The Great Influenza (34 page)

* 

Hagadorn had become all but irrelevant to the running of the camp. Now he yielded on every point to the medical personnel, did everything they asked, made every resource available to them. Nothing seemed even to slow the disease.

On October 4, for the first time more than one hundred men at Camp Grant died in a single day. Nearly five thousand were ill, with hundreds more falling ill each day. And the graph of contagion still pointed nearly straight up.

Soon, in a single day, 1,810 soldiers would report ill. At some other army camps even more soldiers would collapse almost simultaneously; indeed, at Camp Custer outside Battle Creek, Michigan, twenty-eight hundred troops would report ill - in a
single
day.

Before the epidemic, Capps had begun testing Preston Kyes's pneumonia serum, prepared from chickens. Kyes had reasoned that since chickens were not susceptible to the pneumococcus, infecting them with highly virulent pneumococci might produce a very powerful serum. Capps had planned a series of 'very carefully controlled' experiments. But now, with nothing else to try, he administered the serum to all as it arrived - it was in short supply. It seemed to work. Two hundred and thirty-four men suffering from pneumonia received the serum; only 16.7 percent died, while more than half of those who did not receive it died.
But it was in short supply.

Desperate efforts were being made to protect troops from the disease, or at least prevent complications. Germicidal solutions were sprayed into the mouths and noses of troops. Soldiers were ordered to use germicidal mouthwash and to gargle twice a day. Iodine in glycerine was tried in an attempt disinfect mouths. Vaseline containing menthol was used in nasal passages, mouths washed with liquid albolene.

Despite every effort, the death toll kept rising. It rose so high that staff grew weary, weary of paperwork, weary even of identifying the dead. Michie was forced to issue orders warning, 'The remains are labeled by placing an adhesive plaster bearing the name, rank, organization around the middle of the left forearm. It is the duty of the Ward Surgeon to see that this is done before the remains leave the ward' . A great deal of difficulty has been experienced in reading names on death certificates' Either have these certificates typewritten or' plainly printed. Any neglect on the part of responsible persons will be interpreted as a neglect of duty.'

Michie also instructed all personnel, 'The relatives and friends of persons dying at this hospital must not be sent to the base hospital morgue' . The handling of the effects of the deceased has grown into an enormous task.'

Simultaneously, in that important fight to sustain the country's morale, the
Chicago Tribune
reported good news from Camp Grant. 'Epidemic Broken!' blared the paper's headlines. 'The small army of expert workers under the command of Lt. Col. H. C. Michie has battled the pneumonia epidemic to a standstill' deaths occurred among the pneumonia patients, but more than 100 fighting men pulled through the crisis of their illness' 175 patients have been released after winning their fight.'

* 

At that point Grant's death toll was 452. It showed no sign of slowing. Hoping to have some slight effect on it, hoping to prevent cross-infections, Michie and Capps reiterated their orders to place patients outside: 'The crowding of patients in the wards must be reduced to the minimum' . The verandas must be used to the greatest advantage.'

Perhaps that reminded Hagadorn of his earlier order authorizing overcrowding. Perhaps then too he got word of the hundreds of young men who had died on the train to Georgia, which, like the barracks overcrowding, he had ordered because of 'military necessity.' Perhaps these things caused him such personal pain that it explained why he abruptly ordered the withholding of the names of all soldiers who died from influenza. Perhaps somehow that allowed him to block the deaths from his mind.

A day later the death toll at the camp broke five hundred, with thousands more still desperately ill. 'How far the pandemic will spread will apparently depend only upon the material which it can feed upon,' wrote one army physician. 'It is too early to foretell the end or to measure the damage which will be done before the pandemic disappears.'

Many of the dead were more boys than men, eighteen years old, nineteen years old, twenty years old, twenty-one years old, boys filled with their lithe youth and sly smiles. Hagadorn, the bachelor, had made the army his home, his soldiers his family, the young men about him his life.

On October 8 Michie reported the latest death toll to Colonel Hagadorn in his headquarters office. The colonel heard the report, nodded, and, after an awkward moment, Michie rose to leave. Hagadorn told him to close the door.

