Pandemic 1918 - Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest medical Holocaust in Modern History

Mysterious Radio: Paranormal, UFO & Lore Interviews

Mysterious Radio

4.3 • 3.4K Ratings

🗓️ 11 September 2023

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Season 8 New Release: My special guest is author Catherine Arnold who's here to discuss a pandemic in the early 19th century that left bodies all over the place. Get her book Pandemic 1918 - Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest medical Holocaust in Modern History on Amazon or your local book store.

Before AIDS or coronavirus, there was the Spanish Flu ― Catharine Arnold's gripping narrative, Pandemic 1918, marks the 100th anniversary of an epidemic that altered world history, now in paperback.

In January 1918, as World War I raged on, a new and terrifying virus began to spread across the globe. In three successive waves, from 1918 to 1919, influenza killed more than 50 million people. German soldiers termed it Blitzkatarrh, British soldiers referred to it as Flanders Grippe, but world-wide, the pandemic gained the notorious title of “Spanish Flu”. Nowhere on earth escaped: the United States recorded 550,000 deaths (five times its total military fatalities in the war) while European deaths totaled over two million.

Amid the war, some governments suppressed news of the outbreak. Even as entire battalions were decimated, with both the Allies and the Germans suffering massive casualties, the details of many servicemen’s deaths were hidden to protect public morale. Meanwhile, civilian families were being struck down in their homes. The City of Philadelphia ran out of gravediggers and coffins, and mass burial trenches had to be excavated with steam shovels. Spanish Flu conjured up the specter of the Black Death of 1348 and the great plague of 1665, while the medical profession, shattered after five terrible years of conflict, lacked the resources to contain and defeat this new enemy.

Through primary and archival sources, historian Catharine Arnold gives readers the first truly global account of the terrible epidemic.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi there, I'm K-Town, and on this edition of Mysterious Radio.
0:04.6	Professional writers are similar, maybe professional soldiers who've been present. Some of
0:34.4	the approaches events were described, but also ordinary people, whose letters and diaries have been
0:40.3	preserved in museums and archives. This was the most fascinating thing of all, sitting in a museum
0:47.4	and looking at letters home from soldiers at the front in Wild War, and talking about what the
0:55.6	crew had meant to them, on nurses serving what we now call the Middle East, writing home to their
1:02.1	mothers about the appalling things that they've seen. It was really great to kind of get
1:08.5	the view from underneath, the view from real people, not just the view of, you know,
1:13.3	famous people. At the same time, I looked at every autobiography or memoir I could get hold of
1:21.4	of people who've lived at that time. So I was able to get a picture from
1:26.4	British author, who did you knew Wolf, through to American humorist, Ferber, James Ferber,
1:34.4	and even the Marx brothers, as to how they've been impacted by the Spanish flu. And then
1:41.7	I had so much material, so the next thing was kind of, not so much what do I put in,
1:46.8	what do I leave out, subsequently after the book was published, people still email me now,
1:53.2	or it talks me off to lectures, saying, this is what happened to my grandchild, or can I write you
2:00.3	about what happened to my cousins? So there was still kind of a resource, an entire archive of
2:07.3	stuff out there. It's fascinating. It's really the people's history. There was already, I guess,
2:13.5	an archive started to kind of record firsthand accounts. Where was that located again?
2:20.3	Well, there got various things. The Imperial War Museum in London had already started,
2:25.2	an initiative to go around recording very elderly people's memoirs, because it was the Imperial
2:33.5	War Museum. These are mostly people who had served. There's also some material on CBS,
2:39.5	because they've made education in materials and schools. But the thing is, I just had to cast
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Mysterious Radio, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Mysterious Radio and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.