On 28 December 1889, and at the height of global anxiety about a spreading epidemic, the
American journal Medical News published a lengthy article by Dr Roberts
Bartholow about ‘The Causes and Treatment of Influenza’. Noting that the ‘reappearance of influenza in one of its cyclical
manifestations, or epidemics, is an interesting event’, Bartholow offered a sweeping statement
about the impact of the disease:Influenza comes suddenly; goes as quickly. The least robust, at any age, and women seem
to be the first victims. It is here a question of bodily condition, not of the sex. The
large numbers simultaneously attacked attracts general attention, and thus those most
impressionable are seized, the onset being facilitated by any depressing emotion like fear
or illness.To treat influenza, Bartholow recommended cures such as sulphurous acid, iodoform, tannin,
resorcin, chinoidin, calomel, antipyrin, acetanilide, phenacetin, and more.This article resembled many contemporary reports about an epidemic already referred to in
late 1889 as ‘Russian influenza’ that combined specific descriptions of symptoms with
prognostication about the course of disease. Bartholow’s recommended treatments were clearly
intended for doctors and druggists rather than the general public, yet his sage advice to
maintain vital tone and condition obviously appealed to more general readers. Appearing at the
early stages of an epidemic, the tone of Bartholow’s article was serious yet reassuring in its
claims that the disease was cyclical and familiar, its causes soon to be discovered, and its
cure within reach.Although close reading of an illustrative text, such as Bartholow’s editorial, allows
historians to understand how a medical expert explained a disease outbreak, new tools from the
digital humanities permit interpretations on a larger scale, across a broader range of textual
evidence, and with the potential to uncover additional angles that promote revealing
analysis. This article explores a digital
humanities approach to medical history that takes advantage of the great expansion of texts
accessible through digitised collections to facilitate synthetic analysis across layers of
experience, from the global to the national and regional, down to the local and even the
personal. Digital humanities methods, in other words, allow historians to explore more sources
with new tools while also enhancing traditional techniques of close reading and layered
analysis.In terms of a digital humanities approach to medical history, the real significance of
Bartholow’s article was the manner in which it was replicated, cited and even challenged at a
national level. A database search for ‘Bartholow’, or the frequent misspelling, ‘Bartholomew’,
located more than fifty newspapers over the next ten days that explicitly referenced this
expert discussion of influenza. Nearly
three-quarters of these articles appeared on 28 December 1889, the publication date of the
Medical News article. These articles consisted almost entirely of text
taken from a wire service summary of the journal article, either in a long version of several
paragraphs or a short version of a few sentences. The widely held view of the Russian flu as a
disease outbreak to be observed, anticipated but not feared, was expressed in, for example,
the headline ‘Look Out for ‘La Grippe’, used by a Georgia newspaper, the Macon
Telegraph, to introduce the main points of Bartholow’s article. In other words, searching through digitised collections
reveals the ways iterations of a single text appeared across the United States and gave
readers in disparate locations simultaneous access to expert commentary on a disease.Keyword searching reveals that a few newspapers framed Bartholow’s authoritative commentary
relative to observations from local physicians, who shared the general assessment of the
limited danger of this disease. Yet a
strikingly different, even unique, interpretation of Bartholow’s article appeared in a
Missouri newspaper, the Sedalia Weekly Bazoo, in a 7 January 1890 editorial,
which began with a sweeping denunciation of journalistic practice:There seems to be an irresistible pensity, among certain newspaper writers, to try to
create panics over the public health. They are never happy unless they can publish stories
of fatal epidemic and disastrous plagues …Just now these panic-mongers are filling the
papers with accounts of the ravages of influenza.After referring to European hospitals full of patients, businesses and schools closed, and
public services curtailed, accompanied by sudden and unexplained increases in mortality, the
editorial seemingly mocked alarmist reports of illness in closer proximity: ‘In the Eastern
States, everybody who has a cold in his head reports himself as a victim of La Grippe, and
goes about warning his neighbours to be warned by his melancholy example.’ The Sedalia
Weekly Bazoo then offered its own corrective to stories that ‘read like wild
fiction, based on a slight substratum of fact’: ‘There is nothing new in influenza; it is an
old acquaintance; we know all about it. It is rarely fatal; it does not usually prevent its
victims from attending to business. It sometimes assumes an epidemic type and cases become
frequent, but it never lays whole communities low. It has never in its past visitations
created a general panic; there is no reason why it should do so now.’ Finally, the editorial
ended with a sharp retort to the expert advice offered in the Medical News
ten days earlier: ‘[The influenza] is probably not nearly so much to be feared as the remedies
which Dr Bartholomew [sic] of Philadelphia recommends as safeguards: the
inhalation of sulphuric-acid gas, five grains of chinoidin three times a day and two grains of
calomel at night. A patient who survived these medicines need fear no epidemic in this
world.’The circulation of expert knowledge about influenza involved both repetition and
contestation. The Sedalia Weekly Bazoo used wire service reports to provide
information about the spread of disease in Europe and the United States, yet this editorial
challenged both the nature of most newspaper reporting and the specific recommendations of a
medical expert. A digital humanities approach that uses broad analytical tools to identify a
single text for close analysis offers medical historians a tool to explore tensions between
claims of medical expertise and interpretations of human experience.The Russian influenza, like other nineteenth-century disease outbreaks, is especially suited
to a combination of searching across large amounts of texts and close reading of specific
texts because of the potential to trace the diffusion of knowledge across communication
networks while also carefully evaluating the substance of this information. Medical experts
like Bartholow can be tracked by both their names and their ideas, yet this approach requires
a combination of tools and techniques. Interpreting specific texts requires the skills of
close reading, yet it was the digital humanities tools of word searching and synthetic
analysis that identified the texts deserving close interpretation within the broader context.
Diseases like influenza epidemics lend themselves to multiple forms of analysis, because the
disease can be examined across levels (global, regional, local and personal) as well as across
a variety of discursive forms (expert analysis, factual reporting, subjective responses and
editorial commentary).