They just weren't listening. It paced the streets of London door to door tracking poor, emaciated faces, people he knew, people he cared for.
And it was all pointing in the same direction. He'd found the link, even drawn them a map to show it.
But still nothing. So now it was time to take action if they weren't going to do anything about this growing terror than he would Mr. Snow.
See here, Mr. Snow, he turns to find the man he posted at Broad Street, sprinting, half falling through the mud towards him.
Mr. Snow, we're ready. We've got everything you need. John nodded and followed the man back in the direction he'd come from.
He had a new bounce in his step. This was it. The day they had to hear him, he'd rip off that water pump handle and then they'd see.
You've now joined us in the 19th century and in the sixth episode of our history of pandemic season.
Some say that the man you just heard from plays a central role.
The story we're about to tell. And some say that he was just one of many trying to tackle that century's foremost threat.
Either way, that threat is one which you probably heard of, not least because it's still around in our own time.
Cholera. So let's begin by finding out more about this devastating disease.
From our medical experts Lúcio Kuji and Brian Angus.
Cholera is an acute diarrhoeal disease caused by intestinal infection with toxin producing gram negative bacterium vibrio cholerae.
So there are many Scerri groups of empathy, cholerae, but only two oh one and oh one six nine caused outbreaks.
And currently, I think V Cholerae O one is cause all the recent outbreaks and in fact there's some evidence that the disease itself
probably relates to the fact that the Vibrio is pick up some extra genetic material that switches onto the toxin production.
So some people have argued that in fact there is cholera epidemics of the stage that invades the bacteria and causes the bacteria to become toxic.
Janick, produce toxin. Cholera is very much is the archetypal toxin.
Disease induces cholera toxin which binds to the gut and causes that not to secrete lots and lots of fluid.
And so, again, I've seen patients with cholera in Thailand, for example.
They just have massive diarrhoea and people die of shock.
Basically, they just lose huge amounts of volume. And so management of cholera really involves giving lots of fluids to people as soon as possible.
Usually intravenously. And then there's a little bit of a role for for antibiotics.
But that's really to stop its spread from person to person. And again, this thing about it's a water borne disease.
It's very much related to drinking contaminated water.
And it's very much a human human to human through the water transmission,
essentially spread by eating or drinking food or water contaminated by the theses of infected persons shedding the various Hillary.
That's not great for, is it, either in low resource environments with poor sewerage facilities.
And this is the perfect environment which causes efficient spread of cholera.
The typical risk area is a kind of Perry urban slums, camps for internally displaced persons or refugees,
where there's only minimum requirements of clean water and sanitation which aren't being met.
The consequences of latest humanitarian crises that cause, say,
disruption of water and sanitation systems, displacement of populations, inadequate, overcrowded camps.
These are where you have your increased risk of cholera transmission because
people are defaecating out in the open and getting into the water systems,
the drinking systems and essentially provision of safe water and sanitation is
critical to control the transmission of cholera and also other waterborne diseases.
The hallmark of cholera is a kind of profuse watery diarrhoea.
And it's actually dehydration from the severe diarrhoea, which is the most dangerous clinical feature.
Sanitation is really important for control of outbreaks of these sorts of waterborne diseases, particularly cholera and also things like typhoid.
That's the disease we're dealing with. So let's find out how and when it emerged.
Time to introduce my main guests today, Dr. Class Curcio, Oxford Martin,
fellow from the Programme on Collective Responsibility for Infectious Disease.
Cholera pandemics of the 19th century are really the kind of big band of international health they kick off starting at age 17 to 18 24.
And the kind of Gulf of Bengal area and colour has been endemic there probably for a long time.
But this time something's new and the disease spreads over large parts of the Indian subcontinent.
And there's then also perceived to be spreading across Asia towards Europe.
Initially, people aren't really aware that this is a new disease.
They are really aware that this is something unique or special and very gradually an age before there's any knowledge
of microbiology whatsoever and lots of conflict about whether disease is caused by kind of climatic exhalations,
humoral imbalance or filth, whether you know, how one could even think of this disease.
