Influenza in 1918: an epidemic in images.

©2010 Association of Schools of Public Health In addition to being the first major pandemic of the modern post-germ-theory era, the devastating influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 was also the first to be widely photographed. In army camps and cantonments, in hospitals, and in streets and workplaces across the nation, photographers aimed their lenses and captured a nation struggling to deal with the crisis. From the mundane to the grand, these photographs constitute a visual archive of a nation and a people wracked by the epidemic. The great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once wrote that through his lens he “craved to seize, in the confines of one single photograph, the whole essence of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before [his] eyes.”1 In the fall of 1918, against the tragic backdrop of war and disease, no one image could have effectively captured the turmoil of the times. That said, even a small sample of America and Americans in the midst of the great influenza pandemic of 1918 is a powerful message indeed. History is not so much about dates and actors as it is about context, and in 1918 America, that context was war. Some four million men were mobilized in the U.S. Armed Forces. Training camps and stations were often overcrowded. Soldiers and sailors routinely were packed on to passenger trains and sent to training stations and bases around the nation. The military became an ideal breeding ground for respiratory and other infectious diseases. When influenza struck the United States in the fall of 1918, it almost universally appeared in military populations before hitting civilian