'Old Colds for New', Punch, 18th January, 1890, p. 33.
The Media and Epidemics project seeks to document, from historical and contemporary as well as trans-disciplinary and trans-regional perspectives, the role of media and technologies of communication in the making and management of epidemic outbreaks. The investigation of the British team focuses upon the transmission of medical information by the media and its subsequent cultural interpretations. These evolve and persist, often undergoing dramatic transformations, such as that effected by the Ailment in the article above.
From the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries, even the most established of diseases were subject to such reinventions of identity. By the early twentieth century, Scarlatina, then at the height of its notoriety, had adopted the more theatrical moniker of Scarlet Fever, which ensured its presence continued to be felt for decades to come. Though currently in undoubted decline, it has been rumoured to be contemplating a comeback in recent years, though it is as yet unknown whether it would do so retaining its present persona, which still enjoys considerable recognition. It has certainly fared better than its contemporary, Measles, whose career ended definitively in the early 1960s with the development of a vaccine. Neither offered comment on the fate of Russian Flu following the pandemic of 1889.
The event indeed proved Mr. Punch to be entirely right. After a series of flare ups, the Russian Flu had abated by 1895 and all but disappeared, succeeded by the far more infamous Spanish Flu, emerging upon the scene in 1918, by which time the Russian Flu had well and truly sunk back into its native obscurity, just as Mr. Punch predicted. The Sage himself, though having finally retired from Fleet Street over twenty years ago, was sought for comment. Now living quietly in a village, the location of which we will not disclose, Mr. Punch revealed that the same Ailment whose advance he had been obliged to rebuff in 1890 had since reemerged, having adopted another pseudonym.
“Little Cold-in-the-head has seen quite the triumph,” Mr. Punch admitted. “In its newest guise, it has proved able to supply the editors of the world with nearly inexhaustible material for content, directed towards a worldwide readership that it succeeded (for a period) in imprisoning to read it!”
That guise, of course, is Coronavirus. Mr. Punch’s claims to identify the global superstar responsible for the pandemic of 2019 with the Russian Flu, né Cold-in-the-head, have been confirmed by the New York Times and others.
“I’m not in the business of making predictions anymore,” Mr. Punch responded to further questions. He remains, however, extremely cautious, perhaps understandably at his advanced age of 182, still religiously disinfecting his vegetables, post, and the doorknobs of his remote cottage.
“Please leave me alone – and for God’s sake don’t touch anything on your way out!”
Gareth Dickson
CP, UK Team
Media and Epidemics (MEDEP) 