The plague and the memory hole

I’ve been interested in pandemics and disease for as long as I can remember… and for as long as I can remember, I’ve been bemused and amazed by how quickly the memory of each plague vanishes from the public consciousness. When I was growing up, although my elder family members lived through and were affected by the 1918-1919 influenza as children, I can’t remember a single one of them ever mentioning it. The only family story I’ve ever heard about that time was my Ukrainian great-grandfather, sick with the flu, walking the eight miles or so from the family farm in Windsor, CT to Hartford Hospital—and then, when they didn’t have a bed for him and laid him down on a pallet in the hall to get better or worse as he could, getting up and walking home again, determined to die in his own bed.

He lived.

I know this story because my father told me—my father, who was born just after the end of World War II. Nobody else in the family ever mentioned a thing.

In my reading about pandemics from the Great Influenza (I highly recommend John M. Barry’s book by that title, by the way) to the Black Death (Daniel Dafoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year for example) one thing that’s apparent over and over again is that as the pandemic wanes, what people want most is to forget. And who can blame them?