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This week's deadline is fast approaching. It's always been a matter of pride for the team and never the deadlines are met on time.

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Maria, stop panicking. You've got this. There's that story ready to go about the new granary being built outside St. Petersburg.

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Important, but pretty dull. This other thing, first, it had been nothing more than a rumour, but now I'm hearing more.

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An illness is spreading its way through the city, likely caused by changes in the atmosphere.

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My sources are saying it's racing from house to house. All ages, all classes.

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Everyone's picking it up. I heard it from Peter.

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The schools are starting to close and that his hospital is filling rapidly.

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Nearly everyone saying that it's probably mild. Something to let you know for a while, but not to kill you.

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It has a name for it, too. He's calling it the influenza.

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Welcome to late 19th century Russia and to the seventh episode of our season on the history of pandemics.

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The disease outbreak we're about to discuss is surrounded by questions.

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It's commonly known as the Russian flu, but seems to have been little spoken about by Russians at the time.

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So is that name really appropriate? And indeed, was it really flu at all?

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Does it even deserve to be part of our series as a genuine pandemic, or is it just an outlier in our historical narrative?

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In this episode, we'll try to shed light on all of these questions.

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Before we get into any of that, let's cheque in with our medical experts, Lúcia Agouti and Brian Angus on what flu actually is.

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And some of this is going to sound quite familiar. Influenza commonly known as the flu.

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An infectious disease caused by an influenza virus. So there are two main types of influenza virus types, A and B, the influenza and B,

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viruses that routinely spread in people are the human influenza viruses,

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and they're responsible for the seasonal flu epidemics you see every year influence away.

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Viruses can then be broken down into subtypes depending on the genes that make up the surface proteins.

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And over the course of a flu season, different types A and B or subtypes, influenza B can circulate and cause illness.

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Essentially, people with the flu spread it to others about six feet away and from coughing when they're contagious.

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Most experts think that the virus spreads mainly in those droplets when people cough, sneeze or talk these droplets.

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So they land in the mouths of all the noses of people who are nearby and then they inhale them into their lungs.

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Less often, a person might get the flu by touching a surface or object than the flu virus has been on and then touching their own mouth,

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the nose or possibly their eyes. Essentially, people with the flu most contagious in the first three to four days after illness begins,

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some otherwise healthy adults may be able to infect others,

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beginning one day before their symptoms even develop, so they can start spreading it before they're even aware that they're unwell.

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And some people, especially young children or people with weakened immune systems, might infect others with the virus for a much longer, longer time.

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Two concepts are quite important to think about with influenza.

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When you think about it, in the epidemic in pandemic context is that the influenza viruses are constantly changing.

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And there are two main ways that they change. So you have antigenic drift and antigenic shift, unstinted drift.

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So these when you have small changes, mutations essentially in the genes of influenza viruses,

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that can then lead to changes in the sets, proteins of the virus.

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So you have the hate chain and a surface proteins, and these are the antigens.

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And this means they can be recognised by the immune system and then they're capable of triggering an immune response.

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The changes associated with allergenic drift, they happen continually as the virus replicates.

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And most flu shots are targeted towards two seconds proteins.

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If you have small changes that occur,

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then you can create influenza viruses that are quite closely related and then you have something called crush protection, which is possible.

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However, sometimes these changes can keep accumulating over time until the body can't action recognise them.

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So they look at them as antigenic different. And when this occurs, the immune system doesn't recognise the influenza virus that slightly changed.

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And then kind of hoppa a new virus and then somebody becomes susceptible to that circulating infection again as genic drifts.

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The main reason why people have to get the flu jab more than once and why they continuously review and update the vaccine as time goes on with us.

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Czarnik Shift, you have kind of an abrupt, major change in the influenza A virus.

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And this results in a country and painting and then they proteins and influenza viruses which can infect humans.

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And when you have this kind of shift, it results in a completely new influenza, a subtype.

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And one way that can happen is when you have influenza viruses that jump from animal populations and then gained the ability to infect humans.

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And quite often these are dangerous because we don't have much immunity to them.

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And then they can spread quite rapidly. Flu changes all the time.

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He hasn't addressed a shift and it's antigens as well.

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Two things that sit on the surface of the cell, and those are the things you immune system comes in contact with.

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And they change from from year to year, tend not to change within within the host so much.

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And then again, anti viral resistance for flu.

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We can see develop again, not quite as big a problem as some of the HIV, but it certainly does come along.