So historians have seen that during this period there's a growth of temples being built dedicated to specific fever goddesses in the
Indian subcontinent and increasingly European colonial authorities and the fortunes of the East India Company start picking up that.
Something's going on and they're sending reports back.
So by the end of the 18th, 17, 1824 period when there have been thousands of fatalities in these areas,
there is an awareness that this was something you and this fear of cholera, something new,
something that is very dangerous, gets reinforced or the subsequent pandemic waves.
There are numerous pandemic waves of cholera during the 19th century. And so.
After this initial 18, 17, 18, 24 events, subsequent pandemic waves really drive home this narrative that there is a danger of
new kinds of disease spreading from parts of the world to other parts of the world.
And in the European consciousness, often enough, you know, you get references to the Black Death, etc.,
but there's cholera pandemics that really spark a new kind of way of thinking about disease, something that connects distinct societies.
Disease is something that is related to rapid travel. Disease is something that affects, obviously, European populations as well.
That's very important for the imperial imaginary during this period.
And as a consequence, it triggers by 1851, faced with, again, new research and cholera pandemics, attempts by imperial authorities here,
notably the French, British, Spanish and also some other imperial authorities to devise some kind of international framework of how to deal with it.
I mean, similar to nowadays. A pandemic is a hugely disruptive event for trade.
It causes fear. It causes social unrest and tensions.
And so in 1851, there's really a consolidated international attempt to develop a legal framework to a degree what colour actually is.
But this is before you can see colour under a microscope or, you know, do anything with it.
And there's also a really big attempt to think about how to deal with quarantine.
And that's something that we're still thinking about. We've covered 19. So how long is an appropriate quarantine?
How should a port deal with ships with suspected cholera victims on board?
How do you treat ships flying, you know, with under a different flag?
So all of these things get debated in a sign of the times that there's no definitive agreement reached on this.
It's actually owned in 1892 when microbiologists start coming in and showing you that the pathogen causing cholera.
That's much more sophisticated understands how disease spreads, that new conventions are really reached that span large parts of the globe.
But this wasn't, of course, the only outbreak of cholera in the 19th century.
There are a series of cholera pandemics that sweep around the world. So the first one is from 18, 17 to 18, 24.
Another one is from 1829 to age 47. Then another one from 1846, 1860, from 1863 to 1875.
And then from 1881 to 1896 and from 1899 to 1923.
Now, these don't all hit England in the same way.
Or, you know, the British Isles don't hit Europe in the same way because of the global interconnectedness.
There is really this awareness of cholera as a major challenge.
And increasingly, when it the more it becomes associated as a kind of disease that is spread by filth,
it becomes a sign of your civil, literary, but also moral progress by not having cholera incidence within your cities.
And again,
cholera is kind of the menace lurking in the shadow of people's mind when they offer us large scale spending on sanitation and sewerage upgrades,
which really start gathering steam in the UK from the 1860, 1870, 1880 onwards,
where there's large scale expenditure and it really does result in a measurable decrease of the spread of waterborne pathogens.
I particularly wanted to focus in on England around the middle of the 19th century
and ask class to paint a picture of what public health was like in the country.
At this time, the cholera pandemics hit England in a very unique point in time.
So since the early 19th century, late 18th century,
there's been quite big changes that have happened in terms of thinking about disease coming out of specifically France.
There's this increasingly rigorous concept of disease as something that you can localise within your body.
So since the 18th, 17th century disease, older mediaeval notions of diseases,
kind of imbalance of the body are being displaced by increasingly systematic pathological examinations of the body and increasing this notion,
OK, we can look less disease in a specific point of the body. So disease is no longer something that just arises spontaneously.
But there are distinct diseases and we can differentiate between them.
And at the same time,
there's this enlargement post French revolutionary hope in a kind of rational reconstruction of societies and an increasing trust in maths.
