How people who came before us coped

January 4, 2021 3:38 AM

Can you recommend me your favourite memoirs or other personal accounts of the 1918 influenza pandemic, either online or in print?
posted by Glier's Goetta to Society & Culture (7 answers total)

Katherine Ann Porter nearly died in the epidemic. She was in the hospital for months, and the newspaper she worked for wrote up her obituary. Her novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider is based on that experience.
posted by FencingGal at 7:23 AM on January 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

There's an essay, originally published in 1976 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, written by a doctor who was a medical student in 1918 and worked in one of the field hospitals that I'd recommend.

If you're interested in other respiratory disease in the pre-WWII era, Betty McDonald (of The Egg and I fame) published a memoir about her time at a tuberculosis sanitarium in the 1930s. The Plague and I. It looks like it's now available in eBook.
posted by pie ninja at 7:32 AM on January 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell
posted by mahorn at 8:48 AM on January 4, 2021

There were a bunch of early-COVID essays reflecting on how Mrs Dalloway is a post-pandemic novel. I had never really realized that before and it sheds a lot of light on the character's anxieties but also her enthusiasm for errands.
posted by lunasol at 9:15 AM on January 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

The Great Influenza is packed full of biography, science, politics...and personal anecdotes. having read quite a bit about it, i believe this to be the authoritative account.
posted by j_curiouser at 3:10 PM on January 4, 2021

The Pull of the Stars is a novel set during the 1918 pandemic and it is wonderful.
posted by cyndigo at 8:31 PM on January 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

Seconding Pale Horse, Pale Rider.
I also ordered The Great Influenza, but have not started it.
posted by intrepid_simpleton at 12:59 PM on January 5, 2021