Pandemic 1918

But nowhere escaped this common enemy: the United States recorded 750,000 deaths, five times its total military fatalities in the war, while European deaths totalled over two million. In England and Wales, 250,000 people died in horrific conditions: onset was sudden and indicated by horrific symptoms including haemorrhages from the lungs and nose, the skin turning blue from lack of oxygen and choking to death from ‘air hunger’ as the lungs filled with blood and pus. Another weird symptom was that patients’ hair often turned white overnight. Those who never regained consciousness were the lucky ones; others died raving, lack of oxygen to the brain causing a form of dementia. One of the most terrifying aspects of Spanish flu was the age of its casualties. The majority of the victims were healthy young men and women in the prime of life. The virus was particularly deadly because it triggered a cytokine storm, an auto-immune reaction which ravages the stronger immune system of young adults.

Against the background of the global epidemic, we meet the men and women who battled against this invisible enemy, from medical experts such as US Surgeon General Vaughan, pathologist William Henry Welch, Manchester’s Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr James Niven, and bacteriologist August von Wassermann, inventor of the famous ‘Wassermann test’ for syphilis, who was so determined to find a way to stop the epidemic in its tracks that he declared: ‘For me there are no Germans, no Englishmen – only men who suffer and must be helped.’