So people start counting deaths. Science is not particularly revolutionary,
but actually having robust data sets of deaths in specific localities that he can then analyse statistically.
So we know the difference between an endemic disease and that led epidemic is just really,
you know, that can rise over what you would expect in the number of deaths occurring.
These two changes start bringing in a kind of new way of conceptualising disease.
And there's a young generation of often quite radical medical doctors, public health doctors,
who are starting to emphasise that states should take care of their citizens,
that it is part of state's interest to boost the welfare of societies by taking specific.
Forms of sanitary intervention further. So in the UK, there is a group of influential people smoking.
For example, Chadwick. You are using these statistics to press for senator reform and cholera in this situation is almost, I should say, godsend,
but it definitely boosts the cause of these public health practitioners because it is such an explosive disease.
It causes terror and the repeated waves of introduction in the UK during this period.
And it boosts the political weight of the demands of public health reformers who can
now successfully press for the case that some kind of sanitary reform is necessary.
There may be disagreement about the cause of cholera, but it is increasingly linked to filthy,
stagnant water, specific forms of poverty in the Victorian mind, also specific forms of amoral behaviour.
So drunkards and, you know, people are living squalid lifestyles.
The blame for contracting the disease because of their of their lacking morality there, too.
So it's kind of a comprehensive reform programme of boosting health health defined here no long as the health of the individual.
But as of the population. And it really feeds into this new narrative of nation states,
modern young nation states emerging during this period who are concerned with boosting
the efficiency of their population and also obviously preventing social unrest.
So that's the public health system. But I still wondered how the wider society reacted to this growing threat.
The cholera pandemics initially trigger moral panic.
So large parts of the initial, how shall I say, official communication that isn't really modern public health communication in a way,
combines national calls to prayer,
begging for forgiveness and other kind of spiritual interventions with suggestions like keeping clean, being moderate in your diet.
So against some kind of effect, your constitution and not drinking to excess washing your hands.
So it's kind of a potpourri of different recommendations of kind of tried and trusted 18th, 19th century attempts to kerb disease.
There's also a flourishing market of private preventative measures.
And as the 19th century progresses, this becomes ever more colourful with kind of new concepts of germ theory,
intermingling of all the concepts of my asthmatic fear.
So you'll get people advertising carbonic acid as a kind of disinfection that you can use internally and externally.
You'll have rose petals, dust because of its great smell, dispersing cholera germs.
In our typhoid exhibition, we had a great example of people simultaneously advertising hair lotion to restore hair,
which allegedly folds out pennies from Colorado. Typhoid and cure you of the cholera at the same time.
So there's there's a huge variety of medical interventions. But what does seem to be an emerging consensus within the public health,
emerging public health discipline of the time is that sanitary interventions seem to offer a good chance of prevention,
regardless of whether you agree on germ theory or you agree.
My asthma or, you know, other forms of kind of contagion ism, you will probably agree that getting rid of stagnant water,
getting rid of exhalations filth achieves a kind of common goal.
It seemed like a good time to bring into the story that physician John Snow, along with his famous water pump moment.
I'm aware from my own research that such historical narratives can be misleading,
giving the false impression with hindsight that the line of progress suddenly became clear after some
crucial experiment or insight such as Galileo was falling cannonballs or Newton's falling apple.
I think in general, it's wrong to think of no knowledge progressing inevitably to a certain point.
And if you're looking back at history, there's always a temptation to always, you know, yell at your source and say, isn't it obvious?
Why can't you see this? And that ends up with you asking wrong questions.
It ends up with you the kind of jargon we say, creating a tautology where, you know, progress is inevitable.
Only people that follow John Snow. At the time, everything would have been clear.
John Snow is one of a number of physicians during this time employing maths and point statistics
and employing epidemiological kind of leather shoe epidemiology to trace the origins of outbreaks.
And he's a physician in London during this period and becomes concerned about cholera spreading in London.
And he starts investigating going to the households, asking where water has been taken from notes asking numerous other questions.
And he links off claims that he has found a link.
