Very, Very, Very Dreadful

by Albert Marrin

  6. M. Webster Brown, “Historical Medicine: Early Epidemics of Influenza in America,” Medical Journal and Record, 1932, 449–451; Michael Greger, Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching, www.birdflubook.org/​a.php?id=2; C. W. Potter, “A History of Influenza,” Journal of Applied Microbiology, 91, no. 4 (October 2001), 575.

  7. Niall Johnson and Juergen Muller, “Updating the Accounts: Global Mortality of the 1918–1920 ‘Spanish’ Influenza Pandemic,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 76 (2002), 105–115; Michael T. Osterholm, “Preparing for the Next Pandemic,” Foreign Affairs, July–August 2005, 26; Gina Bari Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 7.

  8. Carol R. Byerly, Fever of War: The Influenza Epidemic in the U.S. Army During World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 71–72.

  9. Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918—World War I and Its Violent Climax (New York: Random House, 2004), 379; Neil Hanson, Unknown Soldiers: The Story of the Missing of the First World War (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 224–225; UNAIDS, “Fact Sheet,” www.unaids.org/​en/​resources/​campaigns/​2014/​2014gapreport/​factsheet.

  10. “U.S. Life Expectancy, 1900–2000,” www.mikalac.com/​tech/​sta/​long.htm#1910; Alfred W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (1976; repr., New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 207; Kolata, Flu, 7; Byerly, Fever of War, 89; David Thompson, “The Influenza Pandemic’s Impact on the U.S. Military in World War I,” Roads to the Great War (blog), August 29, 2013, roadstothegreatwar-ww1-blogspot.com/​2013/​08/​the-influenza-pandemics-impact-on-us.html.

  I: THE PITILESS WAR

  1. Arno Karlen, Man and Microbes: Disease and Plagues in History and Modern Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 21–23.

  2. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1999), 95, 97; Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover, May 1987.

  3. Karlen, Man and Microbes, 41.

  4. Ibid., 39, 52, 57.

  5. Exodus 9:14, 9:9.

  6. “Thucydides on the Plague,” Livius, www.livius.org/​pb-pem/​peloponnesian_war/​war_ t05.html.

  7. Linda Gigante, “Death and Disease in Ancient Rome,” www.innominatesociety.com/​Articles/​Death%20and%20Disease%20in%20Ancient%20Rome.htm; Alison Morton, “The Antonine Plague—the Germs That Killed an Empire,” Alison Morton (personal website), alison-morton.com/​2011/​11/​10/​the-antonine-plague-the-germs-that-killed-an-empire.

  8. Alexandre Yersin (1863–1943), a French physician, discovered the bacterium that causes bubonic plague in 1894. In 1908, researchers proved that rat fleas spread the disease.

  9. Procopius, History of the Wars, Internet Medieval Sourcebook, “Procopius: The Plague, 542,” Fordham University, legacy.fordham.edu/​halsall/​source/​542procopius-plague.asp.

  10. John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 17.

  11. Norman F. Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made (New York: Free Press, 2001), 6.

  12. Kelly, The Great Mortality, 27; Agnolo di Tura, “The Plague in Siena: An Italian Chronicle,” in Perry M. Rogers, Aspects of Western Civilization (New York: Prentice Hall, 2000), 353–365, posted at Plague Readings, www.u.arizona.edu/​~afutrell/​w%20civ%2002/​plaguereadings.html.

  13. Watson Nicholson, The Historical Sources of Defoe’s “Journal of the Plague Year,” Illustrated by Extracts from the Original Documents (1919; repr., Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1966).

  14. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722; repr., Thorndike, ME: G. K. Hall, 2000), 30, 78, 98, 123. There are many editions of this classic English work.

  15. Ibid., 49, 52, 53, 118–119.

  16. Greg Botelho, “Child Who Visited Yosemite National Park Comes Down with the Plague,” CNN, August 7, 2015, www.cnn.com/​2015/​08/06/​health/​yosemite-plague-child/​index.html; “Bubonic Plague Diagnosed in Teton County, Yellowstone Visitor,” Wyoming Department of Health, www.health.wyo.gov/​news/​aspx?NewsID=212.

  17. “Anthony van Leeuwenhoek,” University of California Museum of Paleontology, www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/​history/​leeuwenhoek.html.

  18. Fred R. van Hartesveldt, “The Doctors and the ‘Flu’: The British Medical Profession’s Response to the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19,” International Social Sciences Review, 85, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 2010), 29.

