October 1918: Death rules the capital city
A few weeks ago, as I nursed my son through swine flu, I frequently thought about my greatgrandmother. She had lived in Athens, northwest of Springfield, and nursed her son during another flu pandemic 91 years ago. I felt such sympathy for her. Although the challenges of caring for our sons must have been similar, their outcomes were so different.
After seven days my son was fine. After ten days her son was dead. Her experience was hardly unique that year.
It was 1918, the year of the so-called “Spanish” flu pandemic. Most estimates say it killed between 20 million and 50 million people worldwide, but an article (“1918 Influenza: The Mother of All Pandemics”) in the January 2006 Emerging Infectious Diseases says it might have killed as many as 100 million. “An estimated one third of the world’s population was infected and had clinically apparent illnesses,” it says.
Of the three flu pandemics in the 1900s, “the 1918 flu pandemic was the most severe,” says Jeffrey Diamond, with the Centers for Disease Control. It killed nearly 23,500 in Illinois, based on Illinois Department of Public Health records.
The virus began in Europe during World War I. “But the only people reporting the flu were the neutral countries (which included Spain). So when Spain’s King Alfonso developed it, the world grabbed onto that and that’s why it’s called the ‘Spanish’ flu,” says Dr. Donald R. Graham, chief of infectious diseases at Springfield Clinic. “It’s an unfortunate misnomer.”
Graham says today’s H1N1 flu “is related somewhat” to the 1918 flu. “It has about one third of the same genetic material.” Generally explained, it’s like the H1N1 is an evolved, mutated version of the 1918 flu virus. “It’s a little bit like the way grandchildren are related to their grandparents and look somewhat like them, but not completely,” Graham says.
As American troops came home from European battlefronts in 1918, they brought more than battle wounds. Americans’ war against the Spanish flu began at military camps, where vets were the first to become ill.
Some thought the virus was caused by trench warfare and mustard gas, according to Stanford University’s 1918 influenza Web site, but public health officials knew the culprit was a germ that spread through human contact.
The flu was first reported in Illinois at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, north of Chicago, according to Curtis Mann, city historian and manager of the Sangamon Valley Collection at Lincoln Library. It struck there in early September, 1918. “If you read through the newspapers just a few weeks before the pandemic hit, they were talking about how this Naval station had a clean bill of health. Within a few weeks it reported that thousands of these young men were infected with influenza and hundreds were dying.”
Springfield had boys at that Center and its first brush with the pandemic came on Sept. 22 when one of them, Charles Pritzlaff, died. He was one of many. “They died before they got overseas,” Mann says. According to the Honor Book, which lists the fates of Sangamon County’s WWI veterans, some local recruits arrived at training camps and died of the flu only six weeks later.
The flu ravaged Chicagoland, then traveled south. By Oct. 9, Sangamon County had 40 reported cases and Springfield had its first flu death – Lubertl Campbell of 911 East Madison St. (The Illinois State Journal listed the names and addresses of the afflicted.) The paper theorized that Springfieldians who had visited the Great Lakes Naval Center and Camp Grant, another northern Illinois training camp, had brought the flu to town.
When the virus struck here, it overwhelmed officials and residents. The city’s Board of Health Superintendent, Dr. Albert A. Campbell, was a Chicago physician who was appointed about a month before the pandemic hit. “He didn’t have a lot of time to prepare,” Mann says. He and his aides traveled throughout the city placing “keep out” signs on homes of the sick. When some homeowners removed the signs, Campbell threatened them with a hefty fine. On Oct. 10, with 50 local cases of
