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Book Review
| Geoffrey W. Rice, Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand, second edition, revised and enlarged. (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2005). ISBN I-877257–35–4 (hardcover). 327 pp.
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| In the space of nine months during 1918 and early 1919 the world was engulfed in a virulent pandemic of influenza that was widely but falsely labelled as 'Spanish' flu. The total death rate is unknown but was probably 50 million, if not more. New Zealand, struck by the pandemic in late September 1918, suffered 8,573 deaths in the space of two months, the worst natural disaster in the nation's history. Two features stand out: Maori death rates (total of 2,160) were seven times higher than those for Pakeha; and young adults, especially men—those who would be thought to be the healthiest and strongest section of the population—suffered higher mortality than other age groups. Maori susceptibility to global diseases, like those of other Pacific peoples, was historically higher than those for Europeans and, in the case of flu, this was exacerbated by living in rural communities with poorer standards of housing and nutrition. In its wake, the flu virus left the widowed and orphaned to join the long train of grief with those mourning the killing fields of the Great War. The victims of four years of war, mainly younger men, were publicly acclaimed in memorials and their sacrifice commemorated by annual rites of national memory; for all those who died in the brief fatal visitation of flu, there were few memorials and only private sorrow. |
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Geoffrey Rice's study, which first appeared in 1988, was distinguished not only because it addressed a disaster forgotten or at best marginalised by historians of New Zealand (indeed most historians everywhere!), but also by his pioneer use of all the death certificates of flu victims. His book, now republished in revised and amended form, will surely stand as the definitive national work on the flu pandemic, although as he suggests there is further work for historians to do at the local level. This new edition takes account of the great increase in work that has been done on the pandemic over the past 15 years. Today, thanks to research by historians, epidemiologists, and virologists, we know much more about the possible origin, outbreak, and diffusion on a global scale of flu in 1918–19. And all this new data and information is of great value in a world made all the more conscious that, since the outbreak of avian flu in 1997, another similar pandemic is likely to occur in the near future. |
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This is a splendidly produced book with numerous black and white illustrations, tables, and charts. The many personal accounts, highlighted in the text, by those who experienced New Zealand's 'Black November' emphasise that the pandemic intimately touched and scarred the lives of individual men, women, and children. Chapters one and two are new, the first placing the pandemic in the context of what was known about influenza before 1918, and the second firmly relating the 1918–19 outbreak to the context of the First World War. Rice argues that this war, thought by many contemporaries to have been largely responsible for the virulent influenza, was indeed a significant contributor to the pandemic. He claims it did so in two ways: by bringing together large numbers of men in over-crowded and often unsanitary conditions ideal for the communication of a respiratory disease, and the co-incidence of the virus with the use of mustard gas in trench warfare. To this might be added the recent research by John Oxford and Robert Brown who suggest that influenza was present in France in large military camps such as Etaples in 1916–17, and the thesis of Christopher Langford that the Chinese Labour Corps had brought the infection to Europe and, stationed adjacent to that large camp and also close to aquatic birds, they helped spread the virus to Allied soldiers. A further new final chapter sketches the development of influenza virology since 1918 and details recent research by Jeffrey Taubenberger and others to identify the virus that caused the catastrophic outbreak at the end of the Great War. History is always revisionist, and this is so in the case of the historical epidemiology of influenza. Since this book appeared further important strides have been made to capture the entire genome of modern influenza virus isolates. It is an exciting time to be a historian of influenza, and all who are involved are now better equipped with Geoffrey Rice's revised book to hand which so carefully and comprehensively delineates the course and consequences of the 1918 flu pandemic in New Zealand.
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| DAVID KILLINGRAY
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| GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE LONDON |
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