Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into History Again by Bathroom Readers' Hysterical Society

Author:Bathroom Readers' Hysterical Society
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781607106173
Publisher: Portable Press
Published: 2012-05-31T14:00:00+00:00

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The first victim of the guillotine was a highwayman named Nicolas Pelletier, on April 25, 1792.

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KILLER FLU

Nothing in known history has ever killed so many people so fast as the influenza virus of 1918.

During ten months in 1918 and 1919, a strain of influenza killed between 20 and 40 million people, ten times more than the bubonic plague’s toll back in the Middle Ages. The virus was called “the Spanish flu” because of the millions of early cases reported there. Worldwide one out of every five people contracted it; in the United States the figure was one out of every three people. Check with your grandparents—wherever you’re from, chances are that someone in your family had it and maybe even died from it.

OVER THERE

In 1918, thousands of young men were crowded into army camps in the United States and in the trenches of World War I Europe. A virulent flu outbreak swept through the camps and by year’s end, more American soldiers had died of the flu than had died fighting in the war during that same period.

That August, a second, deadlier wave of Spanish flu hit. During one week, a few people sickened and died in three port cities around the world: Boston, Massachusetts; Freetown in Sierra Leone, and Brest, France. Within weeks, dozens, hundreds, and then thousands of people were dead.

ONLY THE STRONG DON’T SURVIVE

Viruses are usually most dangerous to children and the elderly because their immune systems are either still developing or declining with age. A bizarre twist to the 1918 pandemic (an epidemic gone global) was that it killed so many healthy, young men and women—often within hours. Scientists have figured out that the 1918 bug partially disabled the victims’ immune systems, but exactly how it killed so many so fast remains a secret.

TAKING ITS TOLL

The flu mutated constantly and killed quickly. Stories of horror and hope abounded. Mothers died, leaving their babies untended. Small children nursed entire families back to health. Families dug their own graves and coffins were reused, either by adding a new body to one already there, or in the case of undertakers, using a coffin in a funeral, then burying the body and using the coffin in another funeral. And this wasn’t done secretly; there just weren’t enough coffins to go around.

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