Date

3-2025

Department

History

Abstract

This paper dives into the memory of Spanish Influenza from 1918 to 1920. It will analyze and deconstruct the fear caused or absent during that time and later in the records and literature. The comparison of the time of the Spanish Flu will be contrasted with the memory of the time period with the including of Pale Horse, Pale Rider, which was written in 1939. It will compare these two times and conclude with the recent COVID-19 pandemic from 2019 to 2021.

It was November 2019, and reports of a new respiratory disease from Wuhan, China, began to trickle in. Although it would start as a regional epidemic, it quickly escalated into a global pandemic by the middle of March 2020, bringing the modern world to a standstill. The unprecedented measures such as lockdowns, mask mandates, and a race to produce a vaccine, all aimed at controlling the spread of the virus, made it seem like we were living in a video game to prevent the eradication of humanity. This rare occurrence of a lethal pandemic was a shock to our seemingly invulnerable world of medicine. It produced an inconsistent response that led to civil disobedience, ranging from a lack of respect for mask mandates and conspiracy theories. This is not, however, the first modern pandemic. The first time our interconnected world, where people travel rapidly globally, turned against us was in 1918 with the forgotten Spanish Influenza Pandemic. The “Naples Soldier,” named after a popular opera show of the time, as it would be known to many parts of Europe, would jump around the world with maximum efficiency. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, although maybe forgotten and an infection attributed to the flu, would show a significant contrast among the reactions to the disease with the dissonance between the time of the Spanish Influenza and how it is remembered in records or literature of the time.

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