It Is an Awful Thing: A Social History of the Influenza Epidemic in the United States, 1918-1919

FAIN: FB-38420-03

Nancy K. Bristow
University of Puget Sound (Tacoma, WA 98416-5000)

No project description available

Associated Products

"`It's as bad as anything can be': Patients, Identity, and the Influenza Pandemic" (Article)
Title: "`It's as bad as anything can be': Patients, Identity, and the Influenza Pandemic"
Author: Nancy K. Bristow
Abstract: Americans were stunned when pandemic influenza hit the United States in 1918. Recent advances in bacteriology and public health allowed Americans to imagine a future free of infectious disease, even as their familiarity with influenza tempered their fears of it. They soon realized this influenza was something unprecedented, as it shocked them with its pace, virulence, mortality patterns, and symptoms. Patients endured and fres:Juently succumbed to a miserable illness, their suffering often made worse by the chaotic circumstances the epidemic produced in families and communities and shaped in significant and sometimes discriminatory ways by their gender, class, and race. While the nation's public culture soon forgot the epidemic, it lived on in lives changed irrevocably by its consequences. As they face present and future influenza pandemics, Americans can learn from this earlier experience, guarding against identity-based discrimination and acknowledging and remembering the grief and loss fellow citizens suffered. '
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://www.publichealthreports.org/archives/issuecontents.cfm?Volume=125&Issue=9
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Public Health Reports
Publisher: United States Public Health Service

American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic (Book)
Title: American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic
Author: Nancy K. Bristow
Abstract: Between the years 1918 and1920, influenza raged around the globe in the worst pandemic in recorded history, killing at least fifty million people, more than half a million of them Americans. Yet despite the devastation, this catastrophic event seems but a forgotten moment in the United States. American Pandemic offers a much-needed corrective to the silence surrounding the influenza outbreak. It sheds light on the social and cultural history of Americans during the pandemic, uncovering both the causes of the nation's public amnesia and the depth of the quiet remembering that endured. Focused on the primary players in this drama--patients and their families, friends, and community, public health experts, and health care professionals--historian Nancy K. Bristow draws on multiple perspectives to highlight the complex interplay between social identity, cultural norms, memory, and the epidemic. Bristow has combed a wealth of primary sources, including letters, diaries, oral histories, memoirs, novels, newspapers, magazines, photographs, government documents, and health care literature. She shows that though the pandemic caused massive disruption in the most basic patterns of American life, influenza did not create long-term social or cultural change, serving instead to reinforce the status quo and the differences and disparities that defined American life. As the crisis waned the pandemic slipped from the nation's public memory. The helplessness and despair Americans had suffered during the pandemic, Bristow notes, was a story poorly suited to a nation focused on optimism and progress. For countless survivors, though, the trauma never ended, shadowing the remainder of their lives with memories of loss. This book lets us hear these long-silent voices, reclaiming an important chapter in the American past.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryAmerican/19001945/?view=usa&ci=9780199811342
Primary URL Description: Oxford University Press website
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780199811342

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