This question about buffets and other speculations about the future of cruise ships and the like has me wondering, was there anything that was common before The Spanish Flu that became virtually extinct afterwards because of a society wide shift in behavior?
Hard to say due to overlap with The Great War and social impacts of that. Likely societal changes that occurred were more due to that.
OP, you might like this video…it has some very interesting info. They mention that you couldn’t see a virus in a typical microscope of the day, so they weren’t really sure what was happening. Healthy in the morning, dead by nightfall, but nobody knew why. Maybe that mystery held people back from concluding that they shouldn’t shake hands or whatever.
The use of the spittoon rapidly declined partly as a result of 1918 flu epidemic
See Wikipedia article:
That reminds me of the Carmen parody that references the spittoon/cuspidor, going back to the Three Stooges and maybe even before them: “Toreador, don’t spit on the floor. Please use the cuspidor, that’s what it’s for.”
“Just stop spitting” … I’m on board with that. I see only a few people spitting in public these days, or evidence thereof. It’s completely unnecessary. Let’s start a campaign to finish it.
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I understand that the custom of drinking from a common cup at gatherings came to an abrupt end.
Man, I distinctly remember getting gas at the beginning of all this (March 11, to be precise) and the old guy on the other side of the pump was hocking up loogies and spitting them all over. Like, the whole time it took me to fill my tank. This was after I spent the whole morning listening to Covid-19 stories on NPR. I thought I was going to die right then and there.
Who does this still? And during a pandemic?!
That’s disgusting.
We had a nice-looking pristine brass spittoon in our house growing up. It didn’t have a plant in it, but I think we kind of used it as a junk drawer, matches, maybe? A bit hazy there. It definitely was never used for its intended purpose. Now that I think of it, it was kind of an odd thing to have around in our devoutly Mormon household.
I don’t know. My mother told me that when she was a child in the mid-late 1930s, her town had a fountain downtown and a communal tin cup for thirsty passers by. She claimed no one she knew considered it unsanitary, and she was related to several nurses.
I was under the impression that there still exist religious traditions such as drinking from a Communion cup. Are these gone?
Yes, they decided that cigarette smoking was healthier than chaw. :eek::smack:
This was the major change, and the cure was worse that the disease. It’s hard to get numbers, but smoking kills 8 million people a year world wide. You can’t really just multiply that time 100 years to get 800 million, but the number* is* staggering.
And is many times higher than died from the Spanish Flu*. By perhaps about a factor of ten.
- The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States.
I heard or read somewhere that long, sweepoing skirts became unfashionable bc of the possibility of germ transmission from soil, ground, floors, etc. It seems possible, since really long skirts have never really returned to being the fashion for daywear. Hemlines seemed to rise after about 1918 or so.
Nope, they’re still around. In fact, the Catholic Church used to have the “blood” or wine only for the priest and the “body” or bread for everyone, but several years back* broadened Communion to body and blood offered to all. The Communion ministers wipe the lip of the cup and rotate it a quarter turn for each worshipper.
*Sometime after I went to Catholic grade and high school in the '80s. 
I wonder how much of this was just societal change, though. For example, the Harrison County, WV courthouse, built in 1932, has a place for spittoons in the jury boxes (the brackets are still there, spittoons are not).
It would seem rather odd to outfit a newly constructed public building with devices that had been deemed very harmful 14 years prior. The Wikipedia article notes that they continued in use in southern capitol buildings until the 1970s.
That seems to me as something that “high society” determined in the early 1900s was uncouth or ungentlemanly but died out more slowly in rural areas (much like how many people in rural areas dip or chew tobacco, but it is virtually non-existent in urban areas).
So, without more, I’m not entirely convinced of the link between the Spanish flu and the decline of spittoons.
Cancers of the mouth and throat are also no joke, and smokeless tobacco, like smoking, greatly increases chances of heart attack and stroke.
Over the last 20 years, mouth and throat cancers have probably become more treatable (though they are terrible) than lung cancer, but before that, it was all the same.
There was a drive to get rid of tuberculosis in the late 1800’s/early 1900’s that got a lot of cities to pass anti-spitting bylaws. Don’t know if Spanish flu was the final nail but “elites thought it ungentlemanly” is a rather random guess.
It is a guess, but I think a fairly decent one. Do you think that you don’t see people walking in Times Square or on Rodeo Drive with a giant chaw in their mouths because of Spanish flu fears, or anti-spitting ordinances, or is it because they don’t want to look like an unrefined hillbilly?
Are Spanish flu fears less in West Virginia where many men have a pinch between the cheek and gum and spit into an empty coke bottle?
I take your point that I have no scholarly literature to back it up, but with spittoons existing for another 50 or so years in some parts of the country, it seems a tough sell to attribute the decline to the Spanish flu.