On December 25, 1889, the Los Angeles Times reported that the epidemic of influenza “reigns and rages” in Paris, resulting in a canceled conference of lawyers “because a majority of speakers were ill.” The same article reported on the influenza in other European cities. In St. Petersburg, two-thirds of the population suffered from “the malady” and “scarcely a member of the imperial family has been free from it.” In Brussels, schools were closed because one-third of children were sick. In Berlin, officials reported “no abatement of the evil.” In Frankfort, trams ceased to work because “the employees are all ill.” In Vienna, many victims of influenza are “stricken with inflammation of the lungs and several of them have died.”

This newspaper report on infected cities stood at the intersection of three distinct processes relevant for studies of medicine, engineering, and science. First, the medical situation changed suddenly with the outbreak of a virulent form of influenza. Second, the technological breakthrough of the telegraph and transoceanic cables allowed information to spread across long distances very quickly. Third, the public was increasingly aware of scientific discoveries, as reports of the pandemic anticipated the actual arrival of the disease. This project explores the rapid dissemination of medical understanding, the geographies of health discourse and news reporting, the authority claimed by physicians in public rhetoric, and the long-distance transmission of scientific understanding.

Both contemporaries and historians noted that the telegraph changed understanding of time and space by conveying information quickly over long distances. This study is the first to ask how the acceleration in communication shaped understanding of a disease that spread more quickly and over longer distances that any previous outbreak. Epidemiologists have begun to examine the “Russian flu” as a precursor to the more deadly “Spanish flu” of 1918. This paper makes a unique contribution by asking how telegraph networks allowed reports about the flu to precede the spread of the disease. Finally, examining newspapers from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas illustrates how a worldwide network transmitted information about a global pandemic. This paper is part of a larger study of the epidemiology of information that uses digitized newspapers to trace knowledge about disease in historical contexts.