Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History by Catharine Arnold

4 Stars

This is a chronological retracing of the Spanish flu progression 1917-1918. Depends heavily on witness and survivor stories from medical records to diaries. Arnold uses these accounts to give voice to it, to take it out of the medical jargon and relay the human effect. The pandemic swept up victims indiscriminately from the rich and famous: Gandhi, Lloyd George, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lillian Gish, who were all fortunate, to those who died without anyone to identify them listed in registries as Polish woman, girl.

In northern territories the frozen ground made burial impossible, so to keep them from predation they stacked them in cabins like corded wood, but '[s]ome corpses were wrapped in sheets and placed on rooftops, creating a vista of ghostly shrouds until they could be buried in the spring.'

'When their lungs collapsed, air was trapped beneath their skin. As we rolled the dead in winding sheets, their bodies crackled - an awful crackling noise which sounded like Rice Crispies [sic] when you pour milk over them.'

[S]ix-year-old John Delano [...] lived down the block from an undertaker, and he began to witness coffins piling up on the sidewalk outside the morgue. As the piles of the coffins rose, he and friends played on them, jumping from one to another: 'We thought - boy, this is great. It's like climbing the pyramids. Then one day I slipped and fell and broke my nose on one of the coffins. My mother was very upset. She said, didn't I realize there were people in those boxes? People who had died? I couldn't understand that. Why had all these people died?'

Egon Schiele's portrait of wife Edith as she lay dying.

He died a couple days after her.

[A] little boy who, feeling the pinch of hunger, went to ask the butcher for some meat. He then asked the butcher how to cook it. The butcher asked why his mother wouldn't be cooking it. The little boy replied that his parents had been asleep in bed for two days. The butcher accompanied the lad home to find that they were asleep permanently.

As might be expected, this had a profound effect on witnesses and survivors. Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel includes a vivid description of his brother's death. Katherine Anne Porter's short story Pale Horse, Pale Rider was inspired by her own near miss. 

Fast and deadly, the round of flu that swept through the autumn of 1918 killed people within the day of falling ill. I spent most of the time that I was reading imagining the consequences in today's numbers, but the real 1918 numbers were frightful enough; Persia was estimated to have lost 10% of its population. 

10%. TEN PERCENT. That's decimation.

If that were the US today that would 32.7 MILLION people.

This is powerful and terrifying to read. I thought Mozart's Requiem the perfect accompaniment, if morbid considering he died while writing it. If you want the human experience, then this is a good selection.