Again, this is before you have any kind of microbiological proof that what he's claiming is actually true,
that cholera outbreaks are linked to this one. You know, to this one water company supplying water.
He then creates a map which is specifically designed to prove his points to the map is less a piece
of rigorous science as we now can retrospectively claim to be a more kind of political statements.
It does blend out specific points of information that you wouldn't blend up nowadays to really drive home the
point he is hoping to make and at the end of the cholera outbreak has really died down at the end of this,
then spectacularly removes the handle off the Broad Street pump. John Snow mapped where the cases where basic epidemiology looked at the risk factors.
This what we do with any outbreak is we have it. We try to make a case definition of what the diseases.
And then we will look at people who meet our case definitions and then we'll ask the most questions
about what the what they did do mean contact question where they've been and what they've been doing.
And he tried to do it was a common water source that these people were using and he tried to get it shut down and didn't manage.
And so took matters into his own hands and to create a pump handle and registered the cholera transmission in removing it,
he kind of starts setting a precedent for, you know, thinking of cholera as something that is water related.
Snow isn't that prominence during his time.
And this is not because. You know, there's some kind of evil conspiracy going on against epidemiology during this period,
it's because there are very plausible alternative, according to the current state of science knowledge.
Competing theories of disease ongoing.
Snow is writing again during this time period when there seems to be very plausible evidence that diseases are spread by specific climatic variations.
So there are also lots of hybrid fairy circulating.
So, for example, one of Oxford's most famous physicians during this period,
Sir Henry Jaclyn's, better becomes the Regis professor of medicine in Oxford. He investigates Oxford's column Colour Outbreaks.
And in the 1850 he publishes, another looks almost identical to Snow's map.
Goes from house to house, gathers the case reports, produces his beautifully coloured map of Oxford with different slum districts coloured in.
And when I show it to my students with Mononoke to say, oh, this is snow, it's clearly bacteriological thinking linked into the water,
but then you look closer and you actually see that he's drawn in altitude lines.
What he's saying is, yes, water may be a factor, but actually it's specific climatic conditions that also then cannot allow dangerous poisonous
wrappers or toxic wrappers to stay in specific areas that I'm not as present at higher level.
So it's a time of great competition between different theories of disease.
So snow is he makes an interesting point. It is not conclusive evidence.
Not even by the standards of the time that that is really the cause of the cholera pandemics.
He is, however, later in the early 20th century,
put on a pedestal by rapidly establishing group of public health practitioners at universities who, you know, see him as the founding father.
And as with lots of farming, this you have lots of heroic narratives arising around them.
And, you know, I research a lot of antibiotics that could tell you a lot of stuff about Alexander Fleming, too, you know, in this context.
But to sum up Snowies place in this narrative,
I still felt that we could legitimately consider him to have played an important role in the history of epidemiology.
So, yes, knows William importance. He is one of the first to really highlight Water-borne Connexions.
His epidemiological method is rigorous according to the current standards.
However, it is not, as you know, according to the scientific knowledge of the time, it is not a conclusive proof.
And it is more of an outlier theory in contrast to other, more established fearis like the one Åkerlund is proposing in Oxford,
which often presume a kind of hybrid between Contagion's 90 contingence causes the
modern notion of the scientists we now have is emerges during the 19th century.
But you cannot compare John Snow to a modern scientist and the way modern science is conducted.
The biomedical sciences, as we now know, this fusion of the biologic and the medical sciences.
And that does not exist. When, when, when when Snow's doing these these investigations,
a large part of a science in the 19th century is carried out by people we would
perhaps now characterise as amateurs and seemingly individual investigators,
although very well network once and often enough is relying on considerable sources of wealth,
either privately or from other sources to conduct these investigations.
The modern notion of the kind of biomedical scientists we have now that emerges as a result of the bacteriological revolution,
but also the revolution of industry and the biomedical sciences and of state interest in that that accompanies that.
A part perhaps that also makes it easier for us to envision these people. United is almost Sherlock Holmes like people.
