This week in Texas History: Spanish flu, our ancestors’ pandemic – Hays Free Press

By Bartee Haile

Just when Texans started to think the Spanish Flu had finally run its course, on Feb. 4, 1920 the State Health Department reported 2,514 new cases in the past 24 hours.

The deadly strain of influenza that caused the worldwide epidemic at the end of the First World War was called the Spanish Flu because the outbreak in that country that killed eight million in May 1918 received the most attention. As a noncombatant, Spain had no wartime censorship. Interestingly enough, the Spaniards themselves named the scourge the French Flu.

The Great Pandemic was genuinely global in scope. The only place on the planet to escape the calamity was a small island deep in the Amazon jungle. No one really knows how many lives were lost, but estimates of the worldwide death toll ranged from 40 to 100 million making the twentieth-century pandemic the deadliest in human history.

The Spanish Flu struck healthy individuals, usually the young rather than the old, without warning. In a matter of hours, victims were too weak to walk and had to take to bed. Of those that died, the end often came the very next day. The stricken rarely lingered longer than three days after infection.

The symptoms were ghastly. As the lungs failed, victims turned black or blue from lack of oxygen and bled from the nose, ears and eyes. And, as one historian wrote, Patients would writhe from agonizing pain in their joints.

Although victims were advised to send for a doctor as soon as they came down with Spanish Flu, there was little a physician could do when he arrived. Penicillin would not be discovered until 1928, and it was not until 1943 that an influenza vaccine became available.

The first documented case in the United States occurred on March 11, 1918 at Fort Riley, Kansas, when army cook showed up at sick call with a temperature of 103. Forty-eight hours later, 522 soldiers were flat on their backs.

Later that summer, a more virulent form of the Spanish Flu, undoubtedly carried by returning doughboys, hit Boston. The sickness spread like wildfire through the crowded cities on the East Coast, killing 800 a day in New York City, before heading west.

In the absence of a scientific explanation for the cause and with no cure, hysteria and ignorance filled the void. One popular theory was that the Spanish Flu was part of a germ-warfare attack by the Germans, while others blamed cat hair and coal dust. The long list of useless home remedies included everything from onions and garlic to goose grease.

The Surgeon Generals antidote for such nonsense was four basic precautions: 1) Keep out of crowds. 2) Cover up each cough and sneeze. 3) Do not spit on the floor or sidewalk. 4) Shun the common drinking cup and the roller towel in public places.

Texans could only wait and hope for the best. Maybe by some sort of miracle the Spanish Flu would skip the Lone Star State. But it didnt.

The suspense ended on Sept. 23, 1918 with the first confirmed sightings of the sickness in Williamson, Kaufman and Bosque counties. Eleven days later, 35 counties were under siege, and a week after that the number had grown to 77.

Towns throughout Texas moved quickly to protect the public over the objections of local merchants and skeptics, who pooh-poohed the danger. On Oct. 9 alone the following communities closed schools, theaters and other gathering places: Lewisville, Plano, Marshall, McKinney, Bonham, Wills Point, Clarksville, Cleburne, Temple, Wichita Falls, Waxahachie, Houston and Corsicana.

By late October, the Spanish Flu had reached the Panhandle with the death of the president of Wayland Baptist College in Plainview on the 28th, and El Paso, where the number of cases neared 5,000 by the 23rd. On the 29th, the State Health Department reported 106,978 cases and 2,181 deaths and that was just in the cities.

Galvestons response to the worst public health crisis since the yellow fever epidemics of the 1800s was typical of most towns. City officials and the daily newspapers saw panic as the greatest enemy and in their efforts to keep everybody calm often painted too rosy a picture of a truly grave situation.

Any decline in the daily death toll was hailed by politicians and The Daily News as a sign the worst was over. Carried away by encouraging numbers in early November, the health commissioner lifted the ban on public places and reopened the schools.

But this unfounded optimism ignored the fact that the Spanish Flu came in waves and would hang on in Texas well into 1920. When the disease returned with a vengeance killing 65 Galvestonians between Nov. 15 and Dec. 15, the commissioner was forced to shut the city down again.

The final figures for the United States, nothing more than educated guesses, had one out of every four Americans stricken by the Spanish Flu and at least half a million fatalities in a population of 105 million. As for the four and half million Texans, 30 to 40 percent contracted the disease and five to ten percent of the afflicted perished. Thats 70,000 dead in the best case and upwards of 175,000 in the worst.

Bartee welcomes your comments and questions at barteehaile@gmail.com or P.O. Box 130011, Spring, TX 77393 and invites you to visit his web site barteehaile.com.

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This week in Texas History: Spanish flu, our ancestors' pandemic - Hays Free Press