  19. For Jenner’s own writings, see Edward Jenner, Vaccination Against Smallpox (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996). See also Albert Marrin, Dr. Jenner and the Speckled Monster: The Search for the Smallpox Vaccine (New York: Dutton Children’s Books, 2002).

  20. Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: Norton, 1997), 365. This is the best general history of medicine from ancient times to the present day.

  21. Ibid., 367.

  22. William W. Keen, “Military Surgery in 1861 and 1918,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 80 (November 1918), 14, 15.

  23. Nancy Tomes, “The Making of a Germ Panic, Then and Now,” American Journal of Public Health, 90, no. 2 (February 2002), 192–194.

  24. Andrew D. White, “Theological Opposition to Inoculation, Vaccination, and the Use of Anaesthetics,” in A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (New York: D. Appleton, 1896), Bob Kobres (personal website), abob.libs.uga.edu/​bobk/​whitem10.html. See also “Utopian Surgery: Early Arguments Against Anesthesia in Surgery, Dentistry and Childbirth,” Hedonistic Imperative, hedweb.com.anesthesia/​index.html.

  25. Clyde F. Barker, “Thomas Eakins and His Medical Clinics,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 153, no. 1 (March 2009), 9, 20.

  26. Ibid., 16, 23.

  27. Kolata, Flu, 258.

  28. Sandra M. Tomkins, “The Failure of Expertise: Public Health Policy in Britain During the 1918–19 Influenza Epidemic,” Social History of Medicine, 5, no. 3 (1992), 438.

  29. Byerly, Fever of War, 24, 37; Bristow, “ ‘It’s as Bad as Anything Can Be,’ ” 136; John S. Billings, Progress of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century, in The Smithsonian Report for 1900 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 643.

  II: DISEASES OF WAR

  1. Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2014), 29, 48; Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 99.

  2. German writer Kurt Tucholsky, quoted in “First World War: 15 Legacies Still with Us Today,” The Guardian, January 15, 2014, www.theguardian.com/​world/​2014/​jan/​15/​firstworldwar.

  3. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic, 17; Emmanuel Bourcier, “The Gas Attack,” Current History, September 1916, jfredmacdonald.com/​worldwarone1914-1918/​battles-18gas-attack.html.

  4. Juliet Nicolson, The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age (New York: Grove Press, 2009), 21; Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 148.

  5. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 146–147.

  6. Keen, “Military Surgery in 1861 and 1918,” 16.

  7. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 152, 153.

  8. Ibid., 146, 147.

  9. Ibid., 149; Hanson, Unknown Soldiers, 33.

  10. Hanson, Unknown Soldiers, 40; “Trench Rats,” Spartacus Educational, spartacus-educational.com/​FWWrats.htm.

  11. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 150–151.

  12. Johnathon E. Briggs, “Wrights Saw Airplanes as Tools of Peace,” Baltimore Sun, April 20, 2003, www.baltimoresun.com/​news/​bal-wrights05-story.html.

  13. Lyn Macdonald, Somme (London: Michael Joseph, 1983), 209; Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 153.
>
  14. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 152; Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 2002), 31, 32.

  15. Nicolson, The Great Silence, 64.

  16. Jenkins, The Great and Holy War, 48–49.

  17. Bourcier, “The Gas Attack.”

  18. Jennifer D. Keene, “Americans at War: Assessing the Significance of American Participation in the Great War,” in New Zealand’s Great War, ed. John Crawford and I. C. McGibbon, 108–122 (Auckland, New Zealand: Exisle Publishing, 2007), 119–120, www.chapman.edu/​our-faculty/​files/​publications/​keene-jennifer/​Americans%20at%20War.pdf.

  19. www.nps.gov/vafo. In the Mexican War (1846–1848), seven American soldiers died of disease for each one killed by the enemy.

  20. Russ Hatter, “Disease Killed More Soldiers Than Combat,” Civil War RX (blog), September 25, 2011, www.civilwarrx.blogspot.com/​2015/​08/​disease-killed-more-soldiers-than-combat.html; Matthew R. Smallman-Raynor and Andrew D. Cliff, “Impact of Infectious Diseases on War,” Infectious Disease Clinics of North America, 18 (2004), 354; James I. Robertson Jr., Soldiers Blue and Gray (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), 145–169.

