This paper explores how the fin-de-siècle spiritualist and occult periodical press in Britain became an authoritative forum for the communication of occult ideas and treatments for viral disease. I assess spiritualist and theosophical periodicals in the context of the so-called ‘Russian Flu’ epidemic (1889–1894) to trace both natural and supposedly supernatural treatments offered for influenza. In doing so, I bring attention to editorial strategies used to undermine specialist medical authority at the time of a highly mediatised epidemic.
The 1890s outbreak was an especially modern one, being ‘as much a media event as a disease event’, which had a formidable grasp on the minds, health, and anxieties of the masses, and was characterised by a looming sense of social panic (Honigsbaum 300). In 1890, the editor of popular reformist spiritualism newspaper the Two Worlds expressed profound exasperation with her medical contemporaries, lamenting that ‘[p]hysicians still grope in the dark to find the remedy’ for influenza. As a consequence, she stressed, it was ‘natural that the public should welcome light from every side’ and open themselves to ‘new influences and new ideas’ (Britten 399). This invited occult periodicals to become uniquely placed responders to a pandemic public anxious for both alternative answers and cures.
By marketing themselves as new voices of authority, I argue that these periodicals sought to amplify medical doubt, undermine scientific knowledge, and legitimise their editorial status in order to become recognised as unconventional, yet authoritative, sources of curative and prophetic knowledge.

Spiritualism’s early twentieth-century resurgence followed in the wake of two devastating mass mortality events, the First World War and the “Spanish flu,” now better known as the 1918 H1N1 pandemic. While long recognized as offering desperately-needed consolation to the war bereaved, the movement’s relationship to the latter public health crisis has proved trickier to pin down. Certainly, the twin catastrophes elicited dramatically differing levels of attention in the era’s interwar spiritualist press, where séance communiques from dead soldiers abound but post-mortem flu victims remain almost entirely absent. In this context, Arthur Conan Doyle’s late-life spiritualist novel The Land of Mist (1926) stands as something of a rarity, offering, as Elizabeth Outka has recently argued, oblique commentary on the pandemic through the ghost doctors and patients whose testimony triggers the conversion of the author’s recurring Professor Challenger character. Countering Outka, however, who identifies Doyle’s pandemic discourse as ultimately optimistic and consolatory, my paper reads the author’s self-described “big psychic novel” in a far darker light, one that exposes the unique challenge posed by Spanish flu to the new religious movement’s melioristic rhetoric and burgeoning investment in alternative healing practices such as the laying on of hands and anti-vaccinationism. Situating The Land of Mist within the real-life spiritualist healing controversies and scandals that inspired its plot, I show how the triumphs of Doyle’s afterlife diagnosticians serve to dramatize the failures of the living practitioners who embraced their spiritual therapeutics and worldview.

Within Nigerian traditional religious history, the Yoruba god of smallpox Sopona was a worshipped figure feared for his ability to infect individuals with smallpox. Although the British government shut down the active worship of Sopona in the early twentieth century, the objects surrounding Sopona worship serve as useful materials in examining Western and non-Western perceptions of epidemic disease in conjunction with spirit worship. Over the last few years historians have been extending their studies towards understanding the relationships between science and occult practices. Much of this work, however, has situated around the European and North American context despite the fact that there were significant worldview similarities between Western and non-Western occultic practitioners. In this talk therefore, I explore some connections between occult practice, indigenous understandings, race and epidemic disease thought through a focus on the Yoruba Sopona smallpox objects displayed in the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum (opened in 1913). In doing so I attempt to tease out what their display might tell us about public perceptions of epidemic diseases in European and non-European settings.