The Great Influenza (28 page)

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19. The virus moved inexorably across the country. Here navy nurses and doctors await the onslaught.

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20. Military commanders tried to protect healthy men; at Mare Island in San Francisco sheets were hung in barracks to screen men from each other's breathing.

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21. In most cities all public meetings were banned, all public gathering places (churches, schools, theaters, and saloons) closed. Most churches simply canceled services but this one in California met outdoors, a technical violation of the closing order but a response to the congregation's need for prayer.

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22. Rufus Cole, the Rockefeller Institute scientist who had led the successful effort to develop a pneumonia vaccine and treatment just before the outbreak of the epidemic. He also made the Rockefeller Institute Hospital a model for the way clinical research is conducted, including at the National Institutes for Health.

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Seattle, like many other places, became a masked city. Red Cross volunteers made tens of thousands of masks. All police wore them. Soldiers marched through the city's downtown wearing them.

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26. More than one scientist called Paul A. Lewis 'the brightest man I ever met.' As a young investigator in 1908 he proved polio was caused by a virus and devised a vaccine that was 100 percent effective in protecting monkeys. It would be half a century before a polio vaccine could protect man. He too was one of the prime investigators searching for the cause of influenza, and a cure or preventative. Ultimately his ambition to investigate disease would cost him his life.

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27. In the late 1920s Richard Shope, Lewis's protegé, unearthed a crucial clue in the search for the cause of influenza. While Lewis went to Brazilian jungles to investigate yellow fever, Shope continued his pursuit of influenza. He was the first to prove a virus caused the disease.

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Many histories of the pandemic portray the eruption of deadly disease (the hammer blow of the second wave) as sudden and simultaneous in widely separated parts of the world, and therefore deeply puzzling. In fact the second wave developed gradually.

When water comes to a boil in a pot, first an isolated bubble releases from the bottom and rises to the surface. Then another. Then two or three simultaneously. Then half a dozen. But unless the heat is turned down, soon enough all the water within the pot is in motion, the surface a roiling violent chaos.

In 1918 each initial burst of lethality, isolated though it may have seemed, was much like a first bubble rising to the surface in a pot coming to boil. The flame may have ignited in Haskell and set off the first burst. The outbreak that killed 5 percent of
all
French recruits at one small base was another. Louisville was still another, as were the deaths on the
City of Exeter
and the outbreak in Switzerland. All these were bursts of lethal disease, violent bubbles rising to the surface.

Epidemiological studies written relatively soon after the pandemic recognized this. One noted that army cantonments in the United States saw 'a progressive increase in cases reported as influenza beginning with the week ending August 4, 1918, and of the influenzal pneumonia cases beginning with the week ending August 18. If this was really the beginning of the great epidemic wave we should expect that if these series of data were plotted out on a logarithmic scale the increase from week to week would plot out as a straight line following the usual logarithmic rise of an epidemic curve' . This condition is substantially fulfilled with the curve of rise plotting out on logarithmic paper as a practically straight line.'

The report also found 'definite outbreaks of increasing severity' occurring during the summer in both the United States and Europe, which 'indistinguishably blend with the great Fall wave.'

In early August the crew of a steamship proceeding from France to New York was hit so hard with influenza 'that all of the seamen were prostrate on it and it had to put into Halifax,' according to an epidemiologist in Gorgas's office, where it remained until enough crew members were well enough to proceed to New York.

On August 12 the Norwegian freighter
Bergensfjord
arrived in Brooklyn after burying four men at sea, dead of influenza. It carried two hundred people still sick with the disease; ambulances transported many of them to a hospital.