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Also, time of year resistance. For example, we saw a man Genisis. We stopped using those.

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Everybody knows the symptoms and signs, but essentially people whose symptoms they can get a combination of fevers, coughs,

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muscle aches, body aches, headaches, feeling tired, sometimes vomiting and diarrhoea that's more common in children and running.

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You stop nose. Before the series, the production team and I discussed a 2005 study which said that it was tempting

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to speculate that the virus might not actually have been an influenza virus,

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but instead. A human corona virus. So I was looking forward to hearing what our medical experts thought of that.

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Viruses don't last as long as maybe bacterial DNA.

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But when you're trying to look at historical records and trying to isolate things,

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it's a bit more difficult because you're not going to really have much intact nucleic acid.

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As far as corona virus vs. flu, again, I think it's difficult to say the these respiratory viruses do circulate.

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Do epidemics and then become endemic. We know about flu because flu changes year to year.

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And it's interesting that they don't call flus pandemics. Flu is endemic.

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I mean, it starts starts with lots cases in one country and then moves into other countries.

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Is the definition of a pandemic? I think as far as these big outbreaks,

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that may well have been the first appearance of a note of a novel corona virus at that time has then established itself in the population.

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More likely, I think, is because we know flu does this all the time, that there was a there was an outbreak of of flu.

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And of course, there have been lots of epidemics and a mix of flu and large casualties because it sort of escapes,

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escapes or immune systems quite regularly. So I don't think there's evidence one way or the other really on that for rotavirus is the source.

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So this one was interesting because Saar's one sort of came in and then disappeared.

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And although we sort of take a lot of credit for being able to control it, I'm not quite sure how much of that was luck or not.

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And so it's a corona viruses, certainly.

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And mayors, similarly can cause severe diseases as we as we can see the coronavirus, I think that's been linked.

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We'll see. That is quite crucially related to carry the virus as well, proven the bovine corona virus that causes quite a lot problems in cattle.

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Again, as I say, it's this thing about close contact with animals. And it may well be that that was the that was the way that it started.

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I think it's I think it's very difficult. We know flu does this. We know corona viruses are particularly good at doing it.

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To put money on it. I'd say it's more like could be a flu pandemic flu than the MacGruder virus outbreak.

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And now historian for this episode didn't think much of this line of questioning either.

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I've come across this information as well. I think for a historian,

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this is not necessarily a very important question and one that I'm associate professor of modern history at the history faculty at Oriel College.

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I'm researching 19th century Russian cultural history. For us, it's interesting what's contemporaries experienced.

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What conclusions they draw from it and how they find meaning to whatever was going on around them.

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Whether it was an influenza virus or corona virus is interesting.

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But I think for for me as a cultural historian, as absolutely secondary and because I'm interested in how people react to the to the crisis.

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Right. With that cleared up, at least as far as I'm concerned, let's get into the story of the so-called Russian flu in 1889.

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The Russian health ministry recognised that something was unusual and that mortality rates were significantly higher than the previous two years.

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And then they concluded that this was due to a particularly severe case of the usual winter.

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They called a Cut-Off or maybe influenza didn't quite know what.

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So the Russian high command and the military sent telegrams to all military districts

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because they they've they realised that this was spreading amongst troops as well.

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And they asked the military doctors to figure out what was going on.

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And the fact that they sent a telegram is indicative of that.

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They thought this was some something urgent and something that couldn't wait until the anormal letter was delivered.

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What they asked is, what is this for an illness?

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Why has it come from what furthers the spread of this illness?

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What makes it spread? And how do we best fight against it?

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But as military doctors noticed at the time, actually, that there was a lot of confusion of what they were actually dealing with.

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And as one wrote in a report in 1891, actually, we didn't even quite know what we were supposed to after we were supposed to look for.

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They received reports from all over the country that very clearly described who was ill and they were also supposed to.

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Take particular account of the age of people who fell ill.

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How long the illness lasted. How it spread from the military or from soldiers to the civilian population.

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And one of the questions was also, do you think that some people might already be immune to it?

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Is it. Are there some people who were not affected by it?

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And when all of this information came in,

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the doctors in St. Petersburg were trying to draw some conclusions from all this statistical evidence that they had.

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And the first thing they did is they wrote up very clear accounts of in this of strike.

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This is what happened in this district. This is what happened.

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And one of the big debates then war within the Russian medical profession was.

