Epidemics of infectious disease are indeed wondrous objects of historical analysis. From their first appearance on the horizon to the choking gasp of their final victim, epidemics are practically ready-made as mass events, with their unpredictability punctuated by expressions of state and class power, and their horror leavened by incredulity, foolhardiness, cowardice, heroism, and any number of other limiting expressions of the human spirit.
But flu? It’s just not like that. Not, at least, according to Mark Honigsbaum’s most recent book on the topic. Eschewing the more predictable approaches of social history or historical epistemology for cultural analysis, this History of the Great Influenza Pandemics uses a century’s worth of flu outbreaks to develop an ‘emotionological’ account of influenza’s symbolic fortunes. The results are ambivalent, and expressly so. In the end, Honigsbaum’s intriguing collections of adverts, headlines, cartoons, celebrity rumours, literary anecdotes and Ministry circulars offer no evidence for a definitive emotional response to influenza. ‘Flu appears deadly, yet prosaic. Its waves first emerge on foreign shores, yet it remains endemic and domesticised. It is democratic, striking all groups equally, even as celebrity victims are readily sensationalised. Men are emasculated for falling victim to it, but male sufferers are equally chastised for ‘carrying on’ in spite of it. Women (actually just one: Virginia Woolf) publicly celebrate a long convalescence from such illnesses as a potentially valuable literary trope, while in private, she makes precisely nothing of her own extended and repeated bouts of flu.
Honigsbaum’s understanding of these symbolic representations emerges out of the logic of his historicist approach: ambivalence merely reflects the biomedical knowledge of the day. After all, influenza was not the viral disease then that we know it to be today: that story begins with researchers developing viable animal models and cross-immunity assays during the 1920s and 1930s. The earlier epoch, in contrast, is dominated by a medical dedication to influenza’s ‘protean’ symptomology and its ‘sphynx-like’ aetiology. These articles of faith are hardly shaken by Richard Pfeiffer’s 1892 announcement that he had isolated the bacillus responsible for flu. As Honigsbaum demonstrates (pp. 64–75), Pfeiffer’s bacillus was initially just one of several contenders for the role, and none of these had much effect on popular culture’s preoccupation with sensationalising the rapid spread of the ‘Russian influenza’ of 1890 via the telegraph and plentiful, cheap, heavily illustrated, and well-organised print media.
Such ‘mediatisation’ (p. 233) of flu is the author’s real interest. In Honigsbaum’s hands, influenza proves an exemplary case study for such a project precisely because its ‘modernity’ is defined less by its specificity than by its emerging celebrity status. This latter begins, innocently enough, with William Farr’s attempt to fit the 1847–8 influenza outbreaks into a concept of shifting ‘epidemic constitutions’ that could be inferred from the significant deviations in the death rate known as ‘excess deaths’ (pp. 23–6). But this was a bit of a false start. To Farr’s chagrin, medics rarely diagnosed flu as a cause of death, and instead persisted in seeing only ‘local’ diseases at work. It was really telegraphy that launched influenza’s public career, primarily because it allowed newspapers to chart the course of the epidemics, in both space and time (pp. 32–81). Not just flu, but flu epidemics, had suddenly became visible objects of public discourse.
Readers might expect a Habermasian segué at this point, but Honigsbaum gestures instead towards various Foucauldian vistas along his emotionological path The argument is innovative: Honigsbaum claims at several points throughout the book that influenza’s new public life ‘destabilized biopolitical discourses by reinforcing dread of the epidemic form...without offering an obvious public health solution’ (p. 23). This same dread and anxiety (less panic) fill the middle chapters of the book, replete with wonderful images lambasting the effete thousand-or-so coppers laid out in 1895 by a ‘homoerotic’ influenza demon (p. 132), lampooning the self-confident ‘sceptics’ that the same might ever strike them down (p. 131), and promoting consumerist salvation in the form of a ‘carbolic smoke ball’ (pp. 157–69) or the ‘liquid life’ supposedly contained in a hot cup of Bovril beef extract (pp. 170–7).
But is biopower so readily equated with state-driven public health? It seems to me that much of the ambivalence and anxiety so well described by Honigsbaum depicts a fairly standard-issue ‘governmentality’ that incites subjects to assiduously weigh the relative risks of their behaviour, be it hygienic (sneezing on a streetcar), existential (pondering taking one’s own life – a noted sequela of the 1890 epidemics), or consumerist. Such an interpretation would (I speculate) fit remarkably well as the ‘subject’s side’ of the new pact the state offered in the form of increasing and expanding health provision for British citizens in the early twentieth century (which is little discussed in this book).
But this quibble over Foucauldian orthodoxy cannot detract from the importance of Honigsbaum’s History for offering a novel approach to understanding epidemics. And despite the diverse and engaging examples that the author puts forward, the significance of the book is not merely empirical; it is also historiographic. His periodisation matters. By ending the story with the most devastating pandemic since the Black Death, Honigsbaum successfully drives home his deflationary point; namely, that despite the millions of deaths and hundreds of millions sickened, the 1918 flu pandemic and all its subsequent hyperbolic spectres are, in the end, ‘only flu’ (p. 236). The systems of surveillance, communication, and symbolism that promote it for dread and panic are the very same ones that bring such pandemics to heel in the first place Our ambivalence evades memorialisation of the 1918 pandemic not because it’s been ‘forgotten’ or somehow ‘repressed’ (though cf. p. 226), but because its epidemic nature emerged as a function of the very system designed to protect us from it.