Death was all about him, in the papers on his desk, in the reports he heard, literally in the air he breathed. It was an envelope sealing him in.

He picked up his phone and ordered his sergeant to leave the building and take with him all personnel in the headquarters and stand for inspection outside.

It was a bizarre order. The sergeant informed Captain Jisson and Lieutenant Rashel. They were puzzled but complied.

For half an hour they waited. The pistol shot, even from inside the building, came as a loud report.

Hagadorn was not listed as a casualty of the epidemic. Nor did his sacrifice stop it.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

T
WO DAYS AFTER
Philadelphia's Liberty Loan parade, Wilmer Krusen had issued that somber statement, that the epidemic in the civilian population 'was assuming the type found in naval stations and cantonments.'

Influenza was indeed exploding in the city. Within seventy-two hours after the parade, every single bed in each of the city's thirty-one hospitals was filled. And people began dying. Hospitals began refusing to accept patients (with nurses turning down $100 bribes) without a doctor's or a police order. Yet people queued up to get in. One woman remembered her neighbors going 'to the closest hospital, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 5th and Lombard but when they got there there were lines and no doctors available and no medicine available. So they went home, those that were strong enough.'

Medical care was making little difference anyway. Mary Tullidge, daughter of Dr. George Tullidge, died twenty-four hours after her first symptoms. Alice Wolowitz, a student nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital, began her shift in the morning, felt sick, and was dead twelve hours later.

On October 1, the third day after the parade, the epidemic killed more than one hundred people (117) in a single day. That number would double, triple, quadruple, quintuple, sextuple. Soon the daily death toll from influenza alone would exceed the city's average
weekly
death toll from all causes - all illnesses, all accidents, all criminal acts combined.

On October 3, only five days after Krusen had let the parade proceed, he banned all public meetings in the city (including, finally, further Liberty Loan gatherings) and closed all churches, schools, theaters. Even public funerals were prohibited. Only one public gathering place was allowed to remain open: the saloon, the key constituency of the Vare machine. The next day the state health commissioner closed them.

The first temporary facility to care for the sick was set up at Holmesburg, the city's poorhouse. It was called 'Emergency Hospital #1' the Board of Health knew more would follow. Its five hundred beds were filled in a day. Ultimately there would be twelve similar large hospitals run with city help, three of them located in converted Republican Clubs in South Philadelphia. It was where people had always gone for help.

In ten days (
ten days!
) the epidemic had exploded from a few hundred civilian cases and one or two deaths a day to hundreds of thousands ill and hundreds of deaths each day.

Federal, municipal, and state courts closed. Giant placards everywhere warned the public to avoid crowds and use handkerchiefs when sneezing or coughing. Other placards read 'Spitting equals death.' People who spat on the street were arrested - sixty in a single day. The newspapers reported the arrests even while continuing to minimize the epidemic. Physicians were themselves dying, three one day, two another, four the next. The newspapers reported those deaths (on inside pages with other obituaries) even while continuing to minimize the epidemic. Health and city workers wore masks constantly.

What should I do?
people wondered, with dread.
How long will it go on?
Each day people discovered that friends and neighbors who had been perfectly healthy a week (or a day) earlier were dead.

And city authorities and newspapers continued to minimize the danger. The
Public Ledger
claimed nonsensically that Krusen's order banning all public gatherings was not 'a public health measure' and reiterated, 'There is no cause for panic or alarm.'

On October 5, doctors reported that 254 people died that day from the epidemic, and the papers quoted public health authorities as saying, 'The peak of the influenza epidemic has been reached.' When 289 Philadelphians died the next day, the papers said, 'Believing that the peak of the epidemic has passed, health officials are confident.'

In each of the next two days more than three hundred people died, and again Krusen announced, 'These deaths mark the high water mark in the fatalities, and it is fair to assume that from this time until the epidemic is crushed the death rate will constantly be lowered.'

The next day 428 people died, and the daily death toll would keep climbing for many days yet - approaching double even that figure.

Krusen said, 'Don't get frightened or panic stricken over exaggerated reports.'

But Krusen's reassurances no longer reassured.