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Is this a contagious disease or is it caused by by something else?

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Maybe we can come back to that question of what what caused this disease in a moment.

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So it's clear to say that at least from the official side, there was an awareness that something was going on, something slightly unusual,

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and that this was something that where the state had an interest in knowing what to deal with

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it and also had to to try to keep the population and also troops as healthy as possible.

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So there was confusion of sorts about the disease at the start.

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But I wondered whether the authorities put any kind of measures in place, perhaps like the kind of social distancing we see mandated today.

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No. And I think one of the reasons for this is, is that they're not sure what is causing this disease.

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So the medical opinion at this time is sort of post HUSTER post.com.

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So contagion is already has become the more convincing epidemiological argument.

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But there are still many people who think that maybe this is not contagious.

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And this is why when they sent out that telegram,

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the Russian military doctors are all told to note down who gets ill and what age they are on and how it spreads.

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But they're also informed that they should note down what the weather is like, whether they observe any atmospheric phenomena.

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Because the question in people's minds or in the mind of those requesting this information is that maybe this

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this is actually caused by some kind of hydrogen that appears from the earth or depending on the weather.

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And thus this goes back to the miasmic theory, and especially from chickens named.

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This is also some very influential German marks from Pétain CORFO,

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who assumes that pathogens for illnesses are a bit like fungi that live in the ground.

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And when the water level rises and then sinks again and the weather conditions are right, these organisms produce pathogens that then spread.

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And so current genes don't help because the pathogen is actually in the earth or in the nature in a given region.

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And with Pasteur discoveries of DeLay and 1868 and then caulks, discoveries of the Gnosis, Hydrogen and others, this theory becomes less convincing.

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But that doesn't mean that it's totally gone. And this is why Russian doctors are still wondering, might it be atmospheric causes to this and France?

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And the fact that it occurs so suddenly amongst a large group of people,

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they think suggests that maybe it can't be contagious because of the spreading fast.

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And most of the doctors from the Russian military district to right back to the Russian centre command,

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most of the military doctors in the regions actually say we think this is not contagious.

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We think there are some atmospheric or other causes to this.

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And the Russian doctors are not alone in this assessments of British doctors that the wildest theories,

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some say maybe it's the northern lights that causes others.

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Others say maybe it's a meteorite that somehow went down somewhere and spread all these pathogens around.

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So this is generally a view that has quite a lot of currency at the time.

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And so these Russian doctors from the military districts.

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All right, back, we don't actually think it's contagious. But here is how it developed in my district.

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And then the ones in the in the centre. They are more convinced by Colhoun Pasteur that they are not so strong defendants of this miasmic theory.

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And they go through all the details that the regional doctor sent back and say, actually, they think it's on Starick, but we don't because look,

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here it was first the military band that got it and then they played and this and this tabun and then we can trace them back.

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So essentially what they do is they do they trace all the infectious chains and then say, well,

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they think it's atmospheric, but we actually we're quite convinced that it's contagious.

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Given that context, I was keen to find out about the mortality statistics that were recorded by the authorities.

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So if we look at the mortality rates for St. Petersburg, for example, which was then a city of around two million inhabitants,

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we see that in previous years, in 1887, in 1918, eight, around 440 people died every week and early November.

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But if we look at 88 nine, the year the flu reached the capital of the Russian empire.

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The numbers are significantly higher. So they are six hundred and two in week forty five, which would be the first week of November.

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Seven hundred thirty three the next week. Six hundred and fifty the week after.

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And then there's a downward trajectory after that. This means that mortality rates are 50 percent higher, some maybe even more in week 46,

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even more than 50 percent higher than they used to be at this time of year.

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And this is a significant increase and one that the authorities did note very clearly that Russian authorities would note these statistics.

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We know this because they have been recording mortality rates since at least the 1930s when they published regional mortality rates regularly.

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And the regional official cause that's there are probably somewhere also aggregate

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mortality rates of November 1889 and the industry of the interior will have had them.

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But unfortunately, I haven't seen these figures with these numbers in mind.

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I wanted to hear more about how the Russian media and the wider public would have regarded this outbreak at the time.

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So Julia took me through one of the most widely read publications of the late 19th century.

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So what is interesting is that on the one hand, we see that mortality rates are significantly higher in early November,

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but this is not met by any particular public response or public concern.

