The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918 / An Account of Its Ravages in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, and the Efforts Made to Combat and Subdue It

by Oscar Jewell Harvey

It certainly was a disconcerting fact that, at the very time when vast numbers of the people in widely-distributed localities had organized themselves, through the Red Cross and other well-known and efficient mediums, to fight disease and prevent suffering and death, we should be smitten with a visitation which caused more casualties and deaths among the peaceful citizens in the homeland than the deadly missiles and poisonous gases of the enemy effected among the American Expeditionary Forces overseas in the great World War.

From September 9 to November 9, according to reports received by the Federal Census Bureau from forty-six large cities in the United States having a combined population of 23,000,000 souls, there was a total of 82,306 deaths attributed to the scourge. In a similar period of time, in the same communities, the normal number of deaths dues to influenza and pneumonia would have been about 4,000.

In the latter part of September 85,000 cases in Massachusetts alone were reported; and by the first week in October the disease was prevalent in nearly all sections of the United States—twenty-three States, from Massachusetts in the East to California in the West, and from Florida in the South-east to Washington in the North-west, were experiencing the mysterious malady. More than 14,000 cases in the military camps of the country were reported to the office of the Surgeon General of the Army within one period of twenty-four hours.

Up to January 4, 1919, according to the Census Bureau, the mortality due to the fatal disease was 115,258 in forty-six cities of the United States containing one-fifth of the population of the country; while, according to statistics submitted to the Actuarial Society of America in July, 1919, 450,000 deaths occurred in the United States in the Autumn and early Winter of 1918 due to this pandemic disease—which wrought its greatest havoc among infants and persons in adult working life. The mortality of males was greater than that of females, while the highest mortality caused by the disease affected persons of the wage-earning class—especially those situated in the lowest economic range.

The origin or source of the disease was unknown. Some experts looked upon it as simply a variety of a well-known disease prevalent, with occasional outbreaks of violence, for hundreds of years. Others attempted to identify it with a form of pneumonic plague that has raged in parts of China for a number of years past—China and its neighboring lands in Asia forming a vast storehouse of infection from which great epidemics have swept in waves across and around the globe.

It is an historic fact that, in the early part of 1917 about 200,000 coolies, collected from the northern part of China (where the pneumonic plague had raged for six or seven years), were sent to France as laborers, and with them went the germs of the pneumonic plague. Many of these coolies were captured by the Germans in the Spring of 1918—hence the outbreak of the plague, at that time, in the German army, where it is said to have been very serious in its deadly character.

There were some writers of the press who declared that the disease had been brought into this country in German submarine boats; but when it was realized that, like a scourge of the Middle Ages, it was sweeping through Europe—no part of which, civilized or barbarian, was exempt—it was called by many experts a by-product of the World War.

The manner of the pandemic’s appearance in different countries indicated that the germs of the disease had been conveyed thither by the currents of the air. Therefore the theory was broached, that the poison gases, with which many sectors of the fighting area in Europe and Asia were drenched, were carried by the winds in every direction, causing the outbreak of the pandemic in England, Germany, France, Spain, Australia, Africa and Asia, as well as in North America and some of the South American countries.

The disease took its deadly toll even in lonely Labrador, in the “silent North” of the Western Hemisphere, where ice-floes from farther north fill every harbor of the rock-bound coast; where giant icebergs, miles in length, mountains in height and acres in extent bar the paths of ships and steamers. “A land where railroads are unknown, where streets are never laid nor roads built to connect one settlement with another; a country where horses and cows are less known than are the rhinoceros and zebra to the inhabitants of the United States; a region where even canned milk is a luxury and candy is seldom seen.”

On all the desolate coast of Labrador, extending over eight degrees of latitude, not a doctor nor a trained nurse, not a hospital nor a dispensary, not even a health officer, was to be found. Eskimo and Indian, German and Briton, halfbreed and white, hunter and fisherman, fell victims to the dreaded scourge, which traveled with rapidity. Whole settlements were left without a single survivor—the unburied corpses being devoured by half-starved dogs. This is the story that came out of the “silent North”—the most gruesome, most awful, tale of disease and death that the world has heard in many a day!