Bibliography of the history of the 1918 influenza pandemic

This is a bibliography of works about the history of the 1918 influenza pandemic. This bibliography is limited to history and excludes other disciplines unless they contain a substantial amount of history.

The 1918–1920 flu pandemic, also known as the Great Influenza epidemic or by the misleading name Spanish flu, was an exceptionally deadly global influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 subtype of the influenza A virus. The earliest probable cases were recorded in March 1918 in Haskell County, Kansas, United States, and further cases followed in April in France, Germany and the United Kingdom. By 1920, about 500 million people, nearly a third of the world's population, had been infected. Death toll estimates range from 17 million to 50 million and may be as high as 100 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in history.

Bibliography contains academic level English language books (including translations) and journal articles, published mainly post World War II. Book entries may have references to reviews published in academic journals or major newspapers when these could be considered helpful. These reference reviews also function as a resource to find other works on this subject.

Works listed here are cited in the notes or bibliographies of scholarly sources. Each is published by an academic or major trade press, written by a recognized expert, or substantially reviewed in scholarly journals; borderline cases are omitted. A selection of primary sources are included. Many of the books below carry their own bibliographies; see Further reading section for longer ones, and External links section for historical sites and museums.

Citations follow APA style. Books have citations to academic journal or mainstream published reviews when available. For books only partly about the subject, relevant chapter or section titles are provided when useful and available. Translators of the original-language edition are included when possible. In cases where a title or name has appeared with more than one English spelling, the most recent published form is used and a footnote documents any earlier title under which the work appeared.

General histories

Arnold, C. (2018). Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness accounts from the greatest medical holocaust in modern history. St. Martin's Press. Barry, J. M. (2004). The great influenza: The epic story of the deadliest plague in history. Viking. Brown, J. (2018). Influenza: The hundred-year hunt to cure the deadliest disease in history. Atria Books. Chandra, S., Christensen, J., & Likhtman, S. (2020). Connectivity and seasonality: The 1918 influenza and COVID-19 pandemics in global perspective. Journal of Global History, 15(3), 408–420. Collier, R. (1974). The plague of the Spanish lady: The influenza pandemic of 1918–1919. Atheneum. Crosby, A. W. (2003). America's forgotten pandemic: The influenza of 1918 (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Honigsbaum, M. (2018). Spanish influenza redux: Revisiting the mother of all pandemics. The Lancet, 391(10139), 2492–2495. Honigsbaum, M. (2019). The pandemic century: One hundred years of panic, hysteria, and hubris. W. W. Norton. Johnson, N. P. A. S., & Mueller, J. (2002). Updating the accounts: Global mortality of the 1918–1920 "Spanish" influenza pandemic. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 76(1), 105–115. Kent, S. K. (2013). The influenza pandemic of 1918–1919: A brief history with documents. Bedford/St. Martin's. Kolata, G. (1999). Flu: The story of the great influenza pandemic of 1918 and the search for the virus that caused it. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Morens, D. M., & Fauci, A. S. (2007). The 1918 influenza pandemic: Insights for the 21st century. The Journal of Infectious Diseases, 195(7), 1018–1028. Morens, D. M., Taubenberger, J. K., & Fauci, A. S. (2009). The persistent legacy of the 1918 influenza virus. New England Journal of Medicine, 361(3), 225–229. Murray, C. J., Lopez, A. D., Chin, B., Feehan, D., & Hill, K. H. (2006). Estimation of potential global pandemic influenza mortality on the basis of vital registry data from the 1918–20 pandemic: A quantitative analysis. The Lancet, 368(9554), 2211–2218. Patterson, K. D., & Pyle, G. F. (1991). The geography and mortality of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 65(1), 4–21. Phillips, H., & Killingray, D. (Eds.). (2003). The Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918–19: New perspectives. Routledge. Potter, C. (2001). A history of influenza. Journal of Applied Microbiology, 91(4), 572–579. Radusin, M. (2012). The Spanish flu – Part I: The first wave. Vojnosanitetski Pregled, 69(9), 812–817. Radusin, M. (2012). The Spanish flu – Part II: The second and third wave. Vojnosanitetski Pregled, 69(10), 917–927. Saunders-Hastings, P., & Krewski, D. (2016). Reviewing the history of pandemic influenza: Understanding patterns of emergence and transmission. Pathogens, 5(4), 66. Spinney, L. (2017). Pale rider: The Spanish flu of 1918 and how it changed the world. PublicAffairs. Spreeuwenberg, P., Kroneman, M., & Paget, J. (2018). Reassessing the global mortality burden of the 1918 influenza pandemic. American Journal of Epidemiology, 187(12), 2561–2567. Taubenberger, J. K., & Morens, D. M. (2006). 1918 influenza: The mother of all pandemics. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 12(1), 15–22.

