Made a mockery of the newfound optimism

From Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It by Gina Kolata.  Page 53. 

In asking why [nobody notices the lethality of the 1918 flu], Crosby proposes a combination of factors that, he said, acting together accounted for the world’s collective amnesia. For one, he argues, the epidemic simply was so dreadful and so rolled up in people’s minds with the horrors of the war that most people did not want to think about it or write about it once the terrible year of 1918 was over. The flu blended into the general nightmare of World War I, an unprecedented event that introduced trench warfare, submarines, the bloody battles of the Somme and Verdun, and the horrors of chemical warfare.

Moreover, the epidemic had no obvious dramatic effect. It did not kill a world leader. It did not usher in a long period in which death from influenza was a new and constant threat. It did not leave behind legions of crippled and maimed or disfigured survivors who would serve as haunting reminders of the disease.

His latest hypothesis, he said in an interview in August 1998, is that in the fifty years preceding the 1918 flu, the world had been through one of the most profound revolutions ever to change the course of history: the germ theory of disease. “Every eighteen months, a new pathogen was identified, and it went on for years,” Crosby noted. Each discovery drove home the message that science was conquering disease. As the drumbeat of infectious agents continued, people “heaved a great sigh of relief. At last infectious disease was not important anymore,” Crosby concludes.

Then came the flu epidemic, which made a mockery of the newfound optimism. And when it ended, Crosby posits, perhaps the most comforting reaction was to forget about it, to push it to the back of humanity’s collective consciousness as quickly as possible. To “see no evil, hear no evil.”