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Reviewed by:
  • Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg
  • Georgina Feldberg
Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg. Esyllt W. Jones. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Pp 240, $65.00 cloth, $27.95 paper

At a moment when a novel influenza virus circles the globe, and the world braces against the next influenza pandemic, Influenza 1918 is a timely study with tremendous historical and social potential. Drawing on an address given at the height of the 1918 epidemic, by social gospeller, the Reverend A.E. Smith, Professor Esyllt Jones argues that 'epidemics and social revolution are two sides of a coin, both metaphorically and experientially … Influenza destroyed lives and put a crack in the social order; it also spun the web of solidarity and generated a theatre of collectivity' (175). A close, contained analysis of one Canadian community's experience with the worst flu yet known, the book probes the ways in which influenza was an agent of social change.

In Winnipeg, the 1918 influenza pandemic provoked multiple changes. The book chapters examine, sequentially, transformations in public health organization and practice, voluntarism and community activism, workplaces and unions, and families. Each chapter circles the arrival of influenza in Winnipeg. From this common starting point, Jones articulates diverse public and private responses to disease. She tracks the ways in which flu entered Winnipeg then spread, provoking fear as deaths continued to mount, even as the intensity of the outbreak waned, making 'every citizen a health officer' and creating the need for both professional and voluntary nursing services. Most compellingly and interestingly, she draws attention to the ways in which fear of infection shaped paid and unpaid work. Immigrant and working-class families, particularly the women among them, become [End Page 145] the focus of this study. When quarantines closed workplaces and left many without a decent family wage, the absence of work and presence of disease created new tensions within the household. Jones deals compassionately with death and portrays the grief of families suddenly left smaller. Public health records, newspapers, government documents, and letters illustrate the impacts of the epidemic. Theory from health, social, and labour historians, anthropologists, and cultural critics situates an analysis that Jones describes as multidisciplinary. While the common starting point of the chapters underscores the diverse ways in which influenza in particular, and disease more generally, stresses communities, it also creates some chronological ambiguity and confusion. The timeline of events is not always clear. Similarly, Jones enriches her work by interweaving secondary and primary materials with her own analysis, but the lines among these sometimes blur.

Influenza 1918 is a significant book for three reasons. Because the history of infectious disease in Canada is understudied, it makes an immediate substantive contribution. Jones's introduction, which reviews the extensive international literature on influenza and summarizes existing Canadian studies, makes a clear, strong case for her contribution. Here, in the conclusion, and even in the subtitle of the book (death, disease, and struggle) this work's relationship to histories of health, disease, and medicine is emphasized. Yet one of the most original and compelling aspects of Influenza 1918 is its focus on work and the working class. Unlike other historians of influenza, Jones probes and underscores the disease's intersections with economic crisis and labour unrest. She reminds us that the pandemic coincided with the emergence of revolutionary and reformist movements around the world. In Winnipeg, 1918 was the year of both the influenza pandemic and the General Strike; these events, Jones boldly suggests, were connected. This is an important observation. Equally important is Jones's identification of the sharp disciplinary divisions that have allowed Canadian historians to overlook or avoid health and disease, so that it is possible to read the rich history of the Winnipeg General Strike 'and have no idea at all that during the winter of 1918–19 … working people were simultaneously confronting a devastating disease' (89).

Influenza 1918 issues a challenge to historians and to analysts of other influenza pandemics. Most historians, epidemiologists, and demographers who have studied 1918 would argue that, unlike other epidemic infections, influenza was not a disease of poverty. The pandemic was devastating because it was democratic...

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