I never got the influenza, though I am far from the strongest in my family.
That would be Pa, and then Brother Jim.
I recall that one day they was both sneezing and the next day Doc took them and Ma to the Consolidated School where they’d set up the hospital.
They took the sick folks to the gym where they had rows of cots set up.
When they got worse they’d take them upstairs to die in Mrs. Lee’s third-grade room.
The cafeteria was the morgue, long tables set out.
I doubt I’ll ever go back to that school.
The 1918 Spanish flu strain killed its victims with a swiftness never seen before. In the United States stories abounded of people waking up sick and dying on their way to work. The symptoms were gruesome: Sufferers would develop a fever and become short of breath. Lack of oxygen meant their faces appeared tinged with blue. Hemorrhages filled the lungs with blood and caused catastrophic vomiting and nosebleeds, with victims drowning in their own fluids. Unlike so many strains of influenza before it, Spanish flu attacked not only the very young and the very old, but also healthy adults between the ages of 20 and 40.
Sometimes the strongest fall first…a good reminder to never take these things too lightly.
Wow. What a great sad story.
I don’t blame you for not wanting to go to that school again.
Randy
That epidemic, which came as WWI was ending, killed more people than all the years of that war ever did. And, of course, back then there was almost nothing the medical community could do. Terrifying.
Thanks for that gruesome picture – having read the symptoms of the worst Covid-19 can do, I’m not feeling very cheerful.
A reminder that however bad things might be right now, they once were a whole lot worse.
No, I wouldn’t ever want to return to that school.
Whoa.
And then the last line.
I wouldn’t want to go back to that school either
Let’s hear it for home schooling. It’s not good what’s happening all over the world, feels like I’m living a Hollywood movie.