
Episode #9
Spanish Flu
Modernity gave people confidence that distance meant safety. Trains, ships, and telegraphs shrank the world, but they also created blind spots. In spring nineteen eighteen, catastrophe slipped quietly into familiar routines—a sickness that looked ordinary, hiding in the machinery of war.Cities in Europe and North America believed they had left massive epidemics behind. Sanitation was improving, bacteriology was advancing, and officials trusted that mortality could be measured and managed. Epidemics seemed like old history, not a threat to the new world. Influenza was counted as a nuisance of winter, rarely deadly on a large scale. Meanwhile, armies in th...

