Symptoms included cold-like nasal congestion, coughing, severe aching in muscles, headache, backache, stomach disturbances, diarrhea, immobilizing pain in bones and joints, fever, and overwhelming fatigue. Pneumonia victims were so weakened by the flu that death claimed easy victories. Army doctors in warring countries couldn’t identify this fast-acting sickness, but that didn’t prevent them from downplaying it.
In Spain, the first non-belligerent country where the flu appeared, the country’s doctors were no better at making a diagnosis but its newspapers could announce the epidemic. Without wartime press censorship, this journalistic coup bequeathed the unfortunate tag “Spanish Flu” to what was now killing people on a scale matching the devastating war itself.
Wounded Canadian troops returning from Britain aboard the hospital ship Araguaya in June 2018 brought it with them. Feverish soldiers on cramped trains spread the flu across countrywide. Cities and towns soon reported alarming numbers of patients. Officials asserted there was no need to worry because “the light and passing sickness had pretty much run its course.”
Medical officer health Dr. Peter McGibbon in Bracebridge wanted to prevent its spread but Ontario’s Board of Health refused because “irritating the public” and closing schools would serve “no useful purpose.” Ottawa’s Defence Department reassured: “The disease, although extremely contagious, is not a serious one and every effort must be made to control alarm, not only among the troops but among the public and in the Press.”
By mid-October 1918 all public buildings in Muskoka were closed to prevent its spread.
People not quarantined were directed to stay isolated at home to contain the deadly flu. Bracebridge’s British Lion Hotel became an emergency hospital. The town’s cases numbered over 400 in a population of 2,200, about the same in Huntsville. Gravenhurst, with 1,600 people, had close to 300 cases. Rural communities were not spared.
Muskoka’s newspapers published histories of influenza epidemics, means of prevention, and treatments such as quinine, oil of eucalyptus, thymol, oil of mountain pine, heparin, and “egg water” – cold water with whipped egg whites flavoured by salt or cinnamon. Post offices were locked while mail was sorted so people couldn’t crowd the lobbies and spread the epidemic. Telephone subscribers had to refrain from phoning “owing to absence of sick operators.” A Bracebridge meat market closed because “the flu got them all at the same time and the manager was unable to secure substitute help.” Muskoka’s dead included mothers leaving their young behind, a mother perishing with her twins, and flu-weakened victims succumbing to pneumonia.
The Spanish Flu infected a half-billion people, about one-third of the planet’s population, killing upward of 50 million victims worldwide.
It’s flu season. Medical science has advanced. Get your shot.
