Flu pandemics. Then and Now.
Dan Snow's History Hit
History Hit
4.7 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 5 February 2020
⏱️ 34 minutes
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Summary
'We are very very vulnerable' says the brilliant science author and journalist Laura Spinney.
Her fantastic book 'Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World' is a shocking account of the flu pandemic that killed tens of millions of people a century ago.
What was Spanish Flu and what lessons are there for us today? As the coronavirus sweeps across China this is a really important conversation about flu, anti-microbial resistance and whether we should be scared.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, folks, Dan Snow here. I am throwing a party to celebrate 10 years of Dan Snow's history hit. |
| 0:06.1 | I'd love for you to be there. Join me for a very special live recording of the podcast in London, in England on the 12th of September to celebrate the 10 years. |
| 0:14.1 | You can find out more about it and get tickets with the link in the show notes. Look forward to seeing you there. |
| 0:26.0 | Welcome, everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's history. |
| 0:33.7 | You find me hold up in my citadel, my citadel with air filters on, my family in quarantine outside. They have not yet passed through the quarantine process. I'm ready. I'm ready for |
| 0:37.4 | Armageddon. I'm ready for the pandemic. And that's what happens when you spend your time |
| 0:42.4 | reading about the Justinian plague. When you find yourself reading about the great plague that |
| 0:49.4 | preceded the destruction of the Persian Empire and great chunks of the Roman Empire in the East |
| 0:55.2 | by the Arabs that surged out of the desert during and after Muhammad's life. |
| 0:59.9 | And when you read about the great pandemic of 1918 to 1920, it gets you a little bit nervous. |
| 1:06.5 | It turns you into a little bit of a prepper. |
| 1:08.8 | So you won't be seeing me. |
| 1:09.7 | I'll be doing these podcasts remotely until the danger is past. Go to History at TV. Use the code Pod 6 as ever. You get |
| 1:16.7 | six weeks totally free. It's free. It's not a bad offer. It's free. So that's pretty good, |
| 1:21.9 | I'd say. So go and check out History at TV. History at Dot TV. It's like Netflix, but just for |
| 1:26.9 | history programs. Use the code |
| 1:28.4 | pod six and you're away. Go and do that. The reason I'm banging on about influenza is this |
| 1:34.2 | podcast is actually about the great influenza, known unfairly as Spanish influenza. Between |
| 1:40.7 | 1918 and 1920, about 50 to 100 million people all around the world were killed by this influenza outbreak. |
| 1:50.0 | It was possibly the largest. I mean, this is the problem with history. It's fascinating. We're good at talking about Dresden. We're good at talking about the First World War, the trenches. We're good at writing books about that. |
| 2:01.3 | And yet we're incredibly bad sometimes at taking a step back and looking at the things that are actually affecting the onward march of this species. |
| 2:09.8 | And the death of 50 to 100 million people in the space of two years all over the world, strikes me as probably more important to study and think about and learn the |
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