Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg

by Esyllt W. Jones

The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed as many as fifty million people worldwide and affected the vast majority of Canadians. Yet the pandemic, which came and left in one season, never to recur in any significant way, has remained difficult to interpret. What did it mean to live through and beyond this brief, terrible episode, and what were its long-term effects?

"Influenza 1918" uses Winnipeg as a case study to show how disease articulated abd helped to re-define boundaries of social difference. Esyllt W. Jones examines the impact of the pandemic in this fragmented community, including its role in the eruption of the largest labour confrontation in Canadian history, the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. Arguing that labour historians have largely ignored the impact of infectious disease upon the working class, Jones draws on a wide range of primary sources including mothers' allowance and orphanage case files in order to trace the pandemic's affect on the family, the public health infrastructure, and other social institutions. This study brings into focus the interrelationships between epidemic disease and working class, gender, labour, and ethnic history in Canada.

"Influenza 1918" concludes that social conflict is not an inevitable outcome of epidemics, but rather of inequality and public failure to fully engage all members of the community in the fight against disease.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Canada

250 pages, Hardcover

First published December 8, 2007

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Influenza 1918, epidemic historian Esyllt W. Jones examines the long term impact of the 1918-19 influenza epidemic on the city of Winnipeg, arguing that the virus itself served as a "social actor" (countering Charles Rosenberg's claims of epidemics) and affected social and political change within the city. Jones' positions Winnipeg as a socially unique city at the turn of the century, one marked by its working-class and ethnically diverse population (which, in turn, also marked it as an economically and socially divided) and that its demographic shaped how the city responded to the epidemic. Starting from the global, before moving to the local, Jones portrays a thorough and moving portrait of a Canadian city changed by the supposedly "forgotten" epidemic.

[Kaiti · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is great! Very detailed analysis that considers class, gender, and ethnicity.

Many of the points she explains relating to the 1918 pandemic are eerily relevant today during COVID-19 (even though this was published in 2007!). Discussions of how it impacts different social groups in different ways, people resisting or embracing public health measures, general denial of the pandemic as a problem... It was a bit like looking in a mirror.

The more things change...

(Loses one star because she messed up the year of the Riel Resistance and as a historian of Manitoba she REALLY should know better.)

[Rachael · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Deborah Sowery-Quinn · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was interesting to read of the parallels from this time in relationship to the present day Covid-19 pandemic - resistance of mask wearing, protests, etc.