War + Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway’s Early Life and Writings

Chapter 3: Love in the Time of Influenza Hemingway and the 1918 Pandemic

36 susan f. beegel loVe In THe TIMe oF InFluenZa Hemingway and the 1918 Pandemic Susan F. Beegel In 1918, a virulent strain of influenza emerged that would spread around the world, fueled by World War I with its patriotic rallies and parades, its streams of refugees, and its mass movements of troops, such as the 1.5 million American soldiers sent to Europe in the last six months of the war (Crosby 31). Before the 1918 flu burned itself out, it had killed between fifty and one hundred million people worldwide, about two-thirds of them in a twenty-four-week period from mid-September to early December. The pandemic killed far more people than World War I, with its 9.2 million combat deaths, or World War II, with 15.9 million dead in battle. It claimed more lives than the Black Death of the Middle Ages in one hundred years and killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty-four years. Because the flu affected young people between the ages of twenty and thirty disproportionately, it is estimated to have killed between eight to ten percent of the world’s total population of people in this age group. In the United States, about twenty-eight percent of the population was infected, and so many people died that the average American life expectancy dropped from fifty-one in 1917 to thirty-nine in 1918 (Kolata 7–8; Barry 4–5). The 1918 influenza pandemic was twenty-five times more deadly than any flu known before or since. Ordinarily, influenza kills about one tenth of one percent of its victims, but the 1918 flu had a mortality rate of two36 love in the time of influenZa 37 and-a-half percent. That doesn’t sound like much, but it was astonishingly contagious, affecting one-fifth of the world’s population. If a similar virus struck the United States today, 1.5 million Americans would die (Kolata 7–8). In crowded military quarters, like the holds of the troopships carrying U.S. soldiers to France, between forty to eighty percent of a population could be infected. In 1918, almost twice as many of America’s sailors died from the flu than from enemy action (Crosby 122). In areas where people lacked medical care, the results were devastating. For instance, at the Teller Lutheran mission in Alaska, an entire village of Eskimos died after two visitors from Nome, where the disease was brewing, attended a church service in a tiny, crowded chapel. By the time outside help reached the village three weeks later, seventy-two villagers were dead, forty-six children were orphaned, and only five adults survived. In one igloo, there were twenty-five frozen corpses, half eaten by the village’s starving dogs (Kolata 30–31). Why was this particular flu so deadly? In The Treatment of Acute Infectious Diseases, a 1916 medical textbook, Dr. Frank Meara states prophetically : “[W]e do not look upon influenza as a highly dangerous disease [because] we do not attribute the deaths from pneumonia to the influenza infection with sufficient emphasis, so little precaution is taken to protect the individual or the community” (183). And yet, as Dr. Meara knew, one result of infection, “much dreaded and to be constantly watched for,” was pneumonia. And influenza pneumonia, he warned, “has a high mortality which differs in different epidemics” (180). That is what made the 1918 influenza so deadly—no other influenza before or since has had such a propensity for pneumonic complication. The pneumonia that came with it was so lethal that it could kill within forty-eight hours after the first ache and cough, filling the lungs with bloody fluid and destroying their delicate tissue (Crosby 8). A physician who served during an outbreak among troops at Fort Devens, near Boston, Massachusetts, described how his patients “rapidly develop the most viscous type of Pneumonia that has ever been seen”: Two hours after admission they have the Mahogany spots over the cheekbones and a few hours later you can begin to see the Cyanosis extending from the ears and spreading all over the face until it is hard to 38 susan f. beegel distinguish the colored man from the white. It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate. It is...