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So if we look at the publication or the articles published in the widely read and very popular illustrated journal New Bar,

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which was published in Petersburg, so close to the scene of these mortality rates,

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we see that they mention all sorts of interesting things or things that they deem interesting in November and December, but not the flu.

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So to give you a context of what Maeva reports, in this period in November, December 1889,

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there are numerous articles and illustrations about the world exhibition in Paris.

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There are lengthy reports, about 500 years of the Russian at the Tillery with pictures of Russian cannons and exhibitions of Russian cannons.

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There are articles about the centenary of the conquest of Odessa on the Black Sea today, port city in Ukraine.

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And there are reports about the presentation of Edison's phonograph in Vienna and even on the more sort of entertaining.

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And there are pictures and reports about dolphins attacking at Orca off the coast of Japan.

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A long article on a new granary that will spill near St. Petersburg.

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And of course, Bahrain is an important export item for the Russian empire.

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So we can see why this is important. There are reports about a lengthy biographic accounts of pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein and

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a slightly celebrity story about how Tolstoy as a young man encountered a bear while hunting.

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And of course, then there are lots of articles about Christmas. And most of these articles, including the Dolphins, are accompanied by illustrations.

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The flu appears on one page and issue number forty nine on second December 1989.

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And this page is small print. There's no picture on this page.

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And the headline is Various News and one of these various news items.

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It's the flu. And the article goes as follows. Quote, In various places in Russia, the epidemic grip has appeared, which spreads quickly.

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Amongst the population in back in its suburban districts and such, just your gut, Shiina.

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And even in Moscow, but also in cars, on boats, on the Volga River in Simferopol, Crimea, and in other cities.

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Masses of people felt ill with this harmless but severe and unpleasant illness, which is also called influenza.

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To get an idea of the number of the affected.

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Suffice it to say that one third of the population of Pittsburgh have succumb to its attack, spread amongst all age groups and amongst all classes.

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Some educational institutions closed because 50 percent of pupils and teachers were ill with influenza.

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All hospitals have been overflowing and pharmacies could barely cope with the onset of influenza.

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Its immediate body temperature rises to 40 degrees or even forty point five, and it falls equally fast.

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The illness lasts one to three days, rarely five to six.

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And apart from the high fever, the effect it has pain in all joints and headaches and sometimes suffers from dizziness and various nothis ailments.

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And then it goes on to describe what brings about this affliction.

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Well, it says, quote, Data suggest that the current epidemic is rather mild.

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Illness is epidemic, but not infectious. It spreads without any clear plan or direction and without infectious clusters.

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And it's a fast, very different from colora. Influenza spreads immediately like torrential rain and affects entire countries, even parts of the both.

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But once trends is not at all like infectious epidemics would spread, which spreads from microbes.

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In all likelihood, the causes of influenza are cosmic, caused by changes in the atmosphere.

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Many doctors explain it through an excess of ozone, which from electricity in the atmosphere, acquires a great force of quote.

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Now, why is this interesting? I think this is interesting for a number of reasons.

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That's interesting, but it's only a short article and a illustrated journal that otherwise cares much more about other things.

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But it's interesting also in the way it describes influenza. And there are some ambiguities in the descriptions which are quite revealing.

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One of them is that it says it spreads, but at the same time, it says it's not infections,

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it's peers, it's immediate and it affects entire entire countries and even parts of the earth.

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So there's a peer uncertainty of what is actually going on.

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On the one hand, it says it's severe, but also its claims it's mild.

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And I think what is how we can sort of make sense of this contradiction is if we look at the point of comparison for influenza,

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and that's called Grah in comparison to Pollara, this influenza is not really striking fear into contemporary readers.

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And thus,

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I guess I think there's also what explains why there is a small article about it and it doesn't seem to cause much anxiety or demand for information.

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The difference between us and them is that infectious disease are Aequitas for them.

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And so if one comes along, then, yes, we have to deal with it somehow and we describe it.

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And yes, farmers might struggle and hospitals are overflowing. But but that's part of normality.

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And in went on. So we can sort of it's not really as gripping or as interesting for readers as all of the Dolphins.

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My immediate reaction to this was great surprise that the public weren't up in arms about this new disease.

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So I asked Judith to tell me more. I think the general consensus is that the public reaction was quite resigned.

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My hunches, and I'm pretty sure, in fact, since this was like this pandemic did not cause any local hysterics,

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local hysteria that did not cause a lot of local anxiety. This was also one of the reasons why.

