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In the middle of March, 1917, a young cook at Camp Funston in Kansas became sick. Army doctors found him to be quite ill, with a fever of 103 degrees, a sore throat, headache and muscular pains. What the doctors didn’t know was that before five hours had gone by, 107 previously healthy young soldiers would be moaning with pain in the contagious ward of the army hospital.
This was the start in the United States of the flu epidemic of 1917, an influenza so deadly and so contagious that for well over a year it would dominate the news and overshadow the normal events of human life.
There were three separate waves of the influenza: one in March 1917; one in September, 1917, when tht schools re-opened; and another in March 1918. No one could pinpoint the exact origin of this deadly virus: the French blamed the Spaniards, the Spaniards blamed the French, and the United States blamed Eastern Europe.
A notable characteristic of the disease was that it struck healthy young people. Side effects, such as pneumonia, were the real killers. To combat the disease, doctors of the day had basically the same weapons used now: bed rest, fluids, good nursing care'. There were no antibiotics, no vaccines. There was a great deal of misinformation.
Newspapers of the day said that the illness was so exhausting that people died just from leaning over or from turning over to let the doctor apply a stethoscope r
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