The centenary of the 20th century’s worst catastrophe

ON JUNE 29th 1918 Martín Salazar, Spain’s inspector-general of health, stood up in front of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Madrid. He declared, not without embarrassment, that the disease which was ravaging his country was to be found nowhere else in Europe.In fact, that was not true. The illness in question, influenza, had been sowing misery in France and Britain for weeks, and in America for longer, but Salazar did not know this because the governments of those countries, a group then at war with Germany and its allies, had made strenuous efforts to suppress such potentially morale-damaging news. Spain, by contrast, was neutral, and the press had freely reported on the epidemic since the first cases had appeared in the capital in May. Before the summer was out, the disease Spaniards knew as the “Naples Soldier”—after a tune from a popular operetta—had been dubbed the “Spanish illness” abroad, and that, somewhat unfairly, was the name which stuck.