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And the historiography plays a minor role, although everyone knows there was this and I'm going to.

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And a cause that's just interesting.

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For example, there is a wonderful book about the Colora and Humbug in 1892 by Richard Evans of Tustin, historian.

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He doesn't mention his friends or once he does say,

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but most of it suggests to a post by respiratory diseases of which tuberculosis was the most severe.

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And even if we take tuberculosis and insurance law and all the other respiratory diseases together,

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it's still less than half of the deaths caused by cholera. But I think in this pandemic on its own does not seem to have received much attention.

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There is an article in what's called The Social History of Medicine,

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which claims that founders Hechler ideas about mortality and found a secular pessimism was largely due to this pandemic.

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I'm not convinced by this argument. I think maybe the maybe the experience of illness and of flu.

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Contributed to that. But I can see that the beginnings of an interest and nervousness and nerves and also cultural pessimism.

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I think they were there also before the change throughout the 80s, 90s.

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I don't think you can say a pandemic causes a cultural mood or fund a secular way of expressing fear or introspection or these kinds of things.

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The experience of of illness will certainly have changed people's view on all sorts of things.

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And maybe it did contribute. But if it did, they would have been so many other factors as well.

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But I don't think we can say that was it. And this is especially true when you compare it to the cholera outbreaks happening at the same time.

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When I first got your request, I checked the Standard Russian Dictionary, which is a wonderful and very authoritative publication.

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Eighty volumes brought out between 1890 in 1987, and it has an entry for influenza.

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And this is a page and it says that in the past we thought this was mainly a disease that affected horses.

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But recently it's also become to the attention that this can be more prevalent.

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And there have been outbreaks in the 1950s and also in 1890.

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But largely, this is not very serious. And people are ill for about three to four days and then they suffer a little bit longer from

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the after effects that can cause mortality amongst people with earlier medical conditions.

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But by and large, this is not not a big deal.

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And then it goes on to talk about how it affects horses. If you compare that to the entry on Colora, it's more than 10 pages.

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And I think. Colora is precisely one of the reasons why this pandemic from the Russian perspective, but also from the historical perspective,

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from from historical scholarship, has not received so much attention because we see in eighteen ninety one.

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So immediately after this influenza pandemic, a huge famine in Russia and famines are always events that help the spread of disease.

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And as a as a consequence of that, there's a big typhus epidemic in the Russian empire.

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And the most severe cholera epidemic that spreads as far west as humbug, where we see you on 10000 deaths from the Russian empire.

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They are up to. They estimate that they have 300000 fatalities.

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This is much more serious. There's no suggestion that illnesses that are out of the ordinary, that these give rise to anxieties and great fears.

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Whereas the influenza pandemic is too similar to the normal winter flu, although it's more serious than the usual ones.

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And so it can you can fit it into traditional notions of risk.

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Right. There is a risk of dying or getting badly ill in winter.

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And this is one case which fits very well with your annual concern for your health in winter.

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Whereas a cholera pandemic becomes so sudden and so out of the ordinary and and

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so shocking also in how the disease develops that you can't subsume it under.

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This is the normal risk of life. But I can't get rid of that.

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I have to somehow psychologically deal with this.

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Focus on cholera and away from the flu outbreak is also something Juliette picked up from contemporary doctors.

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The fact that Russian doctors.

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I'm much more interested in waterborne disease in this period and also because of their interest and waterborne disease and in slums.

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And that conviction, many of them are politically fairly radical and think that something should be done about poverty and the Russian empire.

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This is one of the other reasons why this pandemic is pushed to the side in public perception.

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But for Russian doctors, what really matters are these waterborne diseases and the relation to poverty.

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And these are important things, not severe winter cold.

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So this influenza outbreak was relatively inconspicuous, even though it killed or at least laid low a considerable number of contemporary celebrities,

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including Prince Albert, Victor Queen Victoria's grandson, Lord Rosebery, UK prime minister, and the famous Russian mathematician, Sophia Coveleski.

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Yes, I think I think that's probably indicative about how we think.

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Of this pandemic that we can pinpointed to various well-known individuals who died like Russian mathematician Sophia Chmielewski.

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And in her case, she was the first female professor of mathematics in modern times so that her life was cut right at the age of 40.

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This is something that people do take an interest in the history of mathematics or in the interest of Russian women in science.

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Well, no.

