“So they thought it really worked.”

From Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It by Gina Kolata.  Page 22.  Ignorance, fear, courage, anecdote, blind action with reason or evidence.  1918 looks like 2020.  Except that we were lucky in 2020.  Covid-19 was not as infectious or lethal as Spanish flu.  

Buffalo Bill Cody lost his daughter-in-law and grandson. Writer Mary McCarthy was orphaned and sent to live with her uncle.

In France, John McCrae, a Canadian doctor assigned to the Medical Corps, had written the most famous poem about World War I, “In Flanders Fields.” It is a paean to soldiers who died in battle: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow, between the crosses, row on row.” McCrae himself died in the war, but not in battle. He was felled by pneumonia in 1918—which leading virologists say almost certainly was caused by influenza.

A doctor at the University of Missouri, D. G. Stine, wrote that from September 26 until December 6, 1918, 1,020 students got the flu. “I saw one patient die within 18 hours of this disease and 12 hours after being put to bed. I have seen a number of others menaced with death during the first 48 hours of the disease. The statement that influenza is uncomplicated is, I believe, erroneous,” he wrote.

At Camp Sherman in Ohio, 13,161 men—about 40 percent of those at the camp—got the flu between September 27 and October 13, 1918. Of them, 1,101 died.

Army doctors tried every measure to stem the epidemic. They inoculated troops with vaccines made from body secretions taken from flu patients or from bacteria that they thought caused the disease. They made the men spray their throats each day and gargle with antiseptics or alcohol. They hung sheets between beds, and at one camp they even hung sheets in the centers of tables at mess halls. At Walter Reed Hospital, soldiers chewed tobacco each day, believing that it would ward off the flu.

Public health departments gave out gauze masks for people to wear in public. A New York doctor and collector of historical photographs, Dr. Stanley B. Burns, has a photograph in his archive of a minor league baseball game being played during the epidemic. It is a surreal image: The pitcher, the batter, every player, and every member of the crowd are wearing gauze masks.

In Tucson, Arizona, the board of health issued a ruling that “no person shall appear in any street, park, or place where any business is transacted, or in any other public place within the city of Tucson, without wearing a mask consisting of at least four thicknesses of butter cloth or at least seven thicknesses of ordinary gauze, covering both the nose and the mouth.”

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, where schools were closed and movie theaters darkened, the local newspaper noted: “the ghost of fear walked everywhere, causing many a family circle to reunite because of the different members having nothing else to do but stay home.”

Doctors gave out elixirs and vaccinated people against the flu, but to no avail. Crosby wondered about those flu vaccines. What was in them when no one knew what was causing the flu? He interviewed a doctor who had helped produce flu vaccines in 1918. The doctor, Crosby said, told him that the vaccines were just a soup made of blood and mucus of flu patients that had been filtered to get rid of large cells and debris. When they injected it into people’s arms their arms became horribly sore. “So they thought it really worked.”

Anecdotes spread. There was the story of four women who played bridge together one night. The next day, three were dead from the flu. There were tales of people who set off for work and died of influenza hours later.