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.
Maria, stop panicking. You've got this. There's that story ready to go about the new granary being built outside St. Petersburg.
Important, but pretty dull. This other thing, first, it had been nothing more than a rumour, but now I'm hearing more.
An illness is spreading its way through the city, likely caused by changes in the atmosphere.
My sources are saying it's racing from house to house. All ages, all classes.
Everyone's picking it up. I heard it from Peter.
The schools are starting to close and that his hospital is filling rapidly.
Nearly everyone saying that it's probably mild. Something to let you know for a while, but not to kill you.
It has a name for it, too. He's calling it the influenza.
Welcome to late 19th century Russia and to the seventh episode of our season on the history of pandemics.
The disease outbreak we're about to discuss is surrounded by questions.
It's commonly known as the Russian flu, but seems to have been little spoken about by Russians at the time.
So is that name really appropriate? And indeed, was it really flu at all?
Does it even deserve to be part of our series as a genuine pandemic, or is it just an outlier in our historical narrative?
In this episode, we'll try to shed light on all of these questions.
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.
And some of this is going to sound quite familiar. Influenza commonly known as the flu.
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,
viruses that routinely spread in people are the human influenza viruses,
and they're responsible for the seasonal flu epidemics you see every year influence away.
Viruses can then be broken down into subtypes depending on the genes that make up the surface proteins.
And over the course of a flu season, different types A and B or subtypes, influenza B can circulate and cause illness.
Essentially, people with the flu spread it to others about six feet away and from coughing when they're contagious.
Most experts think that the virus spreads mainly in those droplets when people cough, sneeze or talk these droplets.
So they land in the mouths of all the noses of people who are nearby and then they inhale them into their lungs.
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,
the nose or possibly their eyes. Essentially, people with the flu most contagious in the first three to four days after illness begins,
some otherwise healthy adults may be able to infect others,
beginning one day before their symptoms even develop, so they can start spreading it before they're even aware that they're unwell.
And some people, especially young children or people with weakened immune systems, might infect others with the virus for a much longer, longer time.
Two concepts are quite important to think about with influenza.
When you think about it, in the epidemic in pandemic context is that the influenza viruses are constantly changing.
And there are two main ways that they change. So you have antigenic drift and antigenic shift, unstinted drift.
So these when you have small changes, mutations essentially in the genes of influenza viruses,
that can then lead to changes in the sets, proteins of the virus.
So you have the hate chain and a surface proteins, and these are the antigens.
And this means they can be recognised by the immune system and then they're capable of triggering an immune response.
The changes associated with allergenic drift, they happen continually as the virus replicates.
And most flu shots are targeted towards two seconds proteins.
If you have small changes that occur,
then you can create influenza viruses that are quite closely related and then you have something called crush protection, which is possible.
However, sometimes these changes can keep accumulating over time until the body can't action recognise them.
So they look at them as antigenic different. And when this occurs, the immune system doesn't recognise the influenza virus that slightly changed.
And then kind of hoppa a new virus and then somebody becomes susceptible to that circulating infection again as genic drifts.
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.
Czarnik Shift, you have kind of an abrupt, major change in the influenza A virus.
And this results in a country and painting and then they proteins and influenza viruses which can infect humans.
And when you have this kind of shift, it results in a completely new influenza, a subtype.
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.
And quite often these are dangerous because we don't have much immunity to them.
And then they can spread quite rapidly. Flu changes all the time.
He hasn't addressed a shift and it's antigens as well.
Two things that sit on the surface of the cell, and those are the things you immune system comes in contact with.
And they change from from year to year, tend not to change within within the host so much.
And then again, anti viral resistance for flu.
We can see develop again, not quite as big a problem as some of the HIV, but it certainly does come along.
Also, time of year resistance. For example, we saw a man Genisis. We stopped using those.
Everybody knows the symptoms and signs, but essentially people whose symptoms they can get a combination of fevers, coughs,
muscle aches, body aches, headaches, feeling tired, sometimes vomiting and diarrhoea that's more common in children and running.
You stop nose. Before the series, the production team and I discussed a 2005 study which said that it was tempting
to speculate that the virus might not actually have been an influenza virus,
but instead. A human corona virus. So I was looking forward to hearing what our medical experts thought of that.
