The Spanish Flu in Cumberland County, 1918

In 1918, as the war with Germany and the Central Powers was coming to an end, the United States faced another, more subtle, and seemingly invincible enemy. This was the Spanish influenza. Although on a smaller scale and of much shorter duration, it made some think of the Black Death that had decimated Europe in the Middle Ages. Sweeping through Europe, where its presence went unreported because of wartime security, the flu entered the United States in the late summer of 191 8 and in little more than two months is estimated to have sickened 40,000,000 people and caused half a million deaths.¹

For those who lived through it the flu was an anxious time. It snuffed out thousands of lives, many of them young men's, and left permanent losses in families whose parents, children, sons and daughters died. It also produced losses and many dislocations in economic life. Although it is not possible to do more than suggest the number and character of these losses, readers of local newspapers can get some idea of the impact on particular communities of this great, but almost forgotten, epidemic.

 In the early fall of 1918 people began to fall ill of a disease unlike any that they or their doctors had seen . The onset was sudden. It began as a contagious cold; high fever and pains, a sore throat and a running nose were symptoms; and the conditions sometimes quickly developed into pneumonia and meningitis. The disease spread rapidly, especially where people were thickly settled or assembled in crowds-people were said "to die like flies" ; and it was soon recognized as a formidable epidemic. One feature, that of "apparent death," in which the victim suffered cardiac arrest, was noted in grim reports of macabre and distressing episodes.² The earliest cases in Cumberland County seem to have been two sick soldiers who were removed from a troop train at Carlisle and taken to the local hospital, where Dr. R. M . Shepler recognized the disease.

The flu owed its name to the chances of politics and war. The principal European countries were fighting a war, and these nations chose to suppress reports of the epidemic for reasons of intelligence and domestic morale. Spain, however, was a neutral, had no such motives for secrecy, and therefore its physicians and public authorities did not hesitate to announce the presence of influenza . The warring powers were happy to link the disease with its source in an unoffending nation- hence Spanish influenza.³

Exactly how and when the flu entered the United States is not known. A likely explanation is that it was brought in by naval and maritime personnel on ships from European ports. The flu first appeared on naval bases, then in army camps.⁴ In both places large numbers of young men, many just recruited from farms, villages, and small towns, with little or no immunity to respiratory and other diseases, were brought together for the first time. The flu was especially severe at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, where on September 25 it was reported to "hold sway": 10,700 cases had been reported there thus far. The same report added that the army had a total of 22,687 cases, of which 3,000 were reported in a single day.⁵ "Its prevalence in camps and cantonments," it was observed a week later, "has increased the death rate, largely due to the crowded conditions."⁶

Other reports were more personal and therefore had a more immediate impact. On the same day that the Camp Devens figures were published, Charles Dysert, a Carlisle soldier at Camp Holabird in Baltimore, on a visit to Hagerstown, Maryland, with three friends, was stricken with what a local physician diagnosed as the Spanish flu. Two days later another Carlisle man, Oscar Beecher, a 28-year-old naval trainee at Cape May, was reported to have died of the flu.⁷ Some wives and mothers, on receiving news of such illnesses, hurried to the camp hospitals.

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