You know, if the hunch that one wanders London finds finds the Broadstreet handle and takes it off.
I think it both allows us to romanticise. In some way,
the work and I think actually take the actual practise of doing this work less seriously and also underestimate how revolutionary this was,
how radical it was. Perhaps that's the better word for it.
In the 19th century, snow was an outlier initially and the consensus that his feary was right emerged gradually.
But there is this tendency nowadays to mistake the way he mobilised evidence with our way of mobilising
evidence and then to presume that society should have automatically snap the finger and say,
no, this is this is what's causing the disease. He's a good retrospective hero.
If there were a number of key figures around this time,
I was keen to understand from Flosse who else was contributing significantly to the understanding of this disease?
Well, as a German, I have to say, well, but Cofferati, you know, he is the person to isolate the Veber.
They are right. And his investigations in Hamburg, even though there are still a lot of contestation during this period,
whether something is is jumbo or not, his is new mode of presenting evidence, the kind of.
Even though he actually doesn't invent it. But it goes back to his students deeply.
Luffler the cost postulates of linking a microbe to a disease in a way that we probably wouldn't do any more.
But not that kind of new way of mobilising evidence.
Using the laboratory to make decisive claims about this is the.
This is how it spreads.
The disease is the pathogen rather than the kind of wider climatic constitution and the insight in the individual's constitution.
That is what makes a huge difference. And in 1890 to the time when those first sanitary conventions are reached,
that is also the year when he in Hamburg has a major breakthrough in terms of
cholera prevention during a pen during an epidemic that occurs in Hamburg.
So British bacteriology in the 19th century also has lots of heroic figures.
But if you really want to see how germ theory takes off.
Gosh, look to the European continent, the labs of Pasteur and to the kind of Corkins cool of bacteriology,
both of whom got to dominate international bacteriology up until the First World War.
And Cok also found himself challenged by competing theories about the nature of this disease.
The very famous story, of course, there's a very famous competition with Max Petten Kaufer,
who was a very famous advocate of sanitary feary, again thinking that ventilation was a key driver of of public health.
And he famously tried to disprove cough. And actually, it's a sign it's a successful challenge for him.
He drinks a solution of cholera. Bacterium doesn't fall ill, allowing him to claim that cholera clearly can't be proved by a germ.
I mean that these scientific rivalry's doing, the period the way lots of people like Pasteur mobilise evidence is very selective.
We shouldn't mistake it with the way, for example, clinical evidence is evaluated nowadays.
It's often much less rigorous. The way statistics is used is very different.
This is before really modern bio statistics emerge there much towards the end of the 19th century.
It's a different world.
It's a different world again, in which, you know, you can have this outsized reputation of not being this individual genius walking around.
There is obviously a large associated body of other people gathering evidence during this period.
I would say actually much more important than Jon Snow is the work of William Farr in the General Office of Statistics in Britain.
Just by compiling mortality reports, which gives people an increasing body of evidence to draw on when it comes to epidemiological analysis,
that is also an increasingly powerful when the mass becomes better was the end of the 19th century
in cities where disease comes from and also showing which interventions may be effective or not.
So yeah, that there is a large kind of underbody of the people working in this area.
It's very contested.
Other people mobilised my sematic theory using just the same numbers, just like Reactant did later convert to bacteriology in Oxford.
But in the 1960s and 70s, he is convinced it's Poison's oxidase Medical Office of Health.
Up until nineteen or two does not believe in drugs. He believes in poisons.
It's a political choice on my behalf. What I say bacteriological revolution or not?
It's a slow burning thing, right?
So there are there are changes to the way disease is understood, but they filter even through the scientific and medical establishment.
They filter even more unevenly frou frou popular knowledge.
And this means that what we usually end up being confronted with is a very hybrid world world consisting of
medical pluralism with older traditions of sensemaking existing next to modern traditions of sensemaking.
There are fierce rivalries going on. The same time, and often enough, you only really realise that something is happening at a specific point.
