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Witness History

The 'Spanish' flu

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.41.6K Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2020

⏱️ 10 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 1918, more than fifty million people died in an outbreak of flu, which spread all over the world in the wake of the first World War. We hear eye-witness accounts of the worst pandemic of the twentieth century.

(Photo: An American policeman wearing a mask to protect himself from the outbreak of Spanish flu. Credit:Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0

Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless

0:06.8

searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the

0:11.8

telly we share what we've been watching

0:14.0

Cladie Aide.

0:16.0

Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.

0:19.0

Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.

0:21.0

And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less

0:24.9

searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds just before this

0:30.3

BBC podcast gets underway here's something you may not know.

0:34.4

My name's Linda Davies and I commission podcast for BBC Sounds.

0:38.3

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely

0:46.0

engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

0:54.2

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories.

0:57.6

And that's just a few examples.

0:59.4

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.

1:10.0

Hi and thanks for downloading Witness history from the BBC World Service.

1:15.0

Today we're going back to the autumn of 1918 and the worst pandemic of the 20th century.

1:21.0

The Spanish influenza killed more than 50 million people around the world at the

1:26.1

end of the First World War. I'm Lucy Burns and I've been listening back to first-hand

1:31.1

accounts of the flu from the BBC's archives.

1:34.0

I went to bed and certainly felt more ill than I felt felt in my life, terrible ached and so on.

1:46.0

I just remember being totally prostered with fatigue and high fever.

...

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