Rumors spread that dogs carried influenza. The police began killing all dogs on the street. And people began killing their own dogs, dogs they loved, and if they had not the heart to kill them themselves, they gave them to the police to be killed. “At this death rate from causes other than natural,” reported the Gazette, “Phoenix will soon be dogless.”
A cop, a big burly guy . . . came up to the house and nailed a big white sign and on the sign it said influenza in red letters. And they nailed it to the door.” A sign made a family even more isolated.
Parsons’s territory bordered on Alabama and there a traveling salesman from Philadelphia named H. M. Thomas was arrested on suspicion of being a German agent and spreading influenza—death. Thomas was released, but on October 17, the day after influenza had killed 759 people in Philadelphia, his body was found in a hotel room with his wrists cut—and his throat slit. Police ruled it suicide.
Still others fomented terror, believing that blaming the enemy—Germany—could help the war effort, or perhaps actually believing that Germany was responsible. Doane himself charged that “German agents . . . from submarines” brought influenza to the United States. “The Germans have started epidemics in Europe, and there is no reason why they should be particularly gentle to America.”
But a Public Health Service warning to avoid crowds came too late to do much good, and the only advice of any real use remained the same: that those who felt sick should go to bed immediately and stay there several days after all symptoms disappeared. Everything else in Blue’s circulars was so general as to be pointless. Yet all over the country, newspapers printed again and again: “Remember ...
Newspapers reported on the disease with the same mixture of truth and half-truth, truth and distortion, truth and lies with which they reported everything else. And no national official ever publicly acknowledged the danger of influenza. As terrifying as the disease was, the press made it more so. They terrified by making little of it, for what officials and the press said bore no relationship ...
The government had had a plan to identify the best of those remaining. As part of the mobilization of the entire nation, in January 1918 the Council of National Defense had created the “Volunteer Medical Service.” This service tried to enlist every doctor in the United States, but it particularly wanted to track the younger physicians who were women or had a physical disability—in other word...
People were learning, and doctors were advising, and newspapers were warning, that even when a patient seemed to recover, seemed to feel fine, normal, well enough to go back to work, still that patient should continue to rest, continue to stay in bed. Or else that patient was risking his or her life.
Nothing could have stopped the sweep of influenza through either the United States or the rest of the world—but ruthless intervention and quarantines might have interrupted its progress and created occasional firebreaks. Action as ruthless as that taken in 2003 to contain the outbreak of a new disease called severe acute respiratory disorder, SARS, could well have had effect.* Influenza could ...
Now Redden and a colleague drew blood from those who had survived an influenza attack, extracted the serum, and injected it into thirty-six pneumonia patients in a row, beginning October 1. This was not a scientific experiment with controls, and in a scientific sense the results proved nothing. But by the time they reported the results in the October 19 JAMA, thirty patients had recovered, five...
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