Flu in Spain

On 22 May 1918 the Madrid press wrote about a new illness for the first time. The daily El Sol reported that a “fashionable” ailment, not yet diagnosed by doctors, was spreading among the soldiers of the capital’s garrison. The tone was humorous and reassuring: it looked like an ordinary seasonal flu, which every year killed a few dozen, perhaps a hundred, people in Madrid. No one imagined that from this note onwards the disease, which had broken out at Camp Funston more than two months earlier and had passed through the armies on the Western Front, would acquire the name by which we still know it.

Madrid had just celebrated the days of its patron, Saint Isidore, in the middle of May. At crowded street festivals and balls the disease spread like lightning. Madrileños nicknamed it the “Naples Soldier” (soldado de Nápoles), after the most fashionable song of the season from a popular zarzuela, because the flu, like the tune, was everywhere. It was also called the “three-day fever”. On 28 May El Sol wrote that 80,000 people in Madrid were ill, among them King Alfonso XIII. According to some accounts the prime minister, Antonio Maura, and several ministers also fell ill. The Polish historian Łukasz Mieszkowski states that more than a thousand people died in the city within a month, and in June the British Medical Journal wrote of 700 deaths in Spain in ten days.

Why did Spain give the disease its name? The flu was by then in France, Britain and Germany, but in the belligerent countries censorship was in force, and editors themselves avoided writing about diseases that might weaken the morale of the army and the population. Spain was neutral and had no such restrictions. Its newspapers wrote about the epidemic at length, and dispatches from Madrid were eagerly reprinted abroad. News of the king’s illness drew the world’s attention even more. By early June most European newspapers were writing of “Spanish influenza”, and in Poland the name hiszpanka took hold. The impression that Spain had suffered most arose because it alone spoke about it openly.

The Spaniards themselves were convinced that the disease had come from outside. Routes ran across the country by which the war reached far beyond the front: Andalusian seasonal labourers travelled by rail to France to replace mobilised Frenchmen, and Portuguese soldiers bound for Flanders also passed through Spain. Those returning brought the flu, which in Spain was called “French”. This name too was misleading, for the disease had come to France from elsewhere.

The spring wave in Spain soon passed, but in the autumn the epidemic returned in a far more dangerous form and engulfed the whole country, including small towns and villages. According to various estimates about 8 million Spaniards fell ill. Official statistics gave more than 147,000 deaths from influenza, while later studies speak of 200,000–260,000 victims, or as much as about 1.5 per cent of the population. The name, which the Spaniards never wanted, nevertheless stuck for good to the pandemic, which had little to do with Spain.