A SILENT KILLER THAT CLAIMED 80 MILLION IN JUST 18 MONTHS
How the Spanish Flu brought devastation around the globe
WHAT s pri ngs to mind when you visualise t he word ‘ plague’? Do you think of the bubonic plague’s devastation in the 14th century, killing up to 20million. Or perhaps the typhus epidemic that ravaged Europe during the 30 Years War i n the 1600s, claiming over 10million lives.
Going even further back to 541 AD, you might even recall the Plague of Justinian from your history class, a bacteria spread by infected rats and resulting in the extermination of 40 million people across the Middle East and Asia. All of them terrifyingly lethal periods when the very f uture of humanity was threatened. Bad as these pandemics were, however, they paled in comparison to the global killing machine infamously known as ‘the Spanish Flu’.
First recorded 100 years ago this month, it lasted less than two years and yet caused an estimated 80million deaths across the globe – representing 5% of the world’s population at the time. Ireland was not spared in the devastation, as the condition infected up to 800,000 people here – eventually causing the deaths of up to 25,000 people. In comparison, 49,000 Irish soldiers are believed to have died in to the Great War of 1914-18.
THEcondition was immediately labelled the Spanish Flu due to the fact that Spain was the first to publish news reports of the condition in early July 1918. Other European countries where wartime censorship then prevailed were restricted from reporting the flu’s presence due to fears it might demoralise the war effort.
Even today, a century on, its medical origins remain unclear, but it was generally thought to be the result of mass movements of soldiers and refugees due to the conflict, combined with the atrocious health conditions endured in the trenches, and poorly sanitised field hospitals.
Symptoms were first recorded in the French town of Etaples in early 1918, and soon afterward at army depots in Aldershot, in the UK, and Kansas City, in the US – all pointing to general military movement and demobbing as factors of its cause. Yet, even at the height of its ferocious attack on humanity, medical science was utterly foxed at identifying its cause, and it would be the mid1930s before the Spanish Flu was correctly proven to be a virus rather than a bacteria.
Disease historian and Irish Research Council Fellow at May- nooth University Ida Milne’s recently published book, Stacking The Coffins: Influenza, War and Revolution In Ireland 1918-19, tracks the devastation of the pandemic across Ireland through the oral histories of survivors, official records and medical journals.
‘We now know this was the largest influenza pandemic the world has ever known, infecting some- where between one fifth and half of the world’s then population of two billion,’ she explains.
‘It disrupted Irish society and politics. Stilling cities and towns as it passed through, it closed schools, courts and l i braries, quelled trade, crammed hospitals, and stretched medical doctors to their limit as they treated hundreds of patients each day.’
Indeed while the official death toll was listed as 20,057, she suggests the number may have been much higher: ‘Doctors who were obliged to certify the deaths were so busy treating the living it is likely, as the Local Government Board suggested, that the actual toll was higher. Many deaths went uncertified, or were attributed to bronchitis and other causes than influenza.’ The pandemic swept the country in three phases, all within an 18-month timeframe. Beginning in Ulster and reaching down as far as Dublin in July of 1918 – likely driven by the large concentrations of demobbed soldiers home from the war – it was followed by a more virulent attack in October, this time spreading further across the country.
The final and most sustained wave occurred from February until April the following year, a knockout blow that stretched practically the f ull breadth of the national compass. Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a GP and member of the Irish Citizen Army, called for returning soldiers to be quarantined, and their uniforms disinfected. ‘The front in Flanders is a factory of fever,’ she declared.
The pandemic silenced whole communities, filtering through every layer of society, from family life to economics and politics. Schools, libraries, concerts, courts and public buildings were closed, with all sporting events – including the All-Ireland finals – postponed or cancelled.
STREETSand towns were deserted as inhabitants remained inside, terrified of catching the condition. Milne describes how families ‘were flattened, incapable of doing anything except struggling to live; presenting a pathetic tableau to would-be rescuers who broke down doors to find entire families either dead or beyond help, sometimes all dying in the one bed.’
Undertakers across the country were overwhelmed, some small rural towns having over 20 funerals a day. In the Dublin Union Hospital, now St James’s, coffins were stacked 18 high in the mortuary, while across the city every ward in the Mater Hospital was converted into a flu centre. At Glasnevin Cemetery, funerals queued up outside the gates with more than 50 burials a day.
‘People who dealt with the public were the ones most likely to die,’ says Dr Milne. ‘It claimed the lives of doctors, nurses, priests, ambulance workers, postmen, bank clerks and shop workers.’
Dublin’s overcrowded tenements, where one-third of the city’s population lived, were ravaged, with entire families found dead, sometimes all perishing in the same bed.
To make matters worse, and ratchet up further the terror and hysteria, some bodies turned black as death approached – a grim reminder of the bubonic plague centuries earlier. One doctor noted ‘the terrible prostration and revolting grogginess that persisted for weeks, and sometimes even months.
‘Somehow, I was never satisfied that the illness was influenza. To me it was something much more terrible. It truly was a plague, a Black Death.’