  21. Byerly, Fever of War, 39.

  22. Victor C. Vaughan, A Doctor’s Memories (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1926), 198–199.

  23. Ibid., 198.

  24. Byerly, Fever of War, 46, 47.

  25. Ibid., 9.

  26. William Osler, The Evolution of Modern Medicine: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Yale University on the Silliman Foundation, in April, 1913 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1921), www.gutenberg.org/​files/​1566/​1566-h/​1566-h.htm.

  27. Dorothy H. Crawford, The Invisible Enemy: A Natural History of Viruses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 8.

  28. Quoted in Cristina Luiggi, “Same Poop, Different Gut,” The Scientist, November 3, 2010, www.the-scientist.com/​?articles.view/​articleNo/​29352/​title/​Same-poop-different-gut/.

  29. Crawford, The Invisible Enemy, 7–8.

  30. Ibid., 6.

  31. “Viruses,” Encyclopedia of Life, www.eol.org; Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 42.

  32. Barry, The Great Influenza, 100.

  33. Pettit and Bailie, A Cruel Wind, 33.

  34. Barry, The Great Influenza, 104.

  35. Lynette Iezzoni, Influenza 1918: The Worst Epidemic in American History (New York: TV Books, 1999), 111.

  36. Nicolson, The Great Silence, 26–27; Mark Honigsbaum, Living with Enza: The Forgotten Story of Britain and the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918 (London: Macmillan, 2009), 36.

  37. William Mulligan, The Great War for Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 251.

  38. Pete Davies, Catching Cold: The Hunt for a Killer Virus (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 53–54, 56.

  39. Barry, The Great Influenza, 169–171.

  40. Honigsbaum, Living with Enza, 18.

  41. Ibid., 29–30.

  42. Davies, Catching Cold, 108; Nicolas Mignon, “The ‘Spanish’ Flu Hits Belgium,” RTBF, www.rtbf.be/​ww1/​topics/​detail_the-spanish-flu-hits-belgium-1918-1919?id=8358615.

  43. “Spanish Influenza Is Raging in the German Army,” New York Times, June 27, 1918.

  44. Erich von Ludendorff, Ludendorff’s Own Story, August 1914–November 1918: The Great War from the Siege of Liège to the Signing of the Armistice as Viewed from the Grand Headquarters of the German Army, 2 vols. in one (1919; repr., Cranbury, NJ: Scholars Bookshelf, 2006), vol. 2; Alexander Watson, Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914–1918 (New York: Penguin Books, 2015), 528.

  45. Pettit and Bailie, A Cruel Wind, 72.

  46. Antonio Trilla, “The 1918 ‘Spanish Flu’ in Spain,” Clinical Infectious Diseases, 47, no. 5 (2008), 668–673, cid.oxfordjournals.org/​content/​47/​5/668.full.pdf+html.

  47. Barry, The Great Influenza, 172.

  48. Krystal Rose, “Called to Death: A Case Study on the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in Coles County, Illinois,” Historia, 17 (2008), www.eiu.edu/​historia/​Historia2008Rose.pdf.

  49. Herbert French, “The Clinical Features of the Influenza Epidemic of 1918–19,” in Ministry of Health of Great Britain, Report on the Pandemic of Influenza, 1918–19 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1920), 68.

  50. Barry, The Great Influenza, 174.

  III: PUNY MAN: DROWNING IN THE SECOND WAVE

  1. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic, 39.

  2. Ibid., 40.

  3. Pettit and Bailie, A Cruel Wind, 85–86.

  4. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic, 4.

  5. John N. Bombardt Jr. and Heidi E. Brown, Potential Influenza Effects on Military Populations, IDA Paper P-3786 (Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analyses, December 2003), 12; Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic, 5; Honigsbaum, Living with Enza, 72; Byerly, Fever of War, 74–75.

  6. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic, 8; Davies, Catching Cold, 62.

  7. David S. Fedson, “Was Bacterial Pneumonia the Predominant Cause of Death in the 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic?,” Journal of Infectious Diseases, 199, no. 9 (2009), 1408–1409, jid.oxfordjournals.org/​content/​199/​9/1408.full.

  8. Roy Grist, “Flu Epidemic of 1918,” Digital History, www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/​disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=1112.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Vaughan, A Doctor’s Memories, 199.

  11. Kolata, Flu, 16.

  12. Simon Flexner and James Thomas Flexner, William Henry Welch and the Heroic Age of American Medicine (New York: Viking Press, 1941), 376; Honigsbaum, Living with Enza, 72.

