Posted on 02/08/2018 10:12:28 PM PST by nickcarraway
So it’s the Hispanic Flu?
I’ve been reading a book about this,since my great-grandmother died in this epidemic when she was 30.
http://www.umass.edu/umpress/title/influenza-and-inequality
It is probably considered a racist disease, because it might be the White Hispanic Flu. 😆
It’s the West Kansas Flu.
Western Kansas if pretty dry and sparsely populated.
How can there be much flu out there?
My mother came from her dad’s second family. His first one all died except for one daughter.
I’m not sure, but that’s where experts on the 1918 Flu seem to think that it began. There may well have been an Army training camp in western Kansas, this was during our participation in World War One- and Army camps are where that flu hit early and particularly hard.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC340389/
“...So if the contemporary observers were correct, if American troops carried the virus to Europe, where in the United States did it begin?
Both contemporary epidemiological studies and lay histories of the pandemic have identified the first known outbreak of epidemic influenza as occurring at Camp Funston, now Ft. Riley, in Kansas. But there was one place where a previously unknown – and remarkable – epidemic of influenza occurred.
Haskell County, Kansas, lay three hundred miles to the west of Funston. There the smell of manure meant civilization. People raised grains, poultry, cattle, and hogs. Sod-houses were so common that even one of the county’s few post offices was located in a dug-out sod home. In 1918 the population was just 1,720, spread over 578 square miles. But primitive and raw as life could be there, science had penetrated the county in the form of Dr. Loring Miner. Enamored of ancient Greece – he periodically reread the classics in Greek – he epitomized William Welch’s comment that “the results [of medical education] were better than the system.” His son was also a doctor, trained in fully scientific ways, serving in the Navy in Boston.
In late January and early February 1918 Miner was suddenly faced with an epidemic of influenza, but an influenza unlike any he had ever seen before. Soon dozens of his patients – the strongest, the healthiest, the most robust people in the county – were being struck down as suddenly as if they had been shot. Then one patient progressed to pneumonia. Then another. And they began to die. The local paper Santa Fe Monitor, apparently worried about hurting morale in wartime, initially said little about the deaths but on inside pages in February reported, “Mrs. Eva Van Alstine is sick with pneumonia. Her little son Roy is now able to get up... Ralph Lindeman is still quite sick... Goldie Wolgehagen is working at the Beeman store during her sister Eva’s sickness... Homer Moody has been reported quite sick... Mertin, the young son of Ernest Elliot, is sick with pneumonia... Pete Hesser’s children are recovering nicely... Ralph McConnell has been quite sick this week (Santa Fe Monitor, February 14th, 1918).”
The epidemic got worse. Then, as abruptly as it came, it disappeared. Men and women returned to work. Children returned to school. And the war regained its hold on people’s thoughts....”
It was Ft. Riley back then too. Camp Funston was a training facility built on the grounds of Ft. Riley.
My Grandma Edith died in it leaving my Mom bereft, and her brother and three other older sisters motherlesss. Grandpa Charles could not handle raising the five alone, so Mom, then three, and Uncle Earl the youngest were placed by Social Services as foster children, and eventually adopted by their new caretakers.
Even in such circumstances, God works in wondrous ways. Mom was taken from her birth situation and placed with a godly, caring new Mom and Dad, and received the best kind of affection and pious Methodist upbringing that Grandpa Charles would not have offered her.
Mom finished high School with high grades, and was sent to a fine Wesleyan College. There she met and influenced my Dad, who entered the Methodist ministry, receiving a B. A. and subsequently B. Div. in three years of seminary.
Ultimately, when she was widowed, my adoptive kindly Grandma came to live with us, profoundly impacting my own formative years.
That is, on account of the pervasive "Spanish" flu, God used it to organize my Mom's life, gave her an outstanding, faithful, fine husband, and with him, me. But also because of it, my maternal heritage was never a mystery. Grandpa Charles and his second wife Clara never forgot Mom or me, either, through the following years.
I exist because of the Spanish flu, for which I am eternally grateful, as I am of God's continuing and protecting watch care over me.
That goddamsonofabitch Richard Gunderman killed 5% of the world's population; who cares what university he graduated from?
Missing a </sarc> tag?
Western Kansas if pretty dry and sparsely populated.
How can there be much flu out there?
—
If you were a flu, what better place to hide than a sparsely populated area?
A flea and a fly in a flue
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, “let us flee!”
“Let us fly!” said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.
Ogden Nash
Yup... Pig farmers from the United States, but in the end who cares? They called it the Spanish Flu and it will now be known as the Spanish Flu forever.
Was there a military base there?
I recommend the book “Flu” by Gina Kolata for anyone who wants to learn more. The descriptions of entire communities wiped out and people who wake up feeling fine and drop dead walking to work is chilling. There is also the fascinating (and scary) story of researchers trying to recover the flu strain for study by digging up victims frozen in permafrost.
Thanks I will look into that.
There is also a very good documentary that’s available on YouTube.
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