romanticism. Not something I expected to see in a book by a British writer. She reads it right but again I doubt flu was a decisive driver.
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In general this chapter and the previous one could both be full books. They read like speculative teasers of richer possible treatments that leave you looking for closure/resolution of the hypotheses being casually floated.
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Finally close to the end of this book. A retrospective from modern view.
2016 report by Commission on Globsl Health Risk Framework (GHRF) estimated 20% chance of >4 pandemics in the next century, 1 being flu.
Well 1 down, 3 to go. Hopefully this is last big one in my lifetime
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The big flu candidates are H5N1 and H7N9. They’re under surveillance. I guess viruses are like terrorist orgs. Gotta monitor them.
One 2013 model estimated if something like Spanish Flu emerged today, there’d be 21-30m dead. Relatively lower, but absolutely higher.
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If the exact same strain of H1N1 emerged today, she says it would likely be mild.
I wonder how you get to that conclusion. Most people exposed to it are now dead. How are the rest of us immune primed? I still don’t get some basics here. 🤔
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This conclusion and afterword is mostly forgettable speculation in light of Covid. Comments on WHO and CDC that seem charmingly simplistic in 2020. Still some interesting thoughts on using social networks for surveillance etc. Just... obsolete.
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Afterword has interesting insight that pandemic memories take longer to develop and stabilize than other historical memories. 80,000 books on WW1 but only 400 on Spanish Flu. But latter are recent/exponential increase.
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Spanish Flu is finally entering popular memory. 3 characters in Diwnton Abbey got it and 1 died.
Black Death wasn’t even called that till the 16th century. It was called the blue death before. First works on it from 19th century.
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That delay effect is over I think. Covid has been live-blogged and tweeted vastly more broadly and deeply than anything in history. I bet there will be a crop of solid books within a decade.
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Alright done. I skimmed the last 5 chapters rather fast because the book was beginning to drag tbh. But it’s overall a very well done heavy lifting that does its global multi-level spiral South African grandmother storytelling shtick well. The diverse anecdotes help a lot.
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This concludes the pandemic reads live-tweeting book club.
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