  13. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Pandemic Influenza—Past, Present, Future: Communicating Today Based on the Lessons from the 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic; Workshop Proceedings, October 17, 2006, www.flu.gov/​pandemic/​workshop.pdf; Flexner and Flexner, William Henry Welch, 376–377.

  14. Pettit and Bailie, A Cruel Wind, 172; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Pandemic Influenza, 5; Iezzoni, Influenza 1918, 120–121.

  15. Barry, The Great Influenza, 239; Kolata, Flu, 5.

  16. Byerly, “The U.S. Military and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919.”

  17. Rachel Wedeking, “Oral History with Ms. Josie Mabel Brown” (Washington, DC: Office of Medical History, Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, 1986), www.med.navy.mil/​.bumed/​nmhistory/​Oral%20Histories2/​BROWN%20Josie%20%Mabel.pdf.

  18. Ibid.; Ron Grossman, “1918 Influenza Epidemic Struck Hard, Fast,” Chicago Tribune, October 18, 2014, www.chicagotribune.com/​news/​ct-epidemic-scare-flashback-1019-2-20141018-story.html.

  19. Peter C. Wever and Leo van Bergen, “Death from 1918 Pandemic Influenza During the First World War: A Perspective from Personal and Anecdotal Evidence,” Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses, 8, no. 5 (September 2014), 536–546.

  20. Johnson and Mueller, “Updating the Accounts,” 111; Barry, The Great Influenza, 361.

  21. Barry, The Great Influenza, 363; Johnson and Mueller, “Updating the Accounts,” 111.

  22. Larry Smith, “A Hurricane Across the Green Fields of Life: How the 1918 Flu Affected the Caribbean,” Bahama Pundit, October 26, 2005, www.bahamapundit.com/​2005/​10/​how_the_1918_fl_1.html; David Killingray, “The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919 in the British Caribbean,” Social History of Medicine, 7, no. 1 (April 1994), 59–87, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/​pubmed/​11639296.

  23. Smith, “A Hurricane Across the Green Fields of Life”; Killingray, “The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919 in the British Caribbean.”

  24. Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1986), 650, 652; Richard Collier, The Plague of the Spanish Lady: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919 (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 83; John Toland, No Man’s Land: 1918, the Last Year of the Great War (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 299.

  25. Pa
tricia Marsh, “ ‘Mysterious Malady Spreading’: Press Coverage of the 1918–19 Influenza Pandemic in Ireland,” Quest Proceedings of the QUB AHSS Conference June 2008, 6 (Autumn 2008), 169, 171, www.qub.ac/uk/quest.

  26. Johnson and Mueller, “Updating the Accounts,” 111, 113; Toland, No Man’s Land, 498–499; Trilla, “The 1918 ‘Spanish Flu’ in Spain”; img.medscape.com/​article/​703/​354/​703354-tab1.jpg.

  27. Howard Phillips, “Influenza Pandemic,” International Encyclopedia of the First World War, encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/​article/​influenza_pandemic.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Barry, The Great Influenza, 363; Killingray, “The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919 in the British Caribbean,” 34.

  30. Barry, The Great Influenza, 363; Johnson and Mueller, “Updating the Accounts,” 110.

  31. Killingray, “The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919 in the British Caribbean,” 77; Honigsbaum, Living with Enza, 146.

  32. Howard Phillips, “Influenza Pandemic (Africa),” International Encyclopedia of the First World War, encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/​article/​influenza_pandemic_africa; Johnson and Mueller, “Updating the Accounts,” 110.

  33. Phillips, “Influenza Pandemic (Africa)”; Johnson and Mueller, “Updating the Accounts,” 110.

  34. Howard Phillips, “Why Did It Happen? Religious Explanations of the ‘Spanish’ Flu Epidemic in South Africa,” Historically Speaking, 9, no. 7 (September–October 2008), 34.

  35. Phillips, “Influenza Pandemic.”

  36. Ibid.

  37. Bhagavad Gita, chapter 11, verses 31–33.

  38. A. A. Hoehling, The Great Epidemic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), 108.

  39. Ibid., 109; Johnson and Mueller, “Updating the Accounts,” 112.

  40. Johnson and Mueller, “Updating the Accounts,” 112.

  41. Ibid.; Barry, The Great Influenza, 333.

  42. Johnson and Mueller, “Updating the Accounts,” 114; Hoehling, The Great Epidemic, 109–110; Barry, The Great Influenza, 364.

  43. Phillips, “Influenza Pandemic.”