Twenty years into the future, when you look back retrospectively, it's not obvious necessarily that things are going on at the moment.
Another thing I was keen to know more about, hopefully in the light of our modern experience,
Koven was to what extent certain groups or nations were blamed for the spread of cholera 19th century England.
The disease is always politicised. I mean, think of cholera and the Asian cholera as it is then label.
It comes with all kinds of racist assumptions against the supposed causes.
This this notion of sanitation as a civil attari achievement in the language of that,
the justification it also gives you to intervene in other people's lives is a great global
history called a history of global health interventions into the lives of other people.
Because disease is a social phenomenon, because it affects humans, it goes through our bodies,
we shape its environment, take the drugs, etc. It is ease's necessarily a political entity.
And I'm also very sceptical at the moment of chords to take the politics out of science that you often read on unacademic Twitter now,
because the first thing, the first thing people should have learnt about the history of pandemics is that you cannot divorce science from politics.
And the good science in this context is science that is politically aware and manages
to navigate the political streams rather than say we are completely apolitical,
don't touch us. I think that's the wrong ivory tower notion of science that never existed in the metric.
We never will exist in this context.
It was time to move to the end of the century and start to understand how countries began to get this disease under control.
Sanitary infrastructures, which are put in place in the 19th century, play an absolutely crucial role in reducing cholera and typhoid incidents.
Now, for example, typhoid. You can also contract by contaminated food.
Cholera can also be transmitted by other kinds of roads or faecal exposure, et cetera.
So this kind of mass societal susceptibility to explosive spreads of water borne
disease that we still see in low and middle income countries around the world,
that goes down as a result of the quote unquote,
sanitary revolution during the period and also the development of vaccines,
which play an increasing role in protecting European troops abroad and
increasingly play a role in kind of stopping travellers from reimporting disease.
But sadly, unlike smallpox, cholera has not been eradicated.
Cholera is still an ongoing pandemic, one could not say.
So there is the classic cholera pandemics that sweep around the world in the 19th century.
Those classic types gets planted from 1961 by a new cholera type called Tor.
And between 1961 and 1975, there's this really sweeping around the globe of a new L'Étoile pandemic strain of Guinea.
Not now. Wait. What areas of the world where water and sanitation hygiene systems wash in the kind of professional speak are absent or insufficient?
So that starts sweeping around the world in the 1990s, early 1990s.
There's actually global panic about the introduction of these strains into South America.
And you still have regular reports of outbreaks in Yemen, for example, Africa.
African countries have reported outbreaks such as Zimbabwe.
In the 2000s. And there have been also reported cases in the Asian countries, too.
There are currently and three and WHL qualified cholera vaccines that are around.
And they don't always get to the right places because obviously, as we've talked about,
and cholera tends to have outbreaks in places where there are disruptions in the political and social systems.
And you can then treat severe cholera with intravenous fluids.
So antibiotics,
but mass administration of antibiotics isn't recommended because there's no proven effect that really helps with the spread of cholera camera juice,
the duration of story if someone has it. But having mass administration of the antibiotics could contribute to anti-microbial resistance.
There's always a fear during humanitarian crises,
which are set in floods on flooded areas that the dead bodies are floating in the water can spread to cholera.
Actually, there's no evidence that uninfected dead bodies can spread cholera, which is which is quite important to know.
All of this was hugely concerning, and I wondered out loud class whether the cholera had ever really ended.
So in a way, we are still in the middle of a pandemic.
And I think the interesting question to ask here about a pandemic is what's the appropriate timescale to think of a pandemic?
That's the historians question, I think, in this regard. Corona virus Colvard 19 makes everything seem very explosive.
Right. But my work on antimicrobial resistance, for example,
you do start asking yourself the question said, when do we stop, start speaking about a pandemic.
Just because the timescale may be slightly off, in a way, we are seeing a slowly emerging rise of a completely new cast of very difficult to treat
bacterial organisms sharing the same genetic elements that are spreading around the world.