Viruses don't last as long as maybe bacterial DNA.
But when you're trying to look at historical records and trying to isolate things,
it's a bit more difficult because you're not going to really have much intact nucleic acid.
As far as corona virus vs. flu, again, I think it's difficult to say the these respiratory viruses do circulate.
Do epidemics and then become endemic. We know about flu because flu changes year to year.
And it's interesting that they don't call flus pandemics. Flu is endemic.
I mean, it starts starts with lots cases in one country and then moves into other countries.
Is the definition of a pandemic? I think as far as these big outbreaks,
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.
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.
And of course, there have been lots of epidemics and a mix of flu and large casualties because it sort of escapes,
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.
So this one was interesting because Saar's one sort of came in and then disappeared.
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.
And so it's a corona viruses, certainly.
And mayors, similarly can cause severe diseases as we as we can see the coronavirus, I think that's been linked.
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.
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.
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.
To put money on it. I'd say it's more like could be a flu pandemic flu than the MacGruder virus outbreak.
And now historian for this episode didn't think much of this line of questioning either.
I've come across this information as well. I think for a historian,
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.
I'm researching 19th century Russian cultural history. For us, it's interesting what's contemporaries experienced.
What conclusions they draw from it and how they find meaning to whatever was going on around them.
Whether it was an influenza virus or corona virus is interesting.
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.
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.
The Russian health ministry recognised that something was unusual and that mortality rates were significantly higher than the previous two years.
And then they concluded that this was due to a particularly severe case of the usual winter.
They called a Cut-Off or maybe influenza didn't quite know what.
So the Russian high command and the military sent telegrams to all military districts
because they they've they realised that this was spreading amongst troops as well.
And they asked the military doctors to figure out what was going on.
And the fact that they sent a telegram is indicative of that.
They thought this was some something urgent and something that couldn't wait until the anormal letter was delivered.
What they asked is, what is this for an illness?
Why has it come from what furthers the spread of this illness?
What makes it spread? And how do we best fight against it?
But as military doctors noticed at the time, actually, that there was a lot of confusion of what they were actually dealing with.
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.
They received reports from all over the country that very clearly described who was ill and they were also supposed to.
Take particular account of the age of people who fell ill.
How long the illness lasted. How it spread from the military or from soldiers to the civilian population.
And one of the questions was also, do you think that some people might already be immune to it?
Is it. Are there some people who were not affected by it?
And when all of this information came in,
the doctors in St. Petersburg were trying to draw some conclusions from all this statistical evidence that they had.
And the first thing they did is they wrote up very clear accounts of in this of strike.
This is what happened in this district. This is what happened.
And one of the big debates then war within the Russian medical profession was.
Is this a contagious disease or is it caused by by something else?
Maybe we can come back to that question of what what caused this disease in a moment.
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,
and that this was something that where the state had an interest in knowing what to deal with
it and also had to to try to keep the population and also troops as healthy as possible.
So there was confusion of sorts about the disease at the start.
But I wondered whether the authorities put any kind of measures in place, perhaps like the kind of social distancing we see mandated today.
No. And I think one of the reasons for this is, is that they're not sure what is causing this disease.
So the medical opinion at this time is sort of post HUSTER post.com.
So contagion is already has become the more convincing epidemiological argument.
But there are still many people who think that maybe this is not contagious.
And this is why when they sent out that telegram,
the Russian military doctors are all told to note down who gets ill and what age they are on and how it spreads.
But they're also informed that they should note down what the weather is like, whether they observe any atmospheric phenomena.
Because the question in people's minds or in the mind of those requesting this information is that maybe this
this is actually caused by some kind of hydrogen that appears from the earth or depending on the weather.
And thus this goes back to the miasmic theory, and especially from chickens named.
This is also some very influential German marks from Pétain CORFO,
who assumes that pathogens for illnesses are a bit like fungi that live in the ground.
And when the water level rises and then sinks again and the weather conditions are right, these organisms produce pathogens that then spread.
And so current genes don't help because the pathogen is actually in the earth or in the nature in a given region.
And with Pasteur discoveries of DeLay and 1868 and then caulks, discoveries of the Gnosis, Hydrogen and others, this theory becomes less convincing.
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?
And the fact that it occurs so suddenly amongst a large group of people,
they think suggests that maybe it can't be contagious because of the spreading fast.
