Posted on 01/28/2018 9:29:30 AM PST by beaversmom
Blue lips. Blackened skin. Blood leaking from noses and mouths. Coughing fits so intense they ripped muscles. Crippling headaches and body pains that felt like torture. These were the symptoms of a disease that was first recorded in Haskell County, Kansas, one hundred years ago this week, in January 1918. From Kansas the illness spread quickly: not only throughout the U.S. but across the world. Eventually (if misleadingly) it became known as Spanish flu. And while its effects on the body were awful, the mortality rate was truly terrifying.
During a pandemic that lasted two years from its outbreak in the U.S., between 50 million and 100 million people across the globe died—around three percent of the world’s population. Spanish flu killed more people than any pandemic disease before or since, including the sixth-century Plague of Justinian, the medieval Black Death, the AIDS epidemic or Ebola.
The First World War, which was ending just as the flu took hold, killed barely a third as many people with bullets and bombs as the H1N1 strain of influenza did with coughs and shivers.
History Recolored features the work of colorist Marina Amaral, bringing to life black and white photos with color she applies digitally.
Blue lips. Blackened skin. Blood leaking from noses and mouths. Coughing fits so intense they ripped muscles. Crippling headaches and body pains that felt like torture. These were the symptoms of a disease that was first recorded in Haskell County, Kansas, one hundred years ago this week, in January 1918. From Kansas the illness spread quickly: not only throughout the U.S. but across the world. Eventually (if misleadingly) it became known as Spanish flu. And while its effects on the body were awful, the mortality rate was truly terrifying.
During a pandemic that lasted two years from its outbreak in the U.S., between 50 million and 100 million people across the globe died—around three percent of the world’s population. Spanish flu killed more people than any pandemic disease before or since, including the sixth-century Plague of Justinian, the medieval Black Death, the AIDS epidemic or Ebola.
The First World War, which was ending just as the flu took hold, killed barely a third as many people with bullets and bombs as the H1N1 strain of influenza did with coughs and shivers.
The Photograph
This photograph, from the archives of Oakland Public Library in California, shows nurses of the American Red Cross preparing surgical dressings for use on flu patients during the winter of 1918-19. Colorizing the photograph reveals that they are wearing a variety of uniforms. The dark-veiled women standing to the top-right of the frame are wearing the blue headdresses that had been brought in for use by the Red Cross Supply Corps in regulations issued in 1917. Others, however, are still wearing uniforms dating to before these new rules were issued. Color paint-portraits of Red Cross nurses tell us that veils had previously been white. During the emergency conditions of the pandemic, presumably there were better things to worry about.
The virus had first appeared in Oakland in early October, and within a fortnight of its arrival thousands of people were sick. The city hospital was quickly overwhelmed, so the mayor ordered the recently opened civic auditorium (now the Kaiser Convention Center) to be converted into an overflow ward with 80 beds. All were quickly filled by seriously ill Oaklanders.
The image here was one of several taken during a visit to the auditorium by the renowned local newspaper photographer Edward A. ‘Doc’ Rogers. Doc was no stranger to calamity, having covered major Bay Area disasters including the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The nurses he photographed were volunteers working for the American Red Cross. The gauze across their mouths was a precious commodity, since literally every person in the city required it: citizens had been compelled by law to wear a face-mask in public, under pain of an $100 fine and 10 days in prison.
The aftermath
In Oakland, swift action by the city authorities to shut schools and churches and enforce public hygiene measures meant that the local flu epidemic was under control by February 1919. Nevertheless, 1,300 citizens had died, out of 675,000 American deaths in total: more than were killed during the entire Civil War. The pandemic, combined with mortality during the First World War, caused United States life expectancy to drop by 12 years.
Today flu can still be lethal – this season’s flu strain has been unusually deadly–but a tragedy on the scale of 1918 has, mercifully, not been repeated.
In those days, when people
CARED, illegal immigrants with incurable
diseases were NOT sent to every state
by Islamo-Obama-quartering using buses in secret
by the ++-installed pRes_ _ent and his political
foreign-run Agencies to bring back diseases
cured for 40 years or more before - and some
new ones, too.
Here in Hawaii, whole villages died. I talked to one person who remembers coming back to Hawaii after WWI (he was a merchant seaman), and he found that whole areas where he remembered communities were just abandoned. That’s why today you can find ruins of abandoned churches out in the middle of nowhere.
50 million may be more than any one of the waves of the Black Death, I’m no expert on the art of estimating the mortality totals in terms of raw numbers, but I’m pretty sure that several of the the Black Death waves, which stretched from China to Portugal in the least, took out a higher percentage of the world population.
Maybe it’s the 100 year flu. They can blame global warming.
My home village was deeply affected. Numerous small tombstones in the cemetery for infants who died of the flu, as well as many adults. It was truly worldwide.
My paternal grandmother died from the Spanish Flu.
A woman who does a blog on Long Beach, Cal history has a news article about the end of the war and the flu. Long Beach City flew a Gold Star Flag with the number 50 on it, to commemorate the city’s war dead. I think Something like 57 died in LB in November, 1918 alone.
Mortality rate was about 2 1/2 % for those infected
Ironically the disease killed mostly the young and healthy
by triggering a violent immune response which damaged the
lung causing them to fill with blood and fluids
Estimated 670,000 died in US from the Flu or Pneumonia
resulting from it
Current nasty flu making rounds is H3N@ (called Hong Kong flu from 1968 pandemic)
As did mine ... late October 1918. My father was five years old when he lost his mother.
I was doing some reading over the 1918 flu, and came to this one story that had occurred around the Baltimore area. Some guy came home in the late afternoon with a severe headache and aching pain...told the wife he was going to bed. Around sun-up, she tried to wake him, and he was dead. She didn’t want to alarm the two kids and just told them to go off to school. By mid-morning, she had a headache and bodyache. When the kids came home from school....she was dead.
If you read through the historical accounts, urban areas were the hardest hit. Rural areas were much less so.
It’s generally speculated that large numbers of people died and simply weren’t reported in the press, or noted dead in the 1920 Census.
Luke 21:10-11
Research on the cause of the Pandemic of 1918-22 revealed that the agent was not a bacteria but a “filterable virus”. The research on the causative agent of the influenza led to the discovery of DNA.
Glad you posted that. That is the key fact people need to know abou these superflus! They get healthy people not sick/old/young like normal flu.
I think rural seemed lower because of poor record keeping and contact. My maternal grandmother survived it while losing 3 family members. They were in the mountains on the VA/W.VA border.
Aside to that, I’d be curious as to how people alive now who survived it look/are. She turned 100 in December and she is in outlier good shape for that age.
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