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My family and I all had the flu last month, and it was a pretty bad experience. High fevers, runny nose, coughing, body aches, blue lips, and sore throats were our symptoms of the flu. As a follow up to our illness, my parents taught us a little bit more about the Flu of 1918, also known as Spanish flu, due to its hard hit on Spain. After looking at a blog entry on the disastrous event, Mom checked out a video from the library about it. I enjoyed the documentary, and learned a lot from it. If you want to hear more about that real life horror story, read on.

It all started, when some soldiers out in Kansas burned manure, and the effects of it were horrible. A dust storm swept through the state, and infected all the people with something that would devastate the world. In an army camp one man said that he was feeling badly, and was taken to the army hospital. A minute later, many other men reported in sick. What was this mysterious illness? The men began to die off only a few hours after they came to the hospital. The men were listed dead by pneumonia. Then one day, the illness disappeared as quickly as it came. Everyone felt safe, for they didn’t know what was coming next.

More men joined the army, and a few of them came from Kansas. They brought the mysterious flu with them. As they fought in Europe, the soldiers passed on the flu to the French, English, and German. The flu was now a worldwide illness. More and more people began catching it. Since it was a respiratory disease, you could catch the sickness just by breathing near someone with the germ. The flu was so terrible, and so quick to claim its victims, you could wake up in the morning as a healthy person, and be dead by nightfall.

World War I was raging, and there were parades for the war effort. Almost everyone that went to these gatherings got sick immediately. Later, everyone was required to wear masks. A man was shot because he refused to wear one. But they were to no avail. People kept on getting sick. What was the public going to do?

The press tried to ignore it. But the amount of dead was so numerous; no one could ignore it. You would never imagine running out of coffins, but that is exactly what happened. Coffins piled up on the streets, and were put in front of people’s homes. Doctors couldn’t find out what caused the illness.  What had happened was that a liquid had filled up the victim’s lungs, and drowned the person in their own fluids.

Scientists closely inspected the germ, but could find nothing. Then they came out with a vaccine against the bacteria that they thought was the flu. But the vaccine didn’t help, because it wasn’t the bacterium that was causing the flu. It was a virus, which was something people back then couldn’t see, even with their microscopes. The microscopes didn’t have enough power to see the extremely small virus. So they were never going to find it!

The army needed more men to fight World War I. But almost all the men would catch the flu on those cramped troop ships to bring the soldiers overseas. President Woodrow Wilson was faced with a decision. Would he give more men for the war effort, or save them from almost certain flu? He finally decided to send the men overseas to fight.

The following are a few stories that I heard on the documentary that people told of their childhood experiences of the flu:

•  A boy and a couple of friends went out to play on some cedar boxes sitting on the sidewalk. They jumped off of them, climbed them, and had great fun. The boy’s mother told him not to play on the boxes, for there were people in them. Dead people. Soon after, the boy and his friends got ill with the flu.
   
•  A girl’s mother got sick with flu. The girl didn’t like it when everyone wouldn’t let her into her mother’s bed. So they let her sleep in a little bed in her mother’s bedroom. The girl’s mother didn’t like to see her daughter unhappy, and let her sleep with her. The girl got sick also, and was glad to be ill along with her mother, until it got really bad.
   
• One girl’s doctor told her mother not to feed her, because it was just wasting food. She would die anyway.

Since there was no treatment for the flu, people went to old folk remedies. They ate sugar cubes dipped in turpentine and kerosene, and mixed up their own medicines. Nothing seemed to work.

By December of 1918, the worst of the flu was over. An estimated 675,000 people in the U.S. died during the Flu of 1918, ten times as many as World War I had claimed. People built up immunity to the Spanish Flu. The flu ran out of steam, and slowly but steadily went away. The war had been over for a little while, and now the nation was trying to get back to normal. It was time to forget the devastating effects of the flu. For some reason though, the Flu of 1918 is not a very historic pandemic that many people know about.

I’ll leave you with a jump rope chant that girls used to recite during the pandemic.

I had a little bird,
His name was Enza,
I opened up the window,
And in-flu-Enza

©03/08/09