23 May Seminar: Forgotten Pandemic? Revisiting the “Spanish” Influenza on the First World War’s Macedonian Front
For the penultimate Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2024 series, we are pleased to welcome Christos-Stavros Konstantopoulos (McGill University). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 23 May at the normal time (1600 CET). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.
Abstract
Although interest in the history of the “Spanish” influenza pandemic has risen over the past two decades, its connection with the First World War has not yet been fully explored. To the degree that is has been the object of study, it has mostly been approached through the lens of the Western Front. In this presentation, we will talk about the influenza pandemic on the Great War’s Macedonian Front, which is the subject of a larger PhD research project comparing the influenza’s impact on the British, French, and Greek troops fighting on that front. We will start by discussing why that front is of interest to scholars researching the pandemic. Subsequently, based on Hellenic Army data drawn from reports of the army’s medical officers, we will touch on three preliminary findings: a)that the temporal pattern of the pandemic in 1918 differed from that of the Western Front, with the influenza reaching Macedonia more in a single long wave instead of two distinct waves; b)that the scale of influenza-related mortality on the Macedonia front dwarfed mortality from diseases that have captured most of the interest of medical officers at the time as well as of later historians, such as malaria, typhus, or dysentery; and c)that epidemic and endemic diseases, and in particular influenza and malaria, seem to have been correlated rather than distinct.
About the Speaker
Christos-Stavros Konstantopoulos is a first-year PhD student at McGill University, researching the “Spanish” influenza pandemic on the Macedonian Front of the First World War, in particular comparing how it affected the British, French, and Greek troops fighting on that front. He previously studied History at the University of Cambridge and Comparative Political Science at the University of Oxford, before serving in the Hellenic Army’s History Directorate. He has worked for the SCHOOLPOL project of the University of Oxford, researching the evolution of education policies in OECD countries since the Second World War. His broader interests include the history of health, population, education, and development.
2 May Seminar: Socioeconomic mortality differences during the Great Influenza in Spain
For the fifth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2024 series, we are pleased to welcome Sergi Basco (Universitat Barcelona). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 2 May at the normal time (1600 CET). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.
Abstract (and link to paper)
Despite being one of the deadliest viruses in history, there is limited information on the socioeconomic factors that affected mortality rates during the Great Influenza Pandemic. In this study, we use occupation-province level data to investigate the relationship between influenza excess mortality rates and occupation-related status in Spain. We obtain three main results. Firstly, individuals in low-income occupations experienced the highest excess mortality, pointing to a notable income gradient. Secondly, professions that involved more social interaction were associated with a higher excess of mortality, regardless of income. Finally, we observe a substantial rural mortality penalty, even after controlling for income-related occupational groups. Based on this evidence, it seems that the high number of deaths was caused by not self-isolating. Some individuals did not quarantine themselves because they could not afford to miss work. In rural areas, home confinement was likely more limited because their inhabitants did not have immediate access to information about the pandemic or fully understand its impact due to their limited experience handling influenza outbreaks.
About the Speaker
Sergi Basco is Associate Professor of Economics (with tenure) in Universitat Barcelona. He received his PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His work focusses on understanding the effects of globalization and economic crises. His academic work has been published, among others, in Journal of Economic Growth, Journal of International Economics, European Economic Review, Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, World Development, and Economics and Human Biology. He has published the books Housing Bubbles: Origins and Consequences (Winner of the Catalan Society of Economics Prize 2020) and Pandemics, Economics and Inequality: Lessons from the Spanish Flu (joint with J. Domènech and J. Rosés).
18 April Seminar: Popular understandings of contagion during the 1918–19 influenza pandemic
For the fourth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2024 series, we are pleased to welcome Islay Shelbourne (University of St Andrews). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 18 April at the normal time (1600 CET). You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.
