Why was the 1918 flu forgotten?

Like everyone else in the world since March 2020, I've become conspicuously well-informed about the previous big pandemic, the 1918 flu. I've seen (and probably shared) memes on social media about people being told to wear masks back then, or how cases surged, then dipped, then surged again over the two years that the pandemic raged across the world.

Now, that preceding paragraph needs to be rendered in a special sarcasm font, because I'm totally not well-informed about the 1918 flu, though I have indeed seen more information about it in the last 18 months or so, than I had in the preceding 40 or so years of my life. But what's spurring me to write this blog today is the fact that just the other day I was reading a book about the history of Canada, published in 2006, and it makes not a single mention of the pandemic.

I even checked the notes and index, and there's nothing about 1918 flu, Spanish flu, or pandemics in the entire book. This despite a big section on the First World War, in which Canada played a prominent role, and another on the aftermath of the war (though in fairness, that section isn't so big, because the author skips over much of the 1920s).

I've been hyper-aware of this gap in history since the coronavirus pandemic began, particularly in how books from around that period have ignored it. In fact, I think the first instance where I heard of the 1918 flu was in a series of books of alternate history by Harry Turtledove, which explore the long-term consequences of the South winning the Civil War.

When preparing to write this blog, I found this post on History.com, which suggests that this collective act of forgetting came about because people made a conscious effort to forget it. So distraught was everyone at the ferocity of the illness, that doctors made a point of not writing about it; on top of that, the world was recovering from the Great War, and America was racked by political and racial violence.

The problem is, this explanation is still unsatisfying. I get that the books I typically read wouldn't necessarily make a big deal of the 1918 flu, especially because they might have been aimed at kids or written ten years later. But given how many people it affected, it's hard to imagine everyone taking the collective decision to never speak of it again, and then abiding by that decision for the next hundred years.

For one thing, I've learned in the last 18 months that there have been other forgotten pandemics since 1918. Apparently there was one in the 1950s in Britain, for example, which I only heard about in the context of this one. I suppose it makes sense that if a disease is raging only in one or two areas, or if it's over fairly quickly, then you wouldn't hear of it again.

At the same time, I'm well aware of the polio epidemic that raged throughout the Western world in the early decades of the 20th century. That was only beaten in the 1950s, when the Salk vaccine came out, but presumably the long decades in which polio was a danger to people meant it was harder to ignore.

In this context, I can't help thinking of another forgotten event, the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, which I'd never heard of before the HBO Watchmen show came out a couple of years ago. In that case, the forgetting is probably easier to explain, because it happened quickly (over two days) and in just one place, though of course there were other such incidents over the course of the 20th century. And, perhaps a bit distastefully, it was easy for the rest of America to forget given who was massacred in Tulsa - what would a reader of the New York Times have cared for a Black community in Tulsa being burned to the ground?

I think that, on top of people wanting to ignore these kinds of events, the reason we've forgotten them is that it was so hard to get information out back then. One point in that History.com article that I found interesting was that the papers covering the 1918 flu didn't really talk about the human impact of it - contrast that with now, when we see people on Facebook and Twitter who have caught the coronavirus, or died of it. We're all constantly talking about it, and doing so in a way that's leaving a more-or-less permanent record - something that didn't necessarily exist 100 years ago.

Still, given how unknown these events are, it makes you wonder what else we've collectively forgotten - and whether that forgetting is setting us up to repeat whatever's happened.