Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them by Jennifer Wright

Author:Jennifer Wright [Wright, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2017-02-06T16:00:00+00:00

Spanish Flu

Influenza, labeled Spanish, came and beat

me to my knees;

Even doctors couldn’t banish from

my form that punk disease.

—WALT MASON

The purpose of this book is not to scare you. Instead, like all good books, it is intended to distract you from the screaming baby one aisle over from the airplane seat where you are currently trapped for the next five hours. So I apologize that I have to tell you to smile at the frazzled parent, put on your earphones, and brace yourself, because about one hundred years ago, in 1918, 50 million people worldwide died of the Spanish flu, and we still don’t know what caused it or how to treat it, how to eradicate it, or if it will ever return. Sorry!

We do know that this disease wasn’t Spanish. In all likelihood, the Spanish flu was an all-American plague hailing from Haskell, Kansas. There is still research that attempts to pin the biggest plague in the twentieth century on anyplace else (guesses range from China to Great Britain), probably because “America’s bread-basket” is a much nicer way to refer to the Midwest than “the planet’s flu bin.”

In spite of our First World desire to believe that diseases are fundamentally exotic imports, the first case of the Spanish flu epidemic was reported to the weekly journal Public Health Reports by Dr. Loring Miner of Haskell, Kansas, in March 1918. Since the early winter, Dr. Miner had been shocked to see dozens of his patients become sick with what seemed to be “influenza of a severe type” and die. They weren’t even older, less robust patients. The deceased were people who seemed to be extremely healthy and in the prime of life. When Dr. Miner called the U.S. Public Health Service to describe his unusual findings, it wasn’t able to offer any help. Despite his notice in Public Health Reports, people didn’t seem to take the outbreak all that seriously.1

This might be a good time to mention that if you learn about an airborne virus that seems to be killing otherwise healthy young people in your area from a reputable medical journal, you are reading very bad news. Go to the grocery store and start stocking up on supplies immediately. If you have someplace relatively isolated to live, go there. Doing so might feel a bit silly or paranoid, but, honestly, neither of those responses would be overreactions.

Of course, at the time, no one followed Loring’s sage advice. People may have been cavalier because almost everyone has had the flu once and survived. During the early 1900s there was even a jokey doctor’s saying about influenza that went, “Quite a godsend! Everybody ill, nobody dying.”2 Even today, if you mention Spanish flu, most will think that maybe some people had to take a week or two off work in Spain because they were throwing up a whole lot. Because, sure, the flu is inconvenient, but it’s something most people are able to survive.

This wasn’t that sort of flu. Dr. Miner was

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