Grappling with a Flu Pandemic

06/29/2009

The pandemic of “swine” or “H1N1” flu is far from the first flu epidemic with global reach.  Perhaps its most infamous predecessor is the “Spanish” flu that spread across the world in three distinct waves from 1918 to 1920 – estimates are that it killed 50 to 100 million people and that perhaps a third of the world’s population became infected.

This spring, Ryan Davis completed a dissertation that explores how the “Spanish” flu was understood and talked about in Spain, uncovering a fascinating cultural narrative grappling with a paradoxical disease.

The 1918-20 disease acquired the name “Spanish” flu not because it originated in Spain – some of the very earliest cases were recorded in Kansas – but because it was so widely discussed in Spain.  Unlike the countries that were belligerents in World War I, Spain did not have any special censorship restrictions on press coverage or other public discussions of the flu.  As a consequence of the relative silence about the flue in other places, it became known as the “Spanish” flu.

In Spain, the flu quickly became identified with and referred to as a literary figure: the Soldado de Nápoles or “Soldier of Naples,” a Don Juan-like figure who appeared in a popular musical play from 1918: The Song of Forgetting.  “The 1918 flu epidemic was a paradox of sorts,” explains Ryan, “and people were looking for a way to fit this paradox into a coherent narrative.  The Soldier of Naples character came to fill that role because of its deep resonance in Spanish culture.”

The epidemic was paradoxical.  On the one hand, it was the flu, a familiar disease that carried with it a set of assumptions about its symptoms and expectations about the relatively benign progression the epidemic would follow.  On the other hand, the virulence and severity of the disease called into question these assumptions and led to lively discussions among medical professionals about its true nature.  Adding to the problem was the fact that contemporary medical scientists were unable to identify the pathogen because the virus was essentially too small to observe.

Into this gap between the familiar and the unexpected stepped the figure of the Soldier of Naples.  The Soldier was a contemporary iteration of the Don Juan figure, a character in the Spanish literary tradition who embodies the paradox of, on the one hand, social order (through his nobility) and, on the other hand, the threat of social dissolution (through his sexual and violent exploits). This ambiguity of the Don Juan figure is preserved in the Soldier of Naples character and it begins to explain why the latter became associated with the equally ambiguous flu: both were seen as simultaneously benign and threatening.

“The very character of the Soldier of Naples became an embodiment of the disease, to the point where the disease is referred to and pictured as the character from the play,” says Ryan.  One example is the depiction to the left.  “Moreover, this literary metaphor for an illness that was at once familiar and unknown, manageable and threatening actually invoked a more expansive narrative template, one associated with the Don Juan story, or, in this case, the story of the Soldier of Naples. Blending the epidemic with literature in this way provided people with a cognitive tool to make sense of their experience.  Even the ending of the play served this role: a bourgeois wedding reconciles the subversive and dangerous character to the social order, thus providing a metaphor for the eventual ‘taming’ of the disease.”

Ryan became interested in the topic when he came across some references that identified the illness with the character, and started to realize how pervasive the phenomenon was.  “There are literary sources that depict the Soldier of Naples, but when I looked more closely at everything from the popular press to medical journals to cartoons, I realized that this was not an occasional metaphor but a pervasive one that invoked a broader cultural narrative, a whole way of understanding the traumatic experience the country was going through.”

As Ryan collected more information and began to articulate why this way of narrating the disease took hold, he also found himself engaged in a research project that was both broadly interdisciplinary and unconventional for his discipline.  At Emory, he found faculty advisors willing to support unconventional research because it seemed interesting and promising, as well as public health researchers with expertise in epidemic illnesses and openness to conversing with a scholar from a very different perspective and discipline.  “People across Emory were willing to help, and interested in what I was finding.  This research could have been discouraged as not ‘literary’ enough for a literature department and too cultural for public health researchers, but here people welcomed and cultivated these interdisciplinary connections.”

Ryan’s dissertation – completed in the spring – focused on the popular press.  He is looking forward to expanding his work to encompass medical journals and other media, developing new insights about the role this narrative played in framing one of the great public health traumas of the 20th century.  But first, he will need to settle in to his position as Assistant Professor at Illinois State University.