History of Medicine

Journalist & Author

'The Sphinx of Epidemic Diseases'

Influenza tends to perplex social historians because it is a protean, sphinx-like infection that is forever changing its medical identity. In the early Victorian period influenza was regarded as a miasmatic disease - one that, like cholera or malaria, was thought to be due to atmospheric and environmental 'influences'. Following the 'Russian' influenza pandemic of the early 1890s, however, it increasingly came to be regarded as a 'nervous' disease - one that, as this image from an 1895 edition of Fun suggests, could fell burly London policeman. As with H1N1 swine flu in 2009, the Russian flu pandemic also provoked widespread dread - a dread far in excess of influenza's actual destructiveness. My academic work seeks to explore these paradoxes by drawing on official government documents, reports in the medical and popular press, and the diaries and letters of prominent doctors and celebrity patients.

“The Great Dread: cultural and psychological impacts and responses to the ‘Russian’ influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889-93”, Social History of Medicine August 2010.