Authors:
Niall Johnson, Ida Milne
Extract
The influenza that girded the globe in 1918 and the following years came upon a world in turmoil as it roiled from the global conflict. This turmoil was exacerbated by the highly infectious, novel virus that wrought very high levels of illness, and even though case fatality rates were generally low, the sheer scale of morbidity meant that the attendant mortality was exceptional. Some locations had further upheaval heaped upon these disruptions. Examples include the revolutionary movements in Russia and Ireland. The Russian story is yet to be untangled. Even the apparently rudimentary task of establishing the true level of mortality caused by this pandemic in Russia eludes as state functions such as vital registration were in disarray. There have been recent efforts at telling the Irish story, for example, Catriona Foley’s The Last Irish Plague.1 Foley gave an important and nuanced description of the Irish experience of the pandemic.