In preparation
for our class’ upcoming exhibit on the 1918 influenza outbreak in Philadelphia,
our Managing History class read John M. Barry’s work The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History.
The work shows how the influenza outbreak occurred during the first World
War, a period in which persons from around the world travelled
transatlantically. Furthermore, medical professionals remained in short supply due
to the demand for doctors and nurses on the war front. As The Great Influenza shows, these conditions worsened the spread and
death toll of the disease. Yet, while Barry’s work takes readers to a variety
of locations around the world, The Great
Influenza remains most applicable to our upcoming project for its analysis
of the outbreak in Philadelphia.
As Barry shows,
Philadelphia’s place as an epicenter for this outbreak can be attributed to the
city’s extremely overcrowded nature in 1918. As workers migrated to the city
for wartime industry jobs, the city’s population swelled to 1.75 million. Such
a population growth exacerbated already crowded and unsanitary tenement
conditions in the immigrant neighborhoods of South Philadelphia.[1]
As could be expected, influenza’s death tolls remained much higher in these
crowded immigrant neighborhoods. In fact, in one single day – on October 10th
– 759 people died from the disease.[2]
Like most
histories written for popular audiences, Barry’s work includes a cast of characters
that appear throughout the novel. He chronicles their life trajectories like a
biographer and even tries to get at a sense of their emotions like a novelist.
Humanizing history is a great tool for many reasons, but – most importantly –
writing styles like this help to attract readerships that might normally recoil
at a more academically-written history. Yet, it is important to note that these
characters mostly consist of people like Paul Lewis, a doctor at the University
of Pennsylvania who did significant research on the influenza outbreak. Most of
Berry’s characters remain elites. We don’t really get a sense for South
Philadelphia’s immigrant communities, apart from reading about the
neighborhood’s high death toll.
Perhaps, the
sources that better convey a sense of emotion like diaries or oral histories do
not exist for South Philly’s 1918 working-class. Or, maybe they haven’t been
preserved. From a practical standpoint, it makes sense that Barry does not
feature these people in the same way that he does elites. Yet, as we discussed
last week, museumgoers remain most interested in histories that convey the
experiences of ordinary people, people whose lives and experiences resemble
that of their own. For our own exhibit, we should absolutely build on the
research of Barry. However, in order to create a more all-encompassing history
of the 1918 influenza outbreak, we should keep the ordinary person in mind in
our own research. Such a focus will only increase our ability to reach a wider
public audience.
Where might we begin to locate the ordinary person?
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