Last night I watched the latest offering the BBC4 'war beneath the skin' series which was about the attempts of a Manchester doctor to respond to the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic. It was, for me, a great watch, connecting my scientist, historian (never thought I'd use that word of myself!), theologian and lover of Manchester genes.
My first interest was from a historical perspective, not so much what the story said, but how it was told and why (actually that makes me a historiographer not a historian). This 'creative non-fiction' or 'docu-drama' approach cutting in archive film and photos with 21st century acting fascinates me. The parallels with the current swine flue epidemic were obvious - so was any of this in the mind of the writers and producers? The conflicts between social acceptability - a previous threatened epidemic that never came (cf bird flu) and the post WWI celebrations - and scientifically based approach of isolation, separation and closing down public places also had a contemporary ring.
Enter my scientist head - I have constantly been irritated with the swine flu response, since it became clear this was not another false alarm. That we have failed to adopt basic control measures - even in the great plague a clergyman worked out the value of isolation (Remember Eyam?) and the data for the 1918 flu show that the doctor in Manchester got it, at least in part, right. Do we never learn (oh, that's my historian head again!). The use of statistical data and even the mortality curves were familiar (believe it or not similar techniques are used in probabilistic risk assessment! I guess at least in 2009 we have tamiflu and vaccination but we still don't seem to have got our social heads around containment or isolation. Thankfully swine flue has, so far, proved very mild in its effects, but what if it hadn't...?
So to my theologian head and to my research work which is predicated precisely on this relationship of past-present-future. Do we really have to reinvent wheels every time or are there principles and practices we can learn from how things were approached in the past that will inform our now? How do we tell the stories in ways that enable people to engage with them, identify connection points and questions and work with them creatively and constructively? In the dramatisation, a pious twerp refused to close his Sunday Schools to prevent spread of disease, justifying his action by saying that adults can take care of their own spiritual needs, children can't. He may well have been right, but was he missing the point? What do the actions of the churches say to people? How should we really be reacting to swine flu - I'm not convinced that either the alcohol gel and wafer or 'God will protect us' extremes is great - but what else?
So thank you BBC for making me think. At the end of the programme I was left wondering if we'll ever really learn from our experiences, how much commercial and political agendas drive society (need to read more Marx obviously!) how much we really can predict from what we already know (e.g. will viruses return once, twice or a dozen times before they burn out?) and just what it is we try to do when we tell stories from the past. Good stuff!