‘The great influenza’ of 1918-20: A Plague of Compassion

Speaker: Professor Samuel Cohn (University Of Glasgow)

This talk explores popular reactions to the ‘great influenza’ of 1918-20, primarily in relation to other epidemics of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It will contest scholars’ contention that big epidemics, regardless of the disease, inevitably stirred suspicion and blame of the ‘other’, and that an essential factor stirring that hate rested on the mysteriousness of the disease and medical practitioners’ inability to cure or control it.