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“In every home, a sick: society’s response to pandemic influenza on the local level, before and after 1900: The example of Sweden”
| “Pandemics are global in nature, but their impact is local”. This quote from a government sponsored website designed to help individuals and families in the US to understand the threat of a future outbreak of pandemic influenza captures the essence of the harsh experiences of millions of people throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The recurrent influenza pandemics certainly have a profound impact on society. The consequences of the rampant and widespread disease are likely to involve more or less every individual, every family and community, and evoke a response in all social levels in society. Yet the outcome of a pandemic is very difficult to predict. The properties of the virus as well as the actual societal context in which an epidemic appears influences how it is perceived and manifested. To fully understand the complex interaction between disease and society, a local perspective can act as an essential complement to aggregate statistics and studies of national policies and discourses, hence, a national and a normative perspective is not always representative of how the national intentions were translated into local policy. This paper discusses society’s response on the local level to two global influenza pandemics: the Russian flu 1889-1890 and the Spanish influenza 1918-1919. It is asked what measures the local community in different Swedish regions did take to meet the advancing influenza pandemics and how they handled the situation when there was “in every home a sick”. The paper also discusses how society’s welfare arrangements coped with the strain caused by high levels of morbidity and mortality: loss of income, social disruption and family dissolution. Considering the large efforts that today are made to predict possible outcomes of a new pandemic based upon previous observations, it is also relevant to ask to what extent the municipality’s behaviour in the past came to modify its future actions. Did the experiences from previous influenza epidemics help the administrators to foresee the new threat that was coming, or were they deceived by inaccurate expectations and erroneous assumptions on basis of past encounters with the flu?
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