scholarly journals The 1918/19 Spanish Flu in Pisa (Tuscany, Italy)

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-62
Author(s):  
Raffaele Gaeta ◽  
Antonio Fornaciari ◽  
Valentina Giuffra

The Spanish flu pandemic spread in 1918-19 and infected about 500 million people, killing 50 to 100 million of them. People were suffering from severe poverty and malnutrition, especially in Europe, due to the First World War, and this contributed to the diffusion of the disease. In Italy, Spanish flu appeared in April 1918 with several cases of pulmonary congestion and bronchopneumonia; at the end of the epidemic, about 450.000 people died, causing one of the highest mortality rates in Europe. From the archive documents and the autoptic registers of the Hospital of Pisa, we can express some considerations on the impact of the pandemic on the population of the city and obtain some information about the deceased. In the original necroscopic registers, 43 autopsies were reported with the diagnosis of grippe (i.e. Spanish flu), of which the most occurred from September to December 1918. Most of the dead were young individuals, more than half were soldiers, and all of them showed confluent hemorrhagic lung bronchopneumonia, which was the typical feature of the pandemic flu. We believe that the study of the autopsy registers represents an incomparable instrument for the History of Medicine and a useful resource to understand the origin and the evolution of the diseases.

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-83
Author(s):  
Seyyed Alireza Golshani ◽  
Mohammad Ebrahim Zohalinezhad ◽  
Mohammad Hossein Taghrir ◽  
Sedigheh Ghasempoor ◽  
Alireza Salehi

The Spanish Flu was one of the disasters in the history of Iran, especially Southern Iran, which led to the death of a significant number of people in Iran. It started on October 29, 1917, and lasted till 1920 – a disaster that we can claim changed the history. In one of the First World War battlefields in southern Iran in 1918, there was nothing left until the end of World War I and when the battle between Iranian warriors (especially people of Dashtestan and Tangestan in Bushehr, Arabs, and people of Bakhtiari in Khuzestan and people of Kazerun and Qashqai in Fars) and British forces had reached its peak. As each second encouraged the triumph for the Iranians, a flu outbreak among Iranian warriors led to many deaths and, as a result, military withdrawal. The flu outbreak in Kazerun, Firoozabad, Farshband, Abadeh, and even in Shiraz changed the end of the war. In this article, we attempt to discuss the role of the Spanish flu outbreak at the end of one of the forefronts of World War I.


2002 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 314-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Snape

The history of British Catholic involvement in the First World War is a curiously neglected subject, particularly in view of the massive and ongoing popular and academic interest in the First World War, an interest which has led to the publication of several studies of the impact of the war on Britain’s Protestant churches and has even seen a recent work on religion in contemporary France appear in an English translation. Moreover, and bearing in mind the partisan nature of much denominational history, the subject has been ignored by Catholic historians despite the fact that the war has often been regarded by non-Catholics as a ‘good’ war for British Catholicism, an outcome reflected in a widening diffusion of Catholic influences on British religious life and also in a significant number of conversions to the Catholic Church. However, if some standard histories of Catholicism in England are to be believed, the popular Catholic experience of these years amount to no more than an irrelevance next to the redrawing of diocesan boundaries and the codification of canon law.


Author(s):  
Marina V. Moskaljuk ◽  
Lilia R. Stroy

The article is devoted to the art processes that took place in Siberia, Krasnoyarsk, during 1914–1920. The main methodology of scientific study on the creative component of the city during the First World War and Revolution is based on the principles of historicism, objectivity, a systematic approach and unique archival data that allowed reconstructing the history of the art life in the city during the First World War and learning about war prisoner artists who brought the traditions of European art into the Krasnoyarsk creative architectonics. For the first time ever, there was found information not used earlier in the analysis of art processes; the data found incorporated the names of professional masters and amateur artists from Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, who were in military captivity and worked as designers, organized art exhibitions, taught drawing and interacted with local art community. The authors conclude that the selected directions of the creative process formed the art life of the city during the First World War and Revolution, with the participation of foreign masters not only enriching the city culture, but also helping people survive in one of the most dramatic periods of world history


Adeptus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karolina Wróbel-Bardzik

A “green city” – attractions, animals and modernity: The establishment of the Warsaw Zoological Garden in independent PolandThe article describes the history of establishing the Warsaw Zoological Garden in independent Poland after the First World War, a watershed period when it was possible to implement modern designs not only in the broader, national context, but also in the local and urban environment. Intensive discussions on the form of modernity attempted to find its version which would combine European and local inspiration. To some extent, the establishment of a modern zoo also defined the place of animals in the urban space. While some species were excluded from the city centre, others were put in the sphere of leisure time. „Zielone miasto” atrakcji, zwierzęta i nowoczesność. Powstanie warszawskiego ogrodu zoologicznego w odrodzonej PolsceArtykuł dotyczy założenia warszawskiego ogrodu zoologicznego po odzyskaniu przez Polskę niepodległości. Był to moment przełomowy, pozwalający na wprowadzenie istotnych zmian modernizacyjnych zarówno w kontekście narodowym, jak i lokalnym, miejskim. Toczyły się wówczas dyskusje na temat wizji nowoczesności, poszukiwano takiej jej wersji, która łączyłaby trendy europejskie i lokalne inspiracje. Założenie ogrodu zoologicznego jako nowoczesnej instytucji określało w pewnym stopniu także miejsce zwierząt w przestrzeni miejskiej. Zauważalne były wówczas procesy rugowania niektórych gatunków zwierząt z miasta czy sytuowania innych w obrębie kultury czasu wolnego.


