Oklahoma History: April 2020 Archives

The earliest reference to Spanish flu or influenza in the Oklahoma Historical Society's Digital Newspapers Collection is from page 4 of the August 31, 1918, edition of the Daily Ardmoreite. The flu is still a far-off thing, but near enough to be worthy of some advice:

INFLUENZA AND OSCULATION

If your friend or your relative or your best beloved has a runny cold, don't kiss him or don't kiss her and don't kiss them. They may have the "Spanish Flu."

Bacteriological investigation of the cases which have gotten into this country, indicate that there is nothing new or mysterious about this malady. Some of the cases are of what we would call grippe, some of common colds. The only serious thing about it, according to the New York Commissioner of Health is its tendency to a resultant complication of pneumonia.

Most of these communicable diseases are limited to a five-foot zone. The victims cough or sneeze -- or kiss someone -- and anybody within a radius of five feet of them comes in for a share of the dangerous germs. If people will learn to keep a distance of five feet or more from any person with a cough or the sniffles, or a sore throat, they will be quite reasonably safe.

This is not always possible on trains or street cars. It is the duty of the person with the cold to keep out of such conveyances when possible. When travel is absolutely necessary, the cought [sic] should be covered, and the nose-blowing conducted with as much decency as possible. Kissing should be foregone during the period of the illness. Affection can be expressed without it, and the kisses will be none the less desirable when the danger is over.

This early mention still minimizes the threat to little more than a cold or common flu, with a possibility of pneumonia, and the only precautions are to cover your cough, blow your nose decently, avoid kissing, and avoid public transport.

(The same page of the Ardmorite humorously suggests that the cubist school of art is perfect for producing military camouflage and notes that British subjects living in Oklahoma would be classified for the draft along with Americans.)

The term "grippe" is the French term for the flu, which had caught on in America, often preceded with the feminine article, viz. la grippe. Catarrh, colds, and grippe, an 1899 book by John H. Clarke, M.D., a London homeopath, describes colds as of great interest on both sides of the Atlantic, in his preface to the American edition:

An extensive esperience among American residents and visitors in London convinces me that among the bonds of community between the two great divisions of Anglo-Saxonia, one of no little importance is a common interest in the subject of nasal catarrh. I must, therefore, abandon the claim I made in the first editions of this work, that "cold in the head" is a British interest par excellence; and in offering this little work to American readers I trust that my insular standpoint will prove no bar to its wider usefulness.

In the preface to the Fourth English Edition, Clarke writes that he is adding a section "on that most unwelcome visitor of recent years -- EPIDEMIC INFLUENZA." He mentions that it is, in 1899, "in the seventh year of its visitation. ... For centuries the epidemic disease has prevailed in Western Europe at uncertain intervals, and for want of a more definite description the Italians named it 'Influenza,' or 'The Influence.'" He says that severe colds had come to be named commonly as "Influenza Colds," and then merely as "Influenza." In the new section of the book on "Grippe or Influenza," Clarke says that to distinguish it from Influenza Colds, "the malady is sometimes called 'Siberian' or 'Russian' Influenza, since the epidemics have always begun in the northern part of the Russian Empire." Symptoms are defined as including body aches, chills, high fever, fatigue, and nasal drainage, but "It may attack the chest, the heart, the bowels, or the brain." "Constitutional weakness" is said to be a predisposing factor.

(I hasten to state that I find Clarke's book interesting for its definition and description of influenza as it was understood at the turn of the 20th century, and NOT for its recommended remedies, which involve arsenic, mercury, and belladonna in homeopathic quantities.)