A Touch of Flu: centenary of the Spanish flu pandemic

In 2018 the Florence Nightingale Museum will tour ‘A Touch of Flu’, an exhibition focusing on the ‘Spanish’ flu pandemic, to open up dialogue about what we have learned to inform how we should respond to future outbreaks of disease. Between the early summer of 1918 and the spring of 1919 the ‘Spanish’ influenza (so-called because Spain was the only country not to censor reports of the spreading epidemic) claimed the lives of a quarter of a million people in Britain. Worldwide, the death toll from the flu has been estimated at 50 million – ten times as many as died in the First World War and ten million more than AIDS has killed over thirty years. 

Timed for the centenary of the pandemic in 2018, this project is part of a collaboration between the Florence Nightingale Museum, Queen Mary University of London and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.