[Inspired both by
the recent events I’ll include in Monday’s and Tuesday’s posts and the
historical anniversary on which I’ll focus in Friday’s, a series
AmericanStudying epidemics, past and present.]
Contextualizing
and analyzing two of the worst epidemics in modern history.
A widespread international
pandemic that crosses the ocean to the United States in the blink of an eye,
threatening American lives and communities. Health and relief workers and
soldiers infected, and many more quarantined, with nations desperately seeking
to prevent the further spread of the deadly virus. Yet despite such measures,
hundreds of millions around the world are infected and tens of millions die,
including more than half a million American casualties. Right up until that
last clause, it might have seemed that I was writing about the current Ebola
crisis—but as deadly as that crisis has been for the African nations
most affected, it has to date taken the lives of only two Americans;
whereas the 1918 influenza
pandemic (colloquially known as the Spanish
Flu, due to that nation’s more straightforward reporting about the disease’s
presence and effects) killed
more than 500,000 Americans and nearly 100 million people across the globe
before it finally was contained.
Contextualizing
the influenza pandemic requires extended attention to two distinct but related
globalizing trends. Most obviously, the crisis overlapped—not only in time, but
in both cause and effect—with the
final year of World War I (known then as The Great War); some historians
have argued that it began in the war’s trenches or camps, but even if that wasn’t
the case, it certainly spread and lingered
in direct relation to the war (if, as many have noted, its casualty numbers
far exceeded the war’s devastating effects). More subtly, the pandemic’s
truly global spread—it reached even the world’s most remote locations, such
as the Arctic—has to be linked to the ways in which advancements in technology
and travel had made the early 20th century world far more
interconnected than ever before; from the increasing ease of steamship travel
to the rise of new technologies such as the automobile and airplanes, such
developments allowed for international movement and connections in evolving, unprecedented
ways. And as that linked Arctic story illustrates, another, linked
international trend—the rise in imperialistic endeavors around the world—likewise
facilitated the pandemic’s spread.
Both of these
international contexts might seem equally relevant to analyzing our
contemporary Ebola epidemic. Many of the African
nations most affected by the disease have been and remain war-torn, and
those conditions have no doubt contributed to the epidemic’s spread and
effects. And the many American politicians and pundits who called
for the suspension of all trips to and flights from those nations during
the crisis’s early moments were quite explicitly arguing for international travel
as both a contributing factor and a threat. But since, despite the absence of
such drastic measures and the presence of various returning health workers, the
epidemic has not spread to the United States (again, only two Americans have
died from Ebola to date, and only a
handful more have been affected), I would have to contexualize and analyze
this current epidemic’s American story quite differently. To my mind, the
American response to the Ebola epidemic has been driven by irrational or at
least exaggerated fears—of globalization and its effects, of dangerous “others”
(from terrorists
to illegal
immigrants), even of our
fellow citizens. The Ebola epidemic remains quite real and horrific in West
Africa, and requires continued attention—but here in the U.S., comparisons to
the influenza pandemic reveal more about our current political and
psychological state than our health.
Next epidemic tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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