(HOST) As we prepare for another flu season, and health officials warn of a possible worldwide flu epidemic, Vermont Humanities Council executive director and commentator Peter Gilbert looks back to the fall ninety years ago, when more people died in one year of the Great Flu Epidemic than in four years of the Bubonic Plague.
(GILBERT) It started like a typical flu – headache, burning eyes, chills. But soon, according to Gina Kolata, author of Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic, things got serious: delirium; your face turned a brownish purple; you coughed up blood; and, finally, with your lungs filled with fluid, you struggled for breath and most likely died.
It could take mere hours or three or four days, but nothing could be done to stop it. Some survived, some didn’t.
Most flus kill the very young, the old and weakened, but in case of the Spanish Influenza, more than half of the fatalities were young, healthy adults aged 20 to 40. More than a quarter of all Americans got sick. An estimated 675,000 Americans died. In 1918 the average American lifespan dropped a staggering twelve years – from 51 years to 39 years.
Philadelphia and Boston were particularly hard-hit. Philadelphia lost 11,000 citizens in a month. The scene at Camp Devens, an army base west of Boston, was absolutely horrific: the hospital built for 2,000 was overwhelmed with 8,000 men.
That fall in Alaska, mail carriers unknowingly carried the flu as well to isolated native villages, wiping some of them out.
Worldwide, the pandemic killed between twenty and fifty million people.
It hit World War I soldiers fighting in Europe particularly hard. It killed large numbers of troops and weakened even more, undercut morale, and caused battles to be delayed. The British Navy delayed putting to sea for three weeks because so many men were sick.
If you have family genealogical records, you might look at the dates ancestors of that period died – especially in 1918 or ’19. You might note their ages and whether there were multiple deaths recorded.
The Influenza struck my family, as it did most. One of the soldiers who got sick was my mother’s father; he was a battalion medical officer fighting in France. The flu developed into encephalitis lethargica, so-called "sleeping sickness," and then postencephalitic Parkinsonism. Although he survived, it destroyed his health. When he returned home after the war, the woman he had married just two weeks before sailing for France knew immediately that he wasn’t the same man. With time he grew more incapacitated, had to give up what had been a promising medical career, and died in 1950 in a VA hospital at the age of 58.
The epidemic was over in less than a year. Critic H. L. Mencken noted that, in the years that followed, the epidemic was seldom mentioned and apparently forgotten by most Americans. "This is not surprising," he wrote. "The human mind always tries to expunge the intolerable from memory." Nevertheless, the impact of the epidemic is still keenly felt by many, even ninety years later. The grief and loss caused by such tragic diseases, disasters, injustice, and war cast a long and lingering shadow on the hearts and lives of countless loved ones.