The origin site for the 1918 influenza pandemic which killed more than 50 million people worldwide has been hotly debated. While the mid-western United States, France, and China have all been identified as potential candidates by medical researchers, the military context for the pandemic has been all but ignored. Conversely, military historians have paid little attention to a deadly disease which underlines the reciprocal relationship between battlefield and home front. This paper re-examines the debate about the origins and diffusion of the 1918 flu within the context of global war, bridging gaps between social, medical, and military history in the process. A multidisciplinary perspective combined with new research in British and Canadian archives reveals that the 1918 flu most likely emerged first in China in the winter of 1917–18, diffusing across the world as previously isolated populations came into contact with one another on the battlefields of Europe. Ethnocentric fears – both official and popular – facilitated its spread along military pathways that had been carved out across the globe to sustain the war effort on the Western Front.

Using a variety of archival sources and statistics compiled from military hospital records, the author examines the origin and dissemination of influenza in Canada during the “Spanish” influenza pandemic of 1918. He argues that pandemic influenza did not originate with soldiers returning from the First World War but instead traces the spread of the virus to American soldiers on their way overseas. The author posits that in Canada, the disease was then disseminated by the movement of Canadian soldiers as the war effort was widened to include a new commitment to mount an expeditionary force to Siberia. The author concludes that the physical path of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Canada is best understood as the result of a widening of the war effort at the expense of public health rather than as the inevitable consequence of the war’s end.L’auteur examine ici les origines et la propagation de l’influenza au Canada pendant la pandémie de grippe espagnole de 1918. Pour cela, il a consulté diverses sources statistiques et archivistiques tirées de dossiers d’hôpitaux militaires. Il avance que les vecteurs de propagation du virus n’auraient pas été les soldats de retour de la Première Guerre mondiale, mais plutôt les soldats américains qui se rendaient outre-mer. L’auteur pose comme postulat que la maladie s’est par la suite propagée au Canada par l’entremise des soldats canadiens que l’on redéployait afin de constituer une force expéditionnaire en Sibérie. L’auteur conclut qu’en choisissant d’élargir l’effort de guerre au détriment de la protection de la santé publique, le Canada a favorisé la dissémination de la pandémie de l’influenza de 1918, qui n’aurait donc pas été une conséquence inévitable de la fin de la guerre

War is an inherently traumatizing experience, and during the First World War more than 15,000 Canadian soldiers were diagnosed with some form of war-related psychological wounds. Many more went unrecognized. Yet the very act of seeking an escape from the battlefield or applying for a postwar pension for psychological traumas transgressed masculine norms that required men to be aggressive, self-reliant, and un-emotional. Using newly available archival records, contemporary medical periodicals, doctors' notes, and patient interview transcripts, this paper examines two crises that arose from this conflict between idealized masculinity and the emotional reality of war trauma. The first came on the battlefield in 1916 when, in some cases, almost half the soldiers evacuated from the front were said to be suffering from emotional breakdowns. The second came later, during the Great Depression, when a significant number of veterans began to seek compensation for their psychological injuries. In both crises, doctors working in the service of the state constructed trauma as evidence of deviance, in order to parry a larger challenge to masculine ideals. In creating this link between war trauma and deviance, they reinforced a residual conception of welfare that used tests of morals and means to determine who was deserving or undeserving of state assistance. At a time when the Canadian welfare state was being transformed in response to the needs of veterans and their families, doctors' denial that "real men" could legitimately exhibit psychosomatic symptoms in combat meant that thousands of legitimately traumatized veterans were left uncompensated by the state and were constructed as inferior, feminized men.

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