When the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank on her maiden voyage to New York. its fatally ripped hull settled into the collective depths of Western consciousness as the prelude of 20th century disasters. The Great War, which came only a few years later, had to be re-named World War 1 by historians, for it was soon followed by a murderous calamity of even greater proportions. In between these onslaughts, which spanned the first crude aerial bombs to the world-destroying capacity of hydrogen weapons, nature herself seemed to rise up against us in the form of a bug-more precisely, influenza, a strain of subtype H1N1.
The Spanish flu, as it came to be known, lasted from March 1918 to June 1920. No continent on earth was spared. It is estimated that between 20 to 100 million people perished worldwide.
In a comfortable, upper-middle class apartment on Riverside Drive in Brooklyn, New York, silent and somber family members gather round six year old Sally Blaine, who lies in bed shivering, her usually pale face bright with fever. There is nothing anyone can do but cool the little girl’s forehead with a wet cloth and pray that what had killed her mother just a few weeks earlier will not kill her. All around them the flu swirls like a storm of infection. It is not unusual for people to die within hours of contracting the disease. Death is often horrible, as the body hemorrhages and the lungs fill with fluid, effectively causing the victim to drown. The women look down at the thin frame of the girl and wonder to no one but themselves how long she has to live. New York City alone has lost over 30,000 people. They have not died of the war but by a contagion brought back by the soldiers who had fought it.
Because doctors are in such short supply, students of the Buffalo Medical School are told to report to hospitals for duty. Acting Health Commissioner Franklin Gram later remarked, “It was no uncommon matter to find persons who had waited two or three days after having repeatedly… summoned physicians … dying because every physician was worked beyond human endurance.”
The storm abates and then gradually dies out. Today scientists wonder when the next pandemic will strike. Global warming and jet travel make viruses even easier to flourish and spread than in 1918.
Little Sally, born the year the Titanic set sail, survives. In a story about a disease that is full of ironies, one of them is that children had a greater chance of survival than did adults with comparatively stronger immune systems. She grew up, married Robert Beck in 1938, and in 1948 gave birth to a daughter whom she named Brenda.
The baby was born pre-maturely but was given the kind of medical care not available to her grandmother. She was placed in an incubator, where the rich supply of oxygen kept her alive but destroyed her eyesight. For the last several years she has been, on and off again, my student. She is bright, gregarious, lives independently, has attended college, has many friends and a full life.
So now we come full circle. An unsinkable ship sinks; a war to end all wars only sets the stage for an even bigger war; people drown in New York of a disease and a little girl is blinded by too much oxygen. Life does go on but, I have to admit, in ways I couldn’t invent in a million years.
