The Spanish Flu Pandemic — Possible Louse Connection in Overcrowded Conditions
Poet involved
What happened
The influenza pandemic of 1918–1919, which killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people worldwide, struck in conditions — overcrowded barracks, trenches, refugee camps — where lice were endemic. While influenza is not transmitted by insects, the same overcrowded, insanitary conditions that bred lice facilitated the rapid spread of the flu, and some soldiers and civilians weakened by louse-borne typhus or relapsing fever were less able to resist influenza. The pandemic killed more people in a single year than any other event in recorded human history.
Literary impact
The 1918 flu pandemic struck writers across the world, killing Apollinaire, Egon Schiele, and the young poet Wilfred Owen (who died of flu-complicated wounds). Katherine Anne Porter's novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider is the most celebrated literary response to the pandemic in English. The sense of invisible biological force — whether flu, louse-borne typhus, or the mosquito — that the First World War years produced pervades the modernist literature of the 1920s and 1930s, giving it a preoccupation with bodily vulnerability and epidemic mortality.
Source: Wikipedia