And most of the doctors from the Russian military district to right back to the Russian centre command,
most of the military doctors in the regions actually say we think this is not contagious.
We think there are some atmospheric or other causes to this.
And the Russian doctors are not alone in this assessments of British doctors that the wildest theories,
some say maybe it's the northern lights that causes others.
Others say maybe it's a meteorite that somehow went down somewhere and spread all these pathogens around.
So this is generally a view that has quite a lot of currency at the time.
And so these Russian doctors from the military districts.
All right, back, we don't actually think it's contagious. But here is how it developed in my district.
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.
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,
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.
So essentially what they do is they do they trace all the infectious chains and then say, well,
they think it's atmospheric, but we actually we're quite convinced that it's contagious.
Given that context, I was keen to find out about the mortality statistics that were recorded by the authorities.
So if we look at the mortality rates for St. Petersburg, for example, which was then a city of around two million inhabitants,
we see that in previous years, in 1887, in 1918, eight, around 440 people died every week and early November.
But if we look at 88 nine, the year the flu reached the capital of the Russian empire.
The numbers are significantly higher. So they are six hundred and two in week forty five, which would be the first week of November.
Seven hundred thirty three the next week. Six hundred and fifty the week after.
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,
even more than 50 percent higher than they used to be at this time of year.
And this is a significant increase and one that the authorities did note very clearly that Russian authorities would note these statistics.
We know this because they have been recording mortality rates since at least the 1930s when they published regional mortality rates regularly.
And the regional official cause that's there are probably somewhere also aggregate
mortality rates of November 1889 and the industry of the interior will have had them.
But unfortunately, I haven't seen these figures with these numbers in mind.
I wanted to hear more about how the Russian media and the wider public would have regarded this outbreak at the time.
So Julia took me through one of the most widely read publications of the late 19th century.
So what is interesting is that on the one hand, we see that mortality rates are significantly higher in early November,
but this is not met by any particular public response or public concern.
So if we look at the publication or the articles published in the widely read and very popular illustrated journal New Bar,
which was published in Petersburg, so close to the scene of these mortality rates,
we see that they mention all sorts of interesting things or things that they deem interesting in November and December, but not the flu.
So to give you a context of what Maeva reports, in this period in November, December 1889,
there are numerous articles and illustrations about the world exhibition in Paris.
There are lengthy reports, about 500 years of the Russian at the Tillery with pictures of Russian cannons and exhibitions of Russian cannons.
There are articles about the centenary of the conquest of Odessa on the Black Sea today, port city in Ukraine.
And there are reports about the presentation of Edison's phonograph in Vienna and even on the more sort of entertaining.
And there are pictures and reports about dolphins attacking at Orca off the coast of Japan.
A long article on a new granary that will spill near St. Petersburg.
And of course, Bahrain is an important export item for the Russian empire.
So we can see why this is important. There are reports about a lengthy biographic accounts of pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein and
a slightly celebrity story about how Tolstoy as a young man encountered a bear while hunting.
And of course, then there are lots of articles about Christmas. And most of these articles, including the Dolphins, are accompanied by illustrations.
The flu appears on one page and issue number forty nine on second December 1989.
And this page is small print. There's no picture on this page.
And the headline is Various News and one of these various news items.
It's the flu. And the article goes as follows. Quote, In various places in Russia, the epidemic grip has appeared, which spreads quickly.
Amongst the population in back in its suburban districts and such, just your gut, Shiina.
And even in Moscow, but also in cars, on boats, on the Volga River in Simferopol, Crimea, and in other cities.
Masses of people felt ill with this harmless but severe and unpleasant illness, which is also called influenza.
To get an idea of the number of the affected.
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.
Some educational institutions closed because 50 percent of pupils and teachers were ill with influenza.
All hospitals have been overflowing and pharmacies could barely cope with the onset of influenza.
Its immediate body temperature rises to 40 degrees or even forty point five, and it falls equally fast.
The illness lasts one to three days, rarely five to six.
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.
And then it goes on to describe what brings about this affliction.
Well, it says, quote, Data suggest that the current epidemic is rather mild.
Illness is epidemic, but not infectious. It spreads without any clear plan or direction and without infectious clusters.
