"It seems to be a plague," said Miranda, "something out of the Middle Ages. Did you ever see so many funerals, ever?’"
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
by Katherine Anne Porter, 1919.
The patient writhed fitfully in the narrow bed of the primitive if picturesque Queanbeyan District Hospital of 1861 with its two wards and no electricity.
As she retched up a frothy, bloodied mucus, long-serving local doctor Patrick Blackall had done all he could.
A fever, rasping cough and a sharp headache, to be expected in the circumstances.
So, too, the onset of enervating aches and nausea. More concerning: delirium, black spots blooming on the cheeks and the lips taking on a bruised hue. Indications of literally drowning in her own bodily fluids.
It was January 13, 1919, and the war they said would end at Christmas four years before had reached the climax of its catastrophic throes just two months earlier.
Millions from around the globe were dead and as those left made their way back to landscapes and populations forever scarred, on their heels was a fresh terror that would wreak even greater carnage than all just witnessed.
The death notice of 45-year-old Marion Dunlop declared she died of double pneumonia. Her family though, still living in the Canberra region, has long held the culprit to be the infamous Spanish Flu that just over a century ago potentially claimed as many as six times the lives lost to the Great War.
The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19 came to be labelled a “medical holocaust”; a serial killer on an unimagined scale that couldn’t be seen, let alone escaped. While the flu had reared its head throughout history, one unusual aspect of this strain was its effect on the young and healthy.
More than 100 years on, where it came from and when, the level of virulence, and the full scale of its impact continue to confound: all seen in the singular instance of a middle-aged woman’s untimely death in a place far removed from the potential “Ground Zero” of the battlefields of Europe.
And it remains the most lethal and mysterious incarnations of the disease ever to plague humankind - to date.
The beginning of 1918 saw the first of three “waves”, but to the chagrin of the kingdom for which it was named, it is agreed the deathly trajectory didn’t begin in Spain. Nonetheless, between March and May, up to eight million Spaniards contracted it, including their King, Alfonso XIII.
A diabolical plan of the Germans, Chinese labourers carrying it to the European continent, or the more preferred US army camp in Kansas, all have been considered suspects in inflicting it on the world. However, there’s also a theory it was first seen in a frontline French hospital as early as 1916. Certainly it was the sheer volume of troop movements that resulted in its unprecedented spread.
Like something out of a science-fiction novel or an apocalyptic TV series, in less than a year, from the largest cities to the most remote hamlets, hundreds of millions were infected and tens of millions died, often very quickly and quite painfully:
“One of the most striking of the complications was haemorrhage
from mucous membranes, especially from the nose, stomach,
and intestine. Bleeding from the ears and… haemorrhages in
the skin also occurred.”
Of the many touted inaccuracies, one is the 50 million victims of the pandemic (it can vary from 20 million to as high as 100 million). In Australia, it’s generally stated between 12,000 and 15,000 succumbed. The actual number worldwide can never be known with certainty, and for a variety of reasons, including its murky origins. In the early stages, the disease was also both regularly misdiagnosed – everything from cholera to typhoid – or dismissed as the normal seasonal flu.
Along with not initially being compulsory to report or record instances of its appearance, censorship also played its part. With the already deadly state of global affairs, much information was suppressed so as not to impede the war effort or negatively affect morale. Accordingly, the severity remained unacknowledged or unknown in many afflicted areas until undertakers literally began to run out of coffins.
By October, 1918, the most severe stage of the outbreak, Australia had quarantined itself. The first officially recognised case in the country was reported more than two weeks after Marion’s death – a soldier in Sydney who'd travelled by train from Melbourne.
As it was, there were many opportunities for it to have arrived in the antipodes earlier, particularly with returning wounded servicemen.
With instances escalating, confusion continued to reign. As late as March, 1919, The Queanbeyan Age was still questioning the exact nature of the situation and how to deal with it: “This obvious danger seems to have been entirely lost sight of through hysterical dread of a hypothetical ‘germ’ which may exist or not exist, but which, if it did exist, would have every opportunity of making its way through the [protective] masks.”
Perhaps the most compelling evidence in support of the idea its insidious reach was far beyond that recognised, 2005 research revealed that many didn’t die of the flu itself, rather, from secondary complications for which the virus paved the way. Namely, pneumonia.
Canadian Lt-Col John McCrae MD wrote one of the most recognisable poems of World War I, “In Flanders Fields”. In France on January 28, 1918, exactly a year before Australia's official pronouncement of infection, he joined those of whom he wrote: "we are the dead". The doctor though, didn't die in combat, but of pneumonia. Today, virologists say this almost certainly was a result of the Spanish Flu.
Given all of these factors, along with many still unanswered questions, could Marion, daughter of John and Jane Dunlop, of Bungendore, have indeed fallen victim to the “plague of the Spanish Lady” before the Australian experience became clear? If so, how many others may have suffered a similarly undocumented fate?
SOURCES:
* Trove & AWM
* Flu by Gina Kolata, Pan Books, 2001.
* Influenza by Dr Jeremy Brown, Text Publishing, 2018,
* https://www.records.nsw.gov.au/archives/collections-and-research/guides-and-indexes/stories/pneumonic-influenza-1919
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