THE SPANISH FLU: A CONTRIBUTION TO STUDYING THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE SPANISH FLU IN SERBIA

Abstract

It is believed that during the Spanish Flu Pandemic, that took over the entire planet between 1918. and 1919, approximately 500 million people became infected, and 50 million people died. The pandemic didn’t avoid the population in occupied Serbia, nor the soldiers at the Salonica front. It escalated immediately after the breakthrough of the front, and culminated in the moments of delight and euphoria that followed liberation. Even though the flu has taken numerous victims amongst the military and the civilian population, its consequences have been almost completely neglected in historiography, to make way for research of historical and military subjects. A death in a hospital death is not heroic, unlike a death on the battlefield. The purpose of this paper is to call attention to the deadly consequences of this epidemic in the areas of Serbia for which there is relevant information in available literature (Šajkaška Region, Trstenik County and Zlatibor County), as well as to present the results of new research efforts related to parts of the former Valjevo region (Krčmar church parish, Kamenica County and Valjevo County). During research, a specific focus was placed on demographic aspects: the mortality rate, and the percentage of Spanish flu related deaths in the entire human losses during the war. An additional goal of this paper it to initiate further, more comprehensive research, by presenting these discoveries.

Research has shown that the Spanish flu pandemic had spread across various territories in Serbia in autumn of 1918. with deadly consequences, however, the mortality rate differed not only among regions, but from village to village. It appears that the plain, more urbanized territory of Bačka had a relatively lower mortality rate. In the three months that the epidemic lasted there, depending on the village, the Spanish flu deaths accounted for 2% to 52% of all of the deaths in year 1918. One of the worst affected villages was Tovariševo, in which 2.2% of the population had died during the epidemic. On the other hand, in seven remote villages of Valjevo region, all gravitating towards the church in the village of Krčmar, during two moths, the Spanish flu took 70.5% of the lives lost that year, and 4.5% of the entire population, ranging from 1.66% to 9.28%, depending on the village. In all the villages in Kamenica County, more that 4% of the population died due to the flu, and in Zlatibor Country, this number was approximately 5% and in Trstenik County it was 3.7%. Over the six years of Balkan Wars and The Great War, the Spanish flu accounted for 39% of the human losses in Trstenik County, where war losses were smaller than in other regions of Serbia, and it accounted for 21% and 20% of human losses in Zlatibor and Kamenica counties, respectively, as the war losses in those counties were significantly larger.

Research has also shown that within the territory of “Old Serbia,” the mortality rate was significantly lower in urban communities and villages in the surrounding plains. Thus, in the town of Trstenik, only two people had died, in Vrnjačka Banja, only one person did, whilst in Valjevo, 18 people were registered to have died from the Spanish flu. The suburban villages in the plains surrounding Valjevo County, the mortality rate was also lower. Thus, in Divci, only two people had died, while in the more remote, hillside villages, the mortality rate ranged from 2.5% to almost 10% that were registered in Tupanci.

This apparent paradox of the mortality rate being the lowest in more urbanized communities with the highest population density and significantly higher in remote, rural communities, can be interpreted in three ways. On one hand, there was a higher level of culture and a higher awareness of public health and hygiene in the population of towns and their immediate surroundings; on the other hand, there was a certain “inside knowledge” within population in towns as a result of better opportunities to communicate, and these two factors could have resulted in a stronger herd immunity. Furthermore, we should not overlook that the urban and suburban populations had better accessibility to hospitals and healthcare than their counterparts in remote rural areas.