And it's a fast, very different from colora. Influenza spreads immediately like torrential rain and affects entire countries, even parts of the both.
But once trends is not at all like infectious epidemics would spread, which spreads from microbes.
In all likelihood, the causes of influenza are cosmic, caused by changes in the atmosphere.
Many doctors explain it through an excess of ozone, which from electricity in the atmosphere, acquires a great force of quote.
Now, why is this interesting? I think this is interesting for a number of reasons.
That's interesting, but it's only a short article and a illustrated journal that otherwise cares much more about other things.
But it's interesting also in the way it describes influenza. And there are some ambiguities in the descriptions which are quite revealing.
One of them is that it says it spreads, but at the same time, it says it's not infections,
it's peers, it's immediate and it affects entire entire countries and even parts of the earth.
So there's a peer uncertainty of what is actually going on.
On the one hand, it says it's severe, but also its claims it's mild.
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,
and that's called Grah in comparison to Pollara, this influenza is not really striking fear into contemporary readers.
And thus,
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.
The difference between us and them is that infectious disease are Aequitas for them.
And so if one comes along, then, yes, we have to deal with it somehow and we describe it.
And yes, farmers might struggle and hospitals are overflowing. But but that's part of normality.
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.
My immediate reaction to this was great surprise that the public weren't up in arms about this new disease.
So I asked Judith to tell me more. I think the general consensus is that the public reaction was quite resigned.
My hunches, and I'm pretty sure, in fact, since this was like this pandemic did not cause any local hysterics,
local hysteria that did not cause a lot of local anxiety. This was also one of the reasons why.
And the historiography plays a minor role, although everyone knows there was this and I'm going to.
And a cause that's just interesting.
For example, there is a wonderful book about the Colora and Humbug in 1892 by Richard Evans of Tustin, historian.
He doesn't mention his friends or once he does say,
but most of it suggests to a post by respiratory diseases of which tuberculosis was the most severe.
And even if we take tuberculosis and insurance law and all the other respiratory diseases together,
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.
There is an article in what's called The Social History of Medicine,
which claims that founders Hechler ideas about mortality and found a secular pessimism was largely due to this pandemic.
I'm not convinced by this argument. I think maybe the maybe the experience of illness and of flu.
Contributed to that. But I can see that the beginnings of an interest and nervousness and nerves and also cultural pessimism.
I think they were there also before the change throughout the 80s, 90s.
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.
The experience of of illness will certainly have changed people's view on all sorts of things.
And maybe it did contribute. But if it did, they would have been so many other factors as well.
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.
When I first got your request, I checked the Standard Russian Dictionary, which is a wonderful and very authoritative publication.
Eighty volumes brought out between 1890 in 1987, and it has an entry for influenza.
And this is a page and it says that in the past we thought this was mainly a disease that affected horses.
But recently it's also become to the attention that this can be more prevalent.
And there have been outbreaks in the 1950s and also in 1890.
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
the after effects that can cause mortality amongst people with earlier medical conditions.
But by and large, this is not not a big deal.
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.
And I think. Colora is precisely one of the reasons why this pandemic from the Russian perspective, but also from the historical perspective,
from from historical scholarship, has not received so much attention because we see in eighteen ninety one.
So immediately after this influenza pandemic, a huge famine in Russia and famines are always events that help the spread of disease.
And as a as a consequence of that, there's a big typhus epidemic in the Russian empire.
And the most severe cholera epidemic that spreads as far west as humbug, where we see you on 10000 deaths from the Russian empire.
They are up to. They estimate that they have 300000 fatalities.
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.
Whereas the influenza pandemic is too similar to the normal winter flu, although it's more serious than the usual ones.
And so it can you can fit it into traditional notions of risk.
Right. There is a risk of dying or getting badly ill in winter.
And this is one case which fits very well with your annual concern for your health in winter.
Whereas a cholera pandemic becomes so sudden and so out of the ordinary and and
so shocking also in how the disease develops that you can't subsume it under.
This is the normal risk of life. But I can't get rid of that.
I have to somehow psychologically deal with this.
Focus on cholera and away from the flu outbreak is also something Juliette picked up from contemporary doctors.
The fact that Russian doctors.
I'm much more interested in waterborne disease in this period and also because of their interest and waterborne disease and in slums.
