C’est Vrai: The flu season never forgotten

If you haven’t had your flu shot yet, get one. It can save you a lot of misery and maybe even save your life. Thanks to new vaccines, we’re not likely to have an epidemic like the one that swept across the world in 1918, but a lot of people do still get sick each year.
In 1918 there were no effective drugs to prevent a deadly epidemic. A strain of “Spanish flu” infected 500 million people worldwide – about one-third of the planet’s population at the time – and killed 20 million to 50 million people. More than 25 percent of the U.S. population got sick, and 675,000 Americans died. More U.S. soldiers died from the flu in 1918 alone than were killed in battle during all of World War I.
The epidemic probably came to Louisiana through the busy port of New Orleans and may have spread into Acadiana through the port at Morgan City.
The histories are hazy about the exact dates and numbers, but most date the outbreak here from the first week of September, when the steamship Harold Walker sailed to New Orleans from Boston, where the epidemic was already raging. Fifteen passengers were sick and three had died when the Harold Walker docked,
Two days later, Sept. 16, five crew members were sick when an oil tanker reached the city. The ship’s radio operator had died while at sea. On Sept. 19, a United Fruit Company cargo ship brought still more sick crewmen to the city. That was all it took. On Sept. 29, New Orleans newspapers reported the city’s first influenza death. There would be many more.
By the end of October, 14,000 people in New Orleans had suffered the flu’s ravages and more than 800 had died—and other towns were feeling its effects. Newspapers began to print pleas for anyone trained in nursing to contact the Red Cross and volunteer to help care for the sick.
Early in October medical officials in Morgan City issued an order “prohibiting the holding of public gatherings of any kind … until further notice, due to prevalence of Spanish influenza.” Other parishes and communities soon followed suit.
Health officer Dr. C.D. de Gravelles wasn’t sure whether he had authority to order Morgan City’s churches to close their doors, “so [he] put the matter up to them in the form of a request.” There seems also to have been some trouble in closing the saloons in Morgan City and keeping their back doors closed. Other places had no such hesitation closing either the churches or the bars.
de Gravelles reported 39 cases in Morgan City and 30 in Berwick under his personal care. The numbers were comparable in communities across south Louisiana. The disease had apparently spread inland by Oct. 16, when the St. Landry Clarion reported, “There is no let-up in the spread on the ‘flu.’ On the contrary, the malady has spread so rapidly that it said to be epidemic in every state of the union and the number of victims is becoming alarming.”
The next week Opelousas offered free food and hospital care to flu victims.
On Oct. 19, newspapers in Morgan City, Franklin, St. Martinville, and elsewhere used three columns—some of them on the front page—to print in its entirety the latest U.S. Public Health Service bulletin that basically told people to stay away from other people.
That seemed to work. On Nov. 2 the Clarion was able to report, “The influenza epidemic throughout Louisiana and the other states is reported as waning, so much so that the health authorities feel extremely gratified at the present outlook, and the general public is looking forward to a full resumption of every-day activities. Schools, churches, places of amusement, etc., will reopen very shortly and the handicap people have been laboring under during the prevalence of the malady will soon be forgotten.”
It’s hard to find exactly the number of people who died in Louisiana during that epidemic. Records were poorly kept and many of the flu deaths were attributed to pneumonia. But historian Ann McLaurin did a pretty careful study and estimates that there were about 174,000 cases of the flu reported in the state between Sept. 28 and Nov. 5, 1918, with 3,114 deaths.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.