The Flu Epidemic of 1918 by Sandra Opdycke

Author:Sandra Opdycke [Opdycke, Sandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, World
ISBN: 9781135133528
Google: nDosAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-03-26T01:22:33+00:00

STOPPING THE SPREAD OF INFECTION

There are two main ways to fight a disease: treatment and prevention. So far, we have been discussing the treatment side of the equation. It is time now to consider what American communities did, or tried to do, about the second task, that of prevention.

Ideally, of course, there would have been a vaccine to protect the population against influenza, as our flu shots do today. But, as we have discussed, no effective vaccine had yet been developed. Nor could flu be cured, once it began. This meant that communities hoping to bring the epidemic under control had to rely primarily on the same disease-prevention measures that had been used for years: public education, sanitation, and social distancing (so as to separate sick people from healthy ones).

Community authorities had one major asset as they approached this challenge: the growing respect for—and understanding of—public health that had developed during the Progressive Era. Consider the issue of public education, through which members of the public were taught to take personal responsibility for controlling infection. This approach had flowered during the years before the war, especially in connection with the campaign against tuberculosis. Now in 1918, American civilians were besieged with information about how to recognize influenza, how to avoid catching it, and how to prevent transmitting it to others. The Surgeon General of the U.S. Public Health Service sent out a great deal of material, and many state and local health departments added their own, including posters and placards, circulars to be distributed door to door, slides to be shown before movie shows, and press releases in both English and foreignlanguage papers (see Figure 2.1, p. 32).

In these educational materials, the authorities placed a heavy emphasis on Americans’ patriotic obligation to stay healthy themselves, and to protect the well-being of the community. In the same tone of voice in which people were urged to join the military or buy Liberty Bonds, they were reminded: “You owe it to yourself and to your fellow man to do everything you can to stay the progress of this crippling and all too swiftly fatal disease.” After all, as a Public Health Service representative in Texas remarked, “The more cases of influenza we have in this country, so much more will the German Kaiser be pleased.”45

The public information that was circulated during this period urged people to stay away from crowds, but even more, it stressed the importance of “respiratory etiquette.” As one circular explained: “Cover up each cough and sneeze. If you don’t, you’ll spread disease.”46 Above all, people were instructed not to spit. Anti-spitting campaigns, reinforced with fines and arrests, had been developed during the anti-TB campaigns before the war, and they were vigorously revived in 1918. Philadelphia even reissued its old placards, which sternly announced: “Spitting Equals Death.”47

Spitting is certainly an offensive habit, but the intensity with which it was pursued in 1918 owed at least as much to the sanitarian concerns of the nineteenth century as to modern theories about how flu was transmitted.

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