And that conviction, many of them are politically fairly radical and think that something should be done about poverty and the Russian empire.
This is one of the other reasons why this pandemic is pushed to the side in public perception.
But for Russian doctors, what really matters are these waterborne diseases and the relation to poverty.
And these are important things, not severe winter cold.
So this influenza outbreak was relatively inconspicuous, even though it killed or at least laid low a considerable number of contemporary celebrities,
including Prince Albert, Victor Queen Victoria's grandson, Lord Rosebery, UK prime minister, and the famous Russian mathematician, Sophia Coveleski.
Yes, I think I think that's probably indicative about how we think.
Of this pandemic that we can pinpointed to various well-known individuals who died like Russian mathematician Sophia Chmielewski.
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.
This is something that people do take an interest in the history of mathematics or in the interest of Russian women in science.
Well, no.
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.
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.
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.
For example, how much increasing transport links had to do with its spread and indeed whether that might be one of the key factors.
Now, I think there's certainly plays a part,
but I think the picture is a bit more complicated because it's not the first epidemic that sort of affected by movement.
All epidemics are spread through people moving, although at this time they're not quite sure it does, actually.
Right. But what is interesting about cholera as a comparison here,
that from the Russian perspective seems very important as cholera comes to Europe at the beginning of the 19th century,
and it's a consequence of European imperial expansion into into India and Bengal, where the disease had been endemic.
There's 1889 flu grows out of a similar imperial expansion because Russia and
Britain are both meeting or having conflicting interests in Central Asia.
And the Russian military command realises that this influenza pandemic takes its beginning.
In Qatar, the present day was Pakistan.
And of course, in only a few years, one year before, in 1888, they finished the Trans Caspian Railway to Qatar.
So it's with this through this railway that the disease comes to European Russia
and from European Russia spreads across the world until it comes back to China.
So circles the globe in about a year, given how many countries were affected.
I was intrigued to see why this outbreak ended up being labelled as the Russian flu.
So anyway, it's imperial expansion and imperial competition that brings both these countries to Europe.
And this is also how contemporary's frame it.
I think the reason it gets cold, the Russian flu in Britain is on one hand it's safely defined as something far.
So that's already psychologically a bit easier to deal with if we can sort of say this is a foreign disease.
But I think it also takes up this question of Russian and British rivalry in this area.
Almost like saying, see what this Russian advances caused us. We've got this pandemic as a as a result.
So in a way, it's also a public relations discourse or going on at the same time.
And it's interesting that the Russians call it the Russian flu, although the Swedes did call it the Russian running noses.
In fact, Judy, amused on whether the perpetuation of this name today also reflects a modern
misunderstanding of the sophistication or capacity of some 19th century societies.
We often think that countries are less well organised at the time than they were.
And we tend to think this particularly of countries like Russia, where there is an understanding that they were somewhat backward.
Whether this is fair or not has been a huge debate and the scholarship.
But I think what we can certainly say is that Russian statistics in the late 19th century were excellent.
And for economic historians and other people dealing with big numbers that fantastic sources of politics,
of the population and population statistics, income, economic statistic, all sorts of things.
But they have to do with warehoused states, attempted to organise their populations.
And and yes, they are. They know they know quite well what is going on, despite the fact, of course,
that there are areas where they are less informed and maybe it takes a while for us to reach the centre.
And then this, of course, also always a little bit of corruption here and there,
which means that the statistics at the centre might be less reliable than than the locally the the local figures.
But by and large, I think we can conclude that states are about time.
Well, quite well-informed about what was going on. So.
Onto the conclusion of this outbreak, and two, it's perhaps dubious place within our historical narrative of pandemics.
I asked Julia for her reflections on the legacy of Russian flu.
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
perceptions of what was going on in these years and what the important events in the 1990s were for Britain and France.
They only they don't have cholera in 1892. So their view on things is likely to be a little different.
And maybe this also explains why the so-called Russian flu has left more traces in Britain than in other countries.
And Britain has, as I said before, been much earlier with successful surge and and these kinds of things.
So. So cholera is not is a apostasies disease in Britain in the 80s, 90s because they can deal with its threat.
And so maybe the Russian flu. I think that there are a number of reasons why it's prominent.
One, as I said, because of the imperial competitions as one reason and the others possibly because
there is no famine in 1891 in Britain and no cholera epidemic a consequence.