Abstract
On the 26th of November 1918 in Pasadena, CA, the family of fifteen-year-old Heny Ellicott Magill received a call before breakfast from Henry’s Aunt Helen, summarily uninviting them from Thanksgiving. The day prior, Henry and his mother had argued with Helen over her decision to invite two soldiers from the nearby Arcadia Balloon Camp to their Thanksgiving dinner, with Henry describing her choice as ‘very unpatriotic and inconsiderate of others to have the boys when the Spanish Influenza is so bad, especially when one does not know the boys’. Henry’s mother had commented that if her immediate family were to boycott the event, perhaps Aunt Helen could invite even more soldiers. The following morning Aunt Helen called her bluff. Henry, reporting all of this in the diary he kept for the duration of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, rejected Aunt Helen’s insistence that he and his parents were afraid of the flu, insisting that ’we are not afraid but only like to take precautions, as any other sensible person ought’. These precautions, however, were limited. In his concluding statement on the 26th of November entry, Henry notes that the carpenter had arrived to work on an upstairs room. Henry would interact with the carpenter frequently over the next few weeks.
Henry’s diary entries from throughout the pandemic period demonstrate the complex, multilayered understanding of contagion that dictated responses to influenza in 1918. This paper, as part of a larger PhD project, will utilise a Southern Californian case study to trace these understandings and the impact they had on adherence to, or rejection of, public health measures enacted during the pandemic to prevent the spread of influenza. In noting the influence of existing disease experiences, cultural depictions of infection and sickness, and the slow popular adoption of germ theory in the early 20th century, this paper will provide a nuanced study of everyday citizen’s reactions to public health measures, which in Southern California included public gatherings bans, school closures, quarantines, and mask mandates. Existing literature on the subject focuses largely on the opposition to these measures, and in doing so suggests a binary response in which citizens either completely opposed or otherwise entirely complied with public health ordinances. In utilising Henry’s diary, as well as other personal ephemera from the period, this paper will challenge this interpretation, and show instead how individually generated perceptions of infection risk informed the extent to which people followed official prevention measures or enacted their own forms of contagion defence.
About the Speaker
Islay is a PhD Environmental History candidate at the University of St Andrews, where her thesis explores how Southern Californian medical and civilian reactions to the 1918-19 influenza pandemic were framed by the state’s unique attitudes towards health and nature. Prior to her PhD, Islay explored issues of medical authority and expertise in both her BA dissertation on veterinary authority in the First World War (QMUL 2019) and MRes thesis analysing medical expertise among British bacteriologists during the 1918-19 pandemic (IHR 2021). Her research employs a combination of medical, environmental, and everyday life history methodologies, the latter inspired by her work on the Everyday Dictatorship Project, also at the University of St Andrews.
7 March 2024 Seminar: The Economic Impact of the Black Death in England, 1350 to 1400
For the third Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2024 series, we are pleased to welcome Professor Mark Bailey (University of East Anglia). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 7 March at the normal time (1600 CET). You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.
Abstract
The Black Death of 1348–9 halved the population of Europe, and the English sources provide unparalleled insights into the economic consequences of this catastrophe. Recent research and re-readings of older research underline the profound importance of the Black Death in causing long-term shifts in wealth distribution, patterns of consumption and production, the decline of serfdom, and the spread of contractual relations in the land and labour markets.
About the Speaker
Mark Bailey is Professor of Later Medieval History at the University of East Anglia, UK. In 2019 he delivered the Ford Lectures at Oxford University, subsequently published as After the Black Death. Economy, society and the law in fourteenth-century England (Oxford University Press, 2021).
29 February 2024 Seminar: Using cellular-scale viral and immunological models to inform macro-scale public health decision making
For the second Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2024 series, we are pleased to welcome Thomas Finnie (UK Health Security Agency). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 29 February at the normal time (1600 CET). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.
Abstract
All viral pathogens mutate, sometimes that mutation has profound effects on how the pathogen affects the human population (for example by evading the human immune system), often it does not. In this talk I will explore how we have begun to bring together the multiple scales of understanding required to turn raw genomic, or virological information into modelling the effects on a population so that public health actions may be taken.
About the Speaker
Thomas Finnie is Head of Modelling and Data-Science for Emergency Preparedness, Resilience, and Response at the UK Health Security Agency. He worked for more than a decade as a modeller at the UKHSA’s predecessor organization, Public Health England, and has a PhD in Numerical Ecology from Imperial College London.