New CAS project: “Scarred people”
Centre leader Mamelund has been awarded a NordIAS Visiting Fellowship from the Centre for Advanced Study in Oslo (CAS) to visit Tampere Institute for Advanced Study for three weeks in April. This visit will enhance rare academic collaboration and dialogue across Norway and Finland in the fields of mathematical pandemiology (Mamelund, Chowell, Gaddy, Raitoharju) and economic and social history of war (Peltola, Saaritsa, Gaddy, Taskinen).
The aim of the “Scarred people” project is to model excess all-cause spatial mortality in Tampere due to scarring events like the like typhoid epidemics in 1916, the Finnish civil war in 1918, Spanish flu in 1918-20, and unemployment during the Great Depression of the 1920s, using Serfling models and GIS.
The context of a civil war and pandemic in 1918 is especially interesting as it makes us able to tease out interactions of disease, crowding in prison camps, executions, and undernourishment. At the peak, there were almost 10 000 POWs at the camp in Tampere, compared to a normal city population of 45 000. Past scholars of the Spanish flu have hypothesized about the impacts of malnutrition on mortality during the pandemic, but malnutrition in 1918 generally happened in contexts in which high-quality data is not available. Using our collective expertise in disease modelling and the context of the Finnish civil war to study the experience of the pandemic in the POW camp will lead to a better understanding of the pandemic globally.
Our Finish partners have 1) individual cause-specific mortality data (650-800 deaths/year) with the possibility to link deaths to population and red guard membership data, as well as occupation, address, age, gender, and time at the prison camp; 2) weekly statistics of morbidity with causes in the city (in Finland, the city doctors had to report every case to the city health board); and 3) individual hospitalization records for the 1918-21 period from both the city hospitals (City archive) and the hospital in the prison camp (National archive). These latter data have not been collected yet, but we will discuss how to photograph and transcribe this data during the visit.
Expected contributions to Tampere IAS include 1) a workshop to set up data and discuss emerging findings; 2) Guest lectures by Mamelund at Tampere IAS and the Universities of Tampere and Helsinki; 3) Half day academic presentations for larger audience at Tampere; 4) Active participations in academic and social activities at the Tampere IAS, and Tampere and Helsinki universities; 5) Mentoring of students, including a Master student (Antti Puska) who is studying the Spanish flu in Tampere, 1918-1921; 6) An evaluation of the visit and the outcome of the visit to CAS Oslo; 7) Draft of at least one scientific journal article; 8) Collaborations on proposals for new research funding.
Collaborators at Tampere IAS and Tampere University:
1. Ilari Taskinen (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Tampere University & previously at Tampere IAS 2023-25)
2. Emma Raitoharju (University Lecturer, Faculty of Medicine & Health Technology, Tampere University)
Collaborators at University of Helsinki:
3. Jarmo Peltola (Senior Research Fellow, Economic and Social History, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland)
4. Sakari Saaritsa (Professor of Social History, Director, Master’s Programme in Society and Change, Economic and and Social History, Faculty of Social Sciences University of Helsinki, Finland)
Affiliated collaborators:
6. Gerardo Chowell (Georgia State University).
7 Hampton Gaddy (LSE).