And so clearly, this is also a temporal question that we have to ask ourselves.
And we clearly, as humans, geared towards prioritising explosive events, the immediacy of action, alternate political systems.
But as cases that cholera or, you know, antimicrobial resistance show there are very slow burning or, you know,
comparatively slow burning outbreaks that span borders that are still ongoing and that are just as dangerous as as Colvert 19.
Pandemics can also lead to significant longer term change as class outcome pandemic events, the ones that we remember from the 19th century onwards,
are usually associated with some kind of change to global governance with regard to international health.
So the third plague pandemic,
which starts in the late 19th century or starts in the middle 19th century and then becomes a global problem in the late 19th century,
triggers additional safeguards for parts such as the shields that we still use on ships, for example,
to prevent rats from kind of jumping on ships and then popping up somewhere else in the world.
We see the same happening with experiences of the so-called Asian flu, Hong Kong flu,
leading to upgrades and changes of international sanitary arrangements or international health regulations.
So there is a long history of linking pandemic events to often quite old and longstanding
demands for changes to regulations which are then implemented after a pandemic.
So we've covered 19. I wouldn't be surprised if after this we see changes in the way reporting requirements for countries are stipulated.
We saw a big change of that already in 2005 after the 2000 freeze ourselves outbreak.
And I think another thing we may see, and this is pure speculation on my part, historians are notoriously bad at predicting the future,
is that we'll probably also see a formalisation of some of the emergency licencing mechanisms that we've seen for new diagnostics, vaccines.
The information sharing of the scientific community, which has been.
It was already very impressive in 2009 and 2003 during preceding pandemics.
But the scale at which we see this now is so unprecedented that I think we'll probably
soon see some kind of formalisation of that being put into place after this.
But again, this is pure speculation. Historians are not good at predicting the future.
Just before our conversation, I was curious to what extent class felt a society's collective memory was impacted by the experience of a pandemic.
So, I mean, prevailing notions of disease are obviously already a result of existing cultural traditions, of thinking about health and disease.
But experiences of explosive disease outbreaks usually end up having some kind of effect within collective memory.
But this varies. So it's very difficult to predict what kind of aspect of memory will end up taking hold.
Well, we can say is that, you know, there has been a massive shift in how we as a society, as a global society,
think about disease in terms of just thinking of them as microbes following the 19th century shift of abridgements,
which is, you know, if we actually think about it is pretty profound.
The way we interact with surfaces where we structure food protocols, the way our mannerisms have changed.
I'm not sure how long these things last, how long anything will last after Colvert 19 after this experience there.
It's very difficult to predict how how a pandemic event is incorporated into a society's institutional memory.
It's often speculated why, for example, the 1918 to 1920 Spanish flu didn't seem to have left more imprints on collective memory.
And there's lots of competing explanations, for example, that the First World War,
which was obviously also another very, very important global event that was going on at the same time.
At the end of the day, probably overshadowed some forms of such a memory of it.
So it's it's difficult. I think it's very difficult to generalise from one pandemic event to the other.
I might speculate that perhaps facemasks would become more and more customers site in Western culture then than they were before.
But that's that's kind of as far as I will lean out of the window.
Next time on Future Moon is you'll meet the first of two influenza pendants that we'll be covering.
The so-called Russian flu. This is perhaps the most controversial selection of the series.
Many would argue that other diseases like typhoid have had a far greater impact on human history.
Others, but this wasn't even a pandemic. More localised flu outbreak and some recent studies hint that this might not have been the flu at all.
It's a strain of corona virus. See what you think after joining.
For our next episode in our history of Pandemic's season. I'm Peter Milliken, and you've been listening to Future Makers.
Future Makers was created in-house at the University of Oxford and presented by Professor Peter Milliken from Hartford College.
A voice set to today was Ben Murrell, and the series is written and produced by Steve Pritchard and Ben Harwood.
The score for the series was designed and created by me, Richard Watts.
I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you. On behalf of the whole team for listening to the history of Pandemic's.