2018 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kieran D. Taylor

The relief of Belgian refugees in Britain is an emerging area of study in the history of the First World War. About 250,000 Belgian refugees came to Great Britain, and at least 19,000 refugees came to Scotland, with the majority hosted in Glasgow. While relief efforts in Scotland were co-ordinated and led by the Glasgow Corporation, the Catholic Church also played a significant role in the day-to-day lives of refugees who lived in the city. This article examines the Archdiocese of Glasgow's assistance of Belgian refugees during the war. It considers first the Catholic Church's stance towards the War and the relief of Belgian refugees. The article then outlines the important role the Church played in providing accommodation, education and religious ministry to Belgian refugees in Glasgow. It does this by tracing the work of the clergy and by examining popular opinion in Catholic media. The article establishes that the Church and the Catholic community regarded the relief and reception of Belgian refugees as an act of religious solidarity.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
David Monger

Abstract Concerns about fake news and media manipulation are commonplace in contemporary society, and, throughout the twentieth century, historians regularly presented the First World War as an era of manipulated public messages. Yet, despite broad statements about the impact of press censorship in First World War Britain, publication of an official history of the ‘D’ notice system, and growing revision of historical understanding of the interaction between the state, the press, propaganda, and the public during the war, no thorough assessment of the content of the D notices issued by the Press Bureau to newspaper editors has been undertaken. This article provides a thorough analysis of the more than seven hundred notices issued during the war years. While drawing attention to several exceptions which exceeded plausible claims of a threat to security, it argues that most notices genuinely sought to protect potentially dangerous information and that casual assumptions about misleading state press management are not borne out by a close reading of the actual notices issued.


2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (160) ◽  
pp. 238-255
Author(s):  
Marjaana Niemi

AbstractCapital cities play a significant role in interpreting a country’s past and charting its future. In the aftermath of the First World War nine new European states, Finland and Ireland among them, were confronted with the question of how to create a capital city befitting their new status and national identity. Instead of designing and constructing an entirely new capital city which would have marked a clean break from the past, all these states chose an existing city as the capital. This article will examine processes through which two capitals, Helsinki and Dublin, were renewed physically and symbolically to make the political change ‘real’ to people, but also to reinterpret the past and create a ‘teleology for the present’. The aim is to discuss the ways in which the changes, planned and implemented, both reflected and reinforced new interpretations of the history of the city and the nation, and the continuities and discontinuities the changes created between the past and the present. Some elements and versions of the past were chosen over others, preserved and reinvented in the cityscape, while others were ignored, hidden or denied.


Ladinia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 49-94
Author(s):  
Reinhard Rampold

While the major events of the First World War were scientifically examined early on, the “everyday stories” associated with the war received little attention for decades. It is only in recent years that this aspect has been recognised as an inte-gral part of history and has also been the subject of academic research in Tyrol and Trentino. Luckily, an extensive collection of field postcards and field letters from Felix, Candidus and Albin Crepaz has been preserved. They were deployed as soldiers on Col di Lana and the Siefsattel in the immediate vicinity of their hometown Lasta, and experienced the impact of the war on their homeland and their relatives at first hand. The preserved documents – even though the letters of reply are missing – give a deep insight into the psychological and physical problems of an ordinary soldier, as well as the concern for his relatives and neighbours, and are thus an important evidence of the everyday history of Tyrol during the First World War.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 100-107
Author(s):  
Savvinov Pavel O. ◽  

The paper provides the analysis of the city self-government structure and election process in Yakutsk. The purpose of this work was to comprehensively review the elections to the City Duma and City Council in Yakutsk during the First World War (1915–1917) and clarify the staff of the city self-government. The scientific novelty is that the staff of Yakutsk self-government and elections to the City Duma and City Council of 1915 are analyzed for the first time using such cognitive methods as historicism, objectivity, consistency, and complexity. Using a comparative-historical method made it possible to determine the cause-and-effect relations and regularities of the historical development of the phenomenon under study. The research revealed that during the elections of 1915, the citizens became more interested in the activities of the public self-government, as evidenced by the first pre-election meetings. The elected city self-government had a majority of officials. At the end of 1916, a project was developed to reorganize the city council office. That project was suggested to increase the complexity of functions and regulations and the number and staff of self-government structures and was to become the next stage in the development of Yakutsk public self-government. Practical relevance of the research is that the results of the study can be used for further study of the cities of Siberia. The article is intended for historians and everyone interested in the history of Yakutia. Keywords: city council, city duma, city regulation of 1892, city council members, election meeting, office of the city council


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