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Tonight's the night I shall be talking a bout of flu the subject of word association football...
As I mentioned to Anonymous Don the other day, I've been obsessing a bit lately over the 1918 flu, probably because I picked up a copy on the weekend of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver (Awakenings) Sacks. Yesterday, when I was googling "1918 flu" and "encephalitis lethargica", I noticed in a couple of hits that mentioned that the former illness was, at the time, also called "the Purple Death." Fans of the old Flash Gordon serials will prick up their ears, because this is the title of the opening chapter of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe - People are dropping like flies of a mysterious disease that leaves the corpse's face purple; it of course turns out to be a bio-weapon deployed by Ming the Merciless. As it happens, green_trilobite and I were watching this serial Sunday morning, and I wondered out loud where they got the idea, because I'd also seen a "G-8 and his flying aces" novel in which the menace is "the Purple Death" - in the case of that story, a type of mind-control. Now, the point of all this is that most books on the 1918 flu comment on how there was this big cultural amnesia about it afterwards, and no one talked or wrote stories about it, unlike, say, the horrors of WWI. I've only come across two purple death stories so far, and the symptoms aren't really analogs to the flu, but I am beginning to wonder if the historians have just been looking in the wrong places (i.e. respectable literature) for unconscious responses to the influenza pandemic.
As I mentioned to Anonymous Don the other day, I've been obsessing a bit lately over the 1918 flu, probably because I picked up a copy on the weekend of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver (Awakenings) Sacks. Yesterday, when I was googling "1918 flu" and "encephalitis lethargica", I noticed in a couple of hits that mentioned that the former illness was, at the time, also called "the Purple Death." Fans of the old Flash Gordon serials will prick up their ears, because this is the title of the opening chapter of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe - People are dropping like flies of a mysterious disease that leaves the corpse's face purple; it of course turns out to be a bio-weapon deployed by Ming the Merciless. As it happens, green_trilobite and I were watching this serial Sunday morning, and I wondered out loud where they got the idea, because I'd also seen a "G-8 and his flying aces" novel in which the menace is "the Purple Death" - in the case of that story, a type of mind-control. Now, the point of all this is that most books on the 1918 flu comment on how there was this big cultural amnesia about it afterwards, and no one talked or wrote stories about it, unlike, say, the horrors of WWI. I've only come across two purple death stories so far, and the symptoms aren't really analogs to the flu, but I am beginning to wonder if the historians have just been looking in the wrong places (i.e. respectable literature) for unconscious responses to the influenza pandemic.
