Epidemic Encounters: Influenza, Society, and Culture in Canada, 1918-20 ed. by Magda Fahrni and Esyllt W. Jones (review)

Edited by Magda Fahrni and Esyllt W. Jones, Epidemic Encounters is a timely examination of the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1920 in Canada. The belief in the supremacy of modern medicine, the general efficacy of antibiotics and vaccines, as well as the defeat of contagious diseases like smallpox and polio in the post-World War II period has, with the exception of medical historians, created a general amnesia regarding the impact that the 1918–1920 epidemic had on Canadian society. Instead, the historiography of this period has been overshadowed by the First and Second World Wars, particularly in regards to state formation, public health, women’s work, and culture. Such oversight ignores the enormous impact of the outbreak – from 1918 to 1920 approximately 55,000 people (women, men, and children) in Canada died from influenza compared to 67,000 soldiers who died during the four years of the First World War

In the last decade, a resurgence in literature related to the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic has accompanied public panics over influenza outbreaks like SARS and H1N1, as well as mounting public fears regarding antibiotic resistant diseases, biological warfare, zombies, and globalization. Epidemic Encounters is certainly keyed into this historical moment: it offers new methodological and interdisciplinary perspectives on the outbreak and draws important links between the past and present. In so doing, it provides context for the 1918 outbreak that also helps to historicize contemporary concerns related to public health policy and outbreak management. Divided into four interrelated sections, the collection explores both state and popular responses to the epidemic; it offers a critical reevaluation of the social contours of the epidemic and the impact of race, class, and ethnicity with respect to public health; it situates influenza within a particular moment in Canada cultural history that is concerned with modernity; and finally, the collection offers a timely comparison of current and past public health practices during crises.

The editors draw on what they refer to as the “flu narrative” or contagion story in order to tease out the social and cultural histories of the outbreak. The first section deals with how different constituents in Canadian society experienced the outbreak. The first two articles address the relationship between the influenza pandemic and the war. Mark Osborne Humphries argues that the state sacrificed the health of Canadians in order to ensure an allied victory. Linda Quiney contends that, in spite of the advances the nursing profession made through women’s participation in the First World War, the pandemic created “contradictory and often conflicting notions of women’s inherent healing capabilities, role in society, and professional advancement.” (64) Magda Fahrini draws on letters written to municipal authorizes to show that while people were concerned about the influenza pandemic and its impact on their health and livelihood, they continued to be concerned with the “issues of everyday life in the early twentieth-century city.” (87)

The second section dispels some of the long held misconceptions that surround the 1918 influenza outbreak. For example, much of the historiography suggests, either implicitly or directly, that the historical experience of the 1918 influenza was largely homogenous. Of course, looking at rates of morbidity and mortality can often hide what histories of medicine mean to reveal, and metanarratives similarly obscure or elide the individual or community experience they construct as part of a larger whole. “The North-South Divide: Social Inequality and Mortality from the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in Hamilton, Ontario” by D. Ann Herring and Ellen Korol is therefore a wonderful addition to this study, as it examines the path the epidemic took in Hamilton, Ontario and its relationship to space and class. The authors argue that the 1918 influenza outbreak “laid bare the social lines that divided the city,” (107) and suggest that people who did not have the financial resources to ensure proper health care during their illness...