It was the last – to date – of the great plagues of human history; no disease epidemic since comes near it in death-toll. It infected 500 million people and killed from 50 to 100 million – 3-5% of the global population. (World War I only killed 10 million.) You would think that would be remembered as an epochal historical event. Yet I’ve never heard of a novel or film or anything about it or using it as a setting. Did everybody just want to forget about it afterwards? Is it, perhaps, something that would be better remembered if a world war had not been going on at the time?
In addition to the war, and the civil war brewing in Russia at the time, disease was rife back then; every summer, you could look forward to a new polio epidemic. A one-off pandemic like this, horrible as it may have been, wouldn’t have been seen as anything out of the ordinary. (How often do you hear the cholera epidemics of the 19th century mentioned today? Such things were so commonplace they were just a fact of life.) Had the flu killed on the scale of the Black Death in the 14th century, yeah, it might be more of a landmark, but it never threatened to wipe out whole populations.
From what I’ve read, it was particularly shocking because of the speed with which it spread; that was entirely due to the AEF being shipped to Europe, where conditions for a pandemic were ideal. Had it not been for that, it might have been confined to a small town in Kansas.
In British period pieces the Spanish Flu it always crops up to kill off a character that needs killin’ through no moral fault of their own.
See, Downton Abbey; Upstairs, Downstairs
And occasionally mentioned in various Agatha Christie mysteries - I seem to remember any number of brothers/sisters/mothers/fathers/whomevers mentioned as having died in the Flu Epidemic [along with killed in combat] typically as a reason that someone unexpected is getting an inheritence.
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Barbara Hambly wrote a novel set in 1923 Hollywood, Bride of the Rat God.
One of the most important characters in the book, Norah Blackwood, was an English woman who had lost almost all of her family to the flu epidemic. And her husband had died in the WWI trenches.
Not a media story, but my grandfather was living in Kansas City Missouri in 1918, and he told me about seeing troop trains full of sick soldiers coming in to the station. Hospitals had no beds left. The boarding hotel he lived in had a cot behind the counter, where the clerk was desperately trying to take care of a relative who lay there with the flu.
I remember an early episode of Numb3rs used it, and so did a later episode of Leverage. I want to say that House at least mentioned it in passing, even though I’m fairly positive that it never was the disease of the week.
For books, I’d suggest searching WorldCat for fiction titles, specifically using the subject heading Influenza Epidemic, 1918-1919 > Fiction. This is a search just for that subject heading, but should give you an idea of what’s out there in libraries - I’m sure there are other books out there that aren’t represented there, but this is a starting place.
It figures prominently in Willa Cather’s “One of Ours.”