World War I and the military

Barry, J. M. (2004). The site of origin of the 1918 influenza pandemic and its public health implications. Journal of Translational Medicine, 2(1), 3. Byerly, C. R. (2005). Fever of war: The influenza epidemic in the U.S. Army during World War I. New York University Press. Byerly, C. R. (2010). The U.S. military and the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919. Public Health Reports, 125(Suppl. 3), 81–91. Cox, J., Gill, D., Cox, F., & Worobey, M. (2019). Purulent bronchitis in 1917 and pandemic influenza in 1918. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 19(4), 360–361. Flecknoe, D., Charles Wakefield, B., & Simmons, A. (2018). Plagues & wars: The "Spanish flu" pandemic as a lesson from history. Medicine, Conflict and Survival, 34(2), 61–68. Humphries, M. O. (2014). Paths of infection: The First World War and the origins of the 1918 influenza pandemic. War in History, 21(1), 55–81. Langford, C. (2005). Did the 1918–19 influenza pandemic originate in China? Population and Development Review, 31(3), 473–505. More, A. F., Loveluck, C. P., Clifford, H., Handley, M. J., Korotkikh, E. V., Kurbatov, A. V., McCormick, M., & Mayewski, P. A. (2020). The impact of a six-year climate anomaly on the "Spanish flu" pandemic and WWI. GeoHealth, 4(9). Oxford, J., Sefton, A., Jackson, R., Innes, W., Daniels, R., & Johnson, N. (2002). World War I may have allowed the emergence of "Spanish" influenza. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 2(2), 111–114. Oxford, J. S. (2001). The so-called Great Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918 may have originated in France in 1916. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 356(1416), 1857–1859. Oxford, J. S., Lambkin, R., Sefton, A., Daniels, R., Elliot, A., Brown, R., & Gill, D. (2005). A hypothesis: The conjunction of soldiers, gas, pigs, ducks, geese and horses in Northern France during the Great War provided the conditions for the emergence of the "Spanish" influenza pandemic of 1918–1919. Vaccine, 23(7), 940–945. Oxford, J. S., & Gill, D. (2019). A possible European origin of the Spanish influenza and the first attempts to reduce mortality to combat superinfecting bacteria: An opinion from a virologist and a military historian. Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, 15(9), 2009–2012. Price-Smith, A. T. (2009). Contagion and chaos: Disease, ecology, and national security in the era of globalization. MIT Press. Shanks, G. D., & Brundage, J. F. (2012). Pathogenic responses among young adults during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 18(2), 201–207. Shanks, G. D., Mackenzie, A., Waller, M., & Brundage, J. F. (2012). Relationship between "purulent bronchitis" in military populations in Europe prior to 1918 and the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic. Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses, 6(4), 235–239. Shanks, G. D. (2016). No evidence of 1918 influenza pandemic origin in Chinese laborers/soldiers in France. Journal of the Chinese Medical Association, 79(1), 46–48. Worobey, M., Cox, J., & Gill, D. (2019). The origins of the great pandemic. Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, 2019(1), 18–25.

National and regional studies

Afkhami, A. (2003). Compromised constitutions: The Iranian experience with the 1918 influenza pandemic. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 77(2), 367–392. Ansart, S., Pelat, C., Boelle, P.-Y., Carrat, F., Flahault, A., & Valleron, A.-J. (2009). Mortality burden of the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic in Europe. Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses, 3(3), 99–106. Arnold, D. (2019). Death and the modern empire: The 1918–19 influenza epidemic in India. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 29, 181–200. Bristow, N. K. (2012). American pandemic: The lost worlds of the 1918 influenza epidemic. Oxford University Press. Chandra, S., Kuljanin, G., & Wray, J. (2012). Mortality from the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919: The case of India. Demography, 49(3), 857–865. Chandra, S., Christensen, J., Chandra, M., & Paneth, N. (2021). Pandemic reemergence and four waves of excess mortality coinciding with the 1918 influenza pandemic in Michigan: Insights for COVID-19. American Journal of Public Health, 111(3), 430–437. Cheng, K., & Leung, P. (2007). What happened in China during the 1918 influenza pandemic? International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 11(4), 360–364. Chowell, G., Viboud, C., Simonsen, L., Miller, M., Hurtado, J., Soto, G., Vargas, R., Guzman, M., Ulloa, M., & Munayco, C. (2011). The 1918–1920 influenza pandemic in Peru. Vaccine, 29(Suppl. 2), B21–B26. Chowell, G., Simonsen, L., Flores, J., Miller, M. A., & Viboud, C. (2014). Death patterns during the 1918 influenza pandemic in Chile. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 20(11), 1803–1811. Chowell, G., Erkoreka, A., Viboud, C., & Echeverri-Dávila, B. (2014). Spatial-temporal excess mortality patterns of the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic in Spain. BMC Infectious Diseases, 14(1), 371. Cimino, E. C. (2023). The supervisors are carrying the bag: The Nurses' Emergency Council, settlement houses, and the 1918 influenza pandemic in New York City. New York History, 104(2), 296–314. Cristina, J., Pollero, R., & Pellegrino, A. (2019). The 1918 influenza pandemic in Montevideo: The southernmost capital city in the Americas. Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses, 13(3), 219–225. Curson, P., & McCracken, K. (2006). An Australian perspective of the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic. New South Wales Public Health Bulletin, 17(8), 103–107. Erkoreka, A. (2010). The Spanish influenza pandemic in occidental Europe (1918–1920) and victim age. Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses, 4(2), 81–89. Fanning, P. J. (2010). Influenza and inequality: One town's tragic response to the great epidemic of 1918. University of Massachusetts Press. Grabowski, M. L., Kosińska, B., Knap, J. P., & Brydak, L. B. (2017). The lethal Spanish influenza pandemic in Poland. Medical Science Monitor, 23, 4880–4884. He, D., Dushoff, J., Day, T., Ma, J., & Earn, D. J. D. (2013). Inferring the causes of the three waves of the 1918 influenza pandemic in England and Wales. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 280(1766), 20131345. Ho, P., & Chow, K. (2009). Mortality burden of the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic in Hong Kong. Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses, 3(6), 261–263. Holbrook, C. (2022). Public health in a federation: Lessons from the Spanish influenza in Australia. Social History of Medicine, 35(3), 818–846.