But the flu was expunged from newspapers, magazines, textbooks, and society’s collective memory. Crosby calls the 1918 flu “America’s forgotten pandemic,” noting: “The important and almost incomprehensible fact about the Spanish flu is that it killed millions upon millions of people in a year or less. Nothing else—no infection, no war, no famine—has ever killed so many in as short a period. And yet it has never inspired awe, not in 1918 and not since, not among the citizens of any particular land and not among the citizens of the United States.”
