“We are living through a historic pandemic,” says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md.īut a hundred years’ worth of advances in virology, medical understanding and vaccine development has made a difference. Since 1918, we have faced many epidemics, but COVID-19 has been the first to rival the great flu in how it has changed everyone’s daily lives. NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HEALTH AND MEDICINE, OTIS HISTORICAL ARCHIVES ID: REEVE 002721 Philadelphia was one of the hardest hit U.S cities. This mortality chart shows the weekly accumulation of deaths above normal during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Crosby’s book was eventually reissued with the fitting title America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918.
One of the first major histories of the pandemic, by Alfred Crosby, didn’t arrive until 1976, the same year Starr published his reflections on serving in an influenza ward. The public memory of the 1918 pandemic, which lasted into 1919, faded quickly in the United States, with few historical accounts or memorials to victims in the aftermath. And ultimately, people who remember what happened and people who forget. But beyond those medical feats, the story of epidemics remains a story about people: people who become sick, people who die, people whose lives are upended, people who care for others. The century since has seen many vaccines and treatments become available to combat infectious diseases. There was the young woman, “flushed with fever,” whose large family kept vigil at her bedside, hoping for a recovery that never came.Īn estimated 50 million people worldwide died of influenza during the 1918 pandemic. There was Mike the piano mover, who in a frenzy left his bed and was about to leap from a window before medical staff grabbed him. Some who died in the makeshift hospital stuck with Starr. “This happened night after night.” In October, around the pinnacle of the pandemic, roughly 11,000 Philadelphians perished. “When I returned to duty at 4 p.m., I found few whom I had seen before,” Starr wrote. Patients, desperate for breath, became delirious and incontinent and would die within days.
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