* 

One could not listen to Paul Lewis speak on any subject and not sense the depth of his knowledge and his ability to see into a problem, envision possible solutions and understand their ramifications. Other scientists in the city did not defer to him, but they looked to him.

He had been working on this problem for three weeks now. He hardly ever left his laboratory. Nor did his assistants, except for the ones who fell ill. Every scientist in Philadelphia was spending every waking minute in the laboratory as well.

The laboratory was his favorite place anyway, more even than home. Normally, everything in his work gave him peace; the laboratory gave him peace, including the mysteries that he embraced. He settled into them like a man casting off into an impenetrable ocean fog, a fog that made one feel both alone in and part of the world.

But this work did not give him peace. It wasn't the pressure exactly. It was that the pressure forced him off rhythm, forced him to abandon the scientific process. He developed a hypothesis and focused on it, but the shorthand process by which he arrived at it made him uncomfortable.

So did hearing the news of the deaths. The youth and vitality and promise of the dead horrified. The waste of their promise horrified. He worked harder.

* 

Arthur Eissinger, president and 'honor man' of Penn's class of 1918, died. Dudley Perkins, a Swarthmore football hero, died. Nearly two-thirds of the dead were under forty.

It was a common practice in 1918 for people to hang a piece of crepe on the door to mark a death in the house. There was crepe everywhere. 'If it was a young person they'd put a white crepe at the door,' recalled Anna Milani. 'If it was a middle-aged person, they'd put a black crepe, and if it was an elderly one, they put a grey crepe at the door signifiying who died. We were children and we were excited to find out who died next and we were looking at the door, there was another crepe and another door.'

There was always another door. 'People were dying like flies,' Clifford Adams said. 'On Spring Garden Street, looked like every other house had crepe over the door. People was dead there.'

Anna Lavin was at Mount Sinai Hospital: 'My uncle died there' . My aunt died first. Their son was thirteen' . A lot of young people, just married, they were the first to die.'

But the most terrifying aspect of the epidemic was the piling up of bodies. Undertakers, themselves sick, were overwhelmed. They had no place to put bodies. Gravediggers either were sick or refused to bury influenza victims. The director of the city jail offered to have prisoners dig graves, then rescinded the offer because he had no healthy guards to watch them. With no gravediggers bodies could not be buried. Undertakers' work areas were overflowing, they stacked caskets in halls, in their living quarters - many lived above their businesses.

Then undertakers ran short of coffins. The few coffins available suddenly became priceless. Michael Donohue's family operated a funeral home: 'We had caskets stacked up outside the funeral home. We had to have guards kept on them because people were stealing the caskets' . You'd equate that to grave robbing.'

There were soon no caskets left to steal. Louise Apuchase remembered most vividly the lack of coffins: 'A neighbor boy about seven or eight died and they used to just pick you up and wrap you up in a sheet and put you in a patrol wagon. So the mother and father
screaming,
'Let me get a macaroni box' [for a coffin] (macaroni, any kind of pasta, used to come in this box, about 20 pounds of macaroni fit in it) please please let me put him in the macaroni box, don't take him away like that'.''

Clifford Adams remembered 'bodies stacked up' stacked up out to be buried'. They couldn't bury them.' The bodies backed up more and more, backed up in the houses, were put outside on porches.

The city morgue had room for thirty-six bodies. Two hundred were stacked there. The stench was terrible; doors and windows were thrown open. No more bodies could fit. Bodies lay in homes where they died, as they died, often with bloody liquid seeping from the nostrils or mouths. Families covered the bodies in ice; even so the bodies began to putrefy and stink. Tenements had no porches; few had fire escapes. Families closed off rooms where a body lay, but a closed door could not close out the knowledge and the horror of what lay behind the door. In much of the city, a city more short of housing than New York, people had no room that could be closed off. Corpses were wrapped in sheets, pushed into corners, left there sometimes for days, the horror of it sinking in deeper each hour, people too sick to cook for themselves, too sick to clean themselves, too sick to move the corpse off the bed, lying alive on the same bed with the corpse. The dead lay there for days, while the living lived with them, were horrified by them, and, perhaps most horribly, became accustomed to them.