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But I think that we know this illness only through these tragedies is indicative that we don't think the illness itself was such a big deal otherwise.

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This, of course, brings up the question of whether we should have included the so-called Russian flu in our history of pandemic series at all.

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And I'll revisit that at the end of the episode. But first, there was still a few more things that I was keen to understand about this outbreak.

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For example, how much increasing transport links had to do with its spread and indeed whether that might be one of the key factors.

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Now, I think there's certainly plays a part,

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but I think the picture is a bit more complicated because it's not the first epidemic that sort of affected by movement.

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All epidemics are spread through people moving, although at this time they're not quite sure it does, actually.

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Right. But what is interesting about cholera as a comparison here,

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that from the Russian perspective seems very important as cholera comes to Europe at the beginning of the 19th century,

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and it's a consequence of European imperial expansion into into India and Bengal, where the disease had been endemic.

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There's 1889 flu grows out of a similar imperial expansion because Russia and

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Britain are both meeting or having conflicting interests in Central Asia.

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And the Russian military command realises that this influenza pandemic takes its beginning.

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In Qatar, the present day was Pakistan.

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And of course, in only a few years, one year before, in 1888, they finished the Trans Caspian Railway to Qatar.

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So it's with this through this railway that the disease comes to European Russia

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and from European Russia spreads across the world until it comes back to China.

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So circles the globe in about a year, given how many countries were affected.

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I was intrigued to see why this outbreak ended up being labelled as the Russian flu.

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So anyway, it's imperial expansion and imperial competition that brings both these countries to Europe.

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And this is also how contemporary's frame it.

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I think the reason it gets cold, the Russian flu in Britain is on one hand it's safely defined as something far.

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So that's already psychologically a bit easier to deal with if we can sort of say this is a foreign disease.

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But I think it also takes up this question of Russian and British rivalry in this area.

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Almost like saying, see what this Russian advances caused us. We've got this pandemic as a as a result.

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So in a way, it's also a public relations discourse or going on at the same time.

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And it's interesting that the Russians call it the Russian flu, although the Swedes did call it the Russian running noses.

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In fact, Judy, amused on whether the perpetuation of this name today also reflects a modern

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misunderstanding of the sophistication or capacity of some 19th century societies.

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We often think that countries are less well organised at the time than they were.

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And we tend to think this particularly of countries like Russia, where there is an understanding that they were somewhat backward.

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Whether this is fair or not has been a huge debate and the scholarship.

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But I think what we can certainly say is that Russian statistics in the late 19th century were excellent.

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And for economic historians and other people dealing with big numbers that fantastic sources of politics,

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of the population and population statistics, income, economic statistic, all sorts of things.

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But they have to do with warehoused states, attempted to organise their populations.

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And and yes, they are. They know they know quite well what is going on, despite the fact, of course,

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that there are areas where they are less informed and maybe it takes a while for us to reach the centre.

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And then this, of course, also always a little bit of corruption here and there,

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which means that the statistics at the centre might be less reliable than than the locally the the local figures.

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But by and large, I think we can conclude that states are about time.

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Well, quite well-informed about what was going on. So.

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Onto the conclusion of this outbreak, and two, it's perhaps dubious place within our historical narrative of pandemics.

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I asked Julia for her reflections on the legacy of Russian flu.

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But what is interesting in the long run is that the flu pandemic that started in 1889 did not leave a lasting imprint on Russian

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perceptions of what was going on in these years and what the important events in the 1990s were for Britain and France.

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They only they don't have cholera in 1892. So their view on things is likely to be a little different.

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And maybe this also explains why the so-called Russian flu has left more traces in Britain than in other countries.

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And Britain has, as I said before, been much earlier with successful surge and and these kinds of things.

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So. So cholera is not is a apostasies disease in Britain in the 80s, 90s because they can deal with its threat.

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And so maybe the Russian flu. I think that there are a number of reasons why it's prominent.

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One, as I said, because of the imperial competitions as one reason and the others possibly because

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there is no famine in 1891 in Britain and no cholera epidemic a consequence.

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Julia also feels that modern experiences significantly impact on the importance we ascribe to events like epidemics.

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Out of interest, I had to look at the sort of overview books of the 19th century to the standard overview

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from textbooks and other introductory books that we usually assign students to read and.

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None of the ones I had on my shelf had epidemic or disease or similar thoughts in the index.

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There one exception, which is a book by someone who wrote about Hollerer.