Julia also feels that modern experiences significantly impact on the importance we ascribe to events like epidemics.
Out of interest, I had to look at the sort of overview books of the 19th century to the standard overview
from textbooks and other introductory books that we usually assign students to read and.
None of the ones I had on my shelf had epidemic or disease or similar thoughts in the index.
There one exception, which is a book by someone who wrote about Hollerer.
So his new book of 19th century European history does have a chapter on diseases.
And I think this is indicative of how history works.
My prediction is that in 10 years, epidemics will be in every history book about the 19th century because we have now experienced ourselves.
But this does change life significantly. And I think what we what we see here and what raises a methodological question
is to what extent historical research is dealing with questions of the present,
which we then look for in the past books about the Russian empire.
They will mention the famine of 1891 and I will mention the cholera epidemic,
because you can't you just can't overlook these things and the Russian empire at the time.
But I think the fact that overview books of global history in the 19th century don't manage,
don't mention diseases is interesting and indicative of the time of writing when these were not on the forefront of historians minds.
So finally, the big question, should we have included the Russian flu in this series?
You'll hear from Julius shortly, but first from Klaus Curcio, who we met in Episode six.
I think nowadays the Russian influenza story is very interesting because the influenza strain is
culturally significant in the sense that it leads Bacteriologists to start suspecting bacillus influenza.
So bacterial with influenza, which becomes very relevant, a particular, very long,
winding history of how this is connected to the discovery of penicillin. Actually, it's been said there is an immediate connexion there.
The big revolution of the 19th century is counting disease.
It's it's accumulating case numbers and it is having then records on mortality going back that become increasingly robust.
Counting deaths beyond the level of the individual community is an incredibly useful national tool for public health.
Once you start counting something, that disease winds incredible power of this political marketplace,
of other diseases that can be prepared for that, you know, should be taken into account.
So I would say from the perspective of a kind of historian of medicine, science and technology, that the Russian influence,
in addition to obviously killing many people, still causing misery and causing widespread panic during this period,
is very important for importing influenza as a disease category that is distinct from others onto the map,
even though the wrong theological agent is defined during the period that that comes back then.
And I an 18, 19, 20, when everybody is looking for bacillus influenza,
they're looking for bacteriological cause because clearly that should be the cause.
Right. It leads Flemyng to isolate barters influenza from his nose and deposited in Britain's microbiological
collection as one of the first strains of deposits that look for penicillin as a selective medium for it.
You know, it's it's the unintended consequences of this are pretty, pretty phenomenal, actually.
I think it's an excellent example, because what it shows is that once the perspectival,
pandemics or epidemics can be very different, depending on where you are.
And in the Russian empire, as I said, where there's the threat of cholera and typhus and all the other things,
but other pandemics can sort of overshadow a global pandemic.
I think this is very interesting that more local epidemics can overshadow a global pandemic.
But I also think that's interesting to see. We are used to living.
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.
Washing our hands and washing our clothes in really hot water because we have antibiotics and we're not used to it anymore.
But what is interesting about this pandemic is that in a context where there is a constant presence of debilitating and frequently fatal diseases,
that even a pandemic can be met with resignation on parts of the population and very soon fade into general oblivion.
I think this is interesting and this tells us a lot about the period that which we are dealing here.
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,
because in the in the context of what off of threats to health,
it's just, well, particularly bad Russian snippet was not what you say and not something that puts everything on the hospital or changeless.
I pretty much completely.
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,
but which, unlike the Russian flu, is of unquestioned historical significance.
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,
spreading rapidly through countries already ravaged by war and malnourishment.
You'll almost certainly have heard of this deadly outbreak. But there's a lot more to learn.
Behind the headlines. And we'll discuss it fully in the next episode of our history of pandemic season.
I'm Peter Milliken, and you've been listening to Future Makers.
Feature makers was created in-house at the University of Oxford and presented by Professor Peter Milliken from Hartford College.
A voice actor today was Anna Wilson, and the score for the series was designed and created by Richard Watts.
The series is written and produced by Steve [INAUDIBLE] shot me then Howard.
Thank you. I'm half of the whole team for listening to the history of pandemics and we love hearing a feedback.
So let us know what you thought of the show and what you might like to hear his cover in the feature.