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So his new book of 19th century European history does have a chapter on diseases.

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And I think this is indicative of how history works.

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My prediction is that in 10 years, epidemics will be in every history book about the 19th century because we have now experienced ourselves.

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But this does change life significantly. And I think what we what we see here and what raises a methodological question

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is to what extent historical research is dealing with questions of the present,

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which we then look for in the past books about the Russian empire.

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They will mention the famine of 1891 and I will mention the cholera epidemic,

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because you can't you just can't overlook these things and the Russian empire at the time.

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But I think the fact that overview books of global history in the 19th century don't manage,

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don't mention diseases is interesting and indicative of the time of writing when these were not on the forefront of historians minds.

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So finally, the big question, should we have included the Russian flu in this series?

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You'll hear from Julius shortly, but first from Klaus Curcio, who we met in Episode six.

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I think nowadays the Russian influenza story is very interesting because the influenza strain is

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culturally significant in the sense that it leads Bacteriologists to start suspecting bacillus influenza.

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So bacterial with influenza, which becomes very relevant, a particular, very long,

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winding history of how this is connected to the discovery of penicillin. Actually, it's been said there is an immediate connexion there.

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The big revolution of the 19th century is counting disease.

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It's it's accumulating case numbers and it is having then records on mortality going back that become increasingly robust.

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Counting deaths beyond the level of the individual community is an incredibly useful national tool for public health.

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Once you start counting something, that disease winds incredible power of this political marketplace,

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of other diseases that can be prepared for that, you know, should be taken into account.

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So I would say from the perspective of a kind of historian of medicine, science and technology, that the Russian influence,

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in addition to obviously killing many people, still causing misery and causing widespread panic during this period,

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is very important for importing influenza as a disease category that is distinct from others onto the map,

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even though the wrong theological agent is defined during the period that that comes back then.

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And I an 18, 19, 20, when everybody is looking for bacillus influenza,

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they're looking for bacteriological cause because clearly that should be the cause.

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Right. It leads Flemyng to isolate barters influenza from his nose and deposited in Britain's microbiological

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collection as one of the first strains of deposits that look for penicillin as a selective medium for it.

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You know, it's it's the unintended consequences of this are pretty, pretty phenomenal, actually.

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I think it's an excellent example, because what it shows is that once the perspectival,

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pandemics or epidemics can be very different, depending on where you are.

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And in the Russian empire, as I said, where there's the threat of cholera and typhus and all the other things,

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but other pandemics can sort of overshadow a global pandemic.

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I think this is very interesting that more local epidemics can overshadow a global pandemic.

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But I also think that's interesting to see. We are used to living.

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A life in which infections don't play a particularly strong rubbled, once spoken to a doctor who says, oh, we've become PSINet, Jennifer.

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Washing our hands and washing our clothes in really hot water because we have antibiotics and we're not used to it anymore.

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But what is interesting about this pandemic is that in a context where there is a constant presence of debilitating and frequently fatal diseases,

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that even a pandemic can be met with resignation on parts of the population and very soon fade into general oblivion.

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I think this is interesting and this tells us a lot about the period that which we are dealing here.

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So I think it's a it's an excellent choice to go for a pandemic that is actually not seen as a big disaster,

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because in the in the context of what off of threats to health,

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it's just, well, particularly bad Russian snippet was not what you say and not something that puts everything on the hospital or changeless.

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I pretty much completely.

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Next time on future makers will travel just a few years forward to another influenza pandemic that's been erroneously blamed on a single country,

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but which, unlike the Russian flu, is of unquestioned historical significance.

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This so-called Spanish flu is estimated by some to have infected up to a third of the world's population in the early 20th century,

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spreading rapidly through countries already ravaged by war and malnourishment.

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You'll almost certainly have heard of this deadly outbreak. But there's a lot more to learn.

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Behind the headlines. And we'll discuss it fully in the next episode of our history of pandemic season.

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I'm Peter Milliken, and you've been listening to Future Makers.

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Feature makers was created in-house at the University of Oxford and presented by Professor Peter Milliken from Hartford College.

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A voice actor today was Anna Wilson, and the score for the series was designed and created by Richard Watts.

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The series is written and produced by Steve [INAUDIBLE] shot me then Howard.

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Thank you. I'm half of the whole team for listening to the history of pandemics and we love hearing a feedback.

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So let us know what you thought of the show and what you might like to hear his cover in the feature.