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- Walt Disney. “The wonderful world of Disney,” was not so magical when Walt was afflicted with the influenza virus. During World War I, at age 17, Walt Disney, in a patriotic gesture, or perhaps more of an escapist adventure with a friend, was eager to serve his nation.
- Edvard Munch. Today, the Norwegian artist, Edvard Munch, is probably best known for his 1893 portrait, Der Schrei der Nature (The Scream of Nature), more popularly known as The Scream.
- Katherine Anne Porter. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Katherine Anne Porter mostly wrote short stories, and her first and only novel was Ship of Fools, published in 1962.
- David Lloyd George. In September 1918, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom encountered the influenza pandemic in Manchester, England, the city of his birth.
- Edith Coffin (Colby) Mahoney
- Franklin Martin
- Violet Harris
- N. Roy Grist
- Clara Wrasse
- Leo Baekeland
- Dorman B.E. Kent
- Donald Mckinney Wallace
- Helen Viola Jackson Kent
From theMassachusetts Historical Society
Between 1906 and 1920, Edith Coffin (Colby) Mahoney of Salem, Massachusetts, kept “three line-a-day diaries” featuring snippets from her busy schedule of socializing, shopping and managing the household. Most entries are fairly repetitive, offering a simple record of what Mahoney did and when, but, on September 22, 1918, she shifted focus to reflect the pandemic sweeping across the United States. Four days later, Mahoney reported that Eugene had succumbed to influenza. “Several thousand cases...
From the National Library of Medicine, via research by Nancy Bristow
In January 1919, physician Franklin Martin fell ill while traveling home from a postwar tour of Europe. His record of this experience, written in a journal he kept for his wife, Isabelle, offers a colorful portrait of influenza’s physical toll. Soon after feeling “chilly all day,” Martin developed a 105-degree fever. Added the doctor, “When the light did finally come I was some specimen of misery—couldn't breathe without an excruciating cough and there was no hope in me.” Martin’s writing dif...
Violet Harris was 15 years old when the influenza epidemic struck her hometown of Seattle. Her high school diaries, recounted by grandniece Elizabeth Weise in a recent USA Todayarticle, initially reflect a childlike naivete. On October 15, 1918, for example, Harris gleefully reported: Before long, however, the enormity of the situation sank in. The...
Fort Devens, a military camp about 40 miles from Boston, was among the sites hardest hit by the 1918 influenza epidemic. On September 1, some 45,000 soldiers waiting to be deployed to France were stationed at the fort; by September 23, according to the New England Historical Society, 10,500 cases of the flu had broken out among this group of milita...
From the National WWI Museum and Memorial
In September 1918, 18-year-old Clara Wrasse wrote a letter to her future husband, Reid Fields, an American soldier stationed in France. Though her home city of Chicago was in the midst of battling an epidemic, influenza was, at best, a secondary concern for the teenager, who reported: Quickly moving on from this mention of disease, Wrasse went on to regale her beau with stories of life in Chicago, which she deemed “to be the same old city, altho there are lots of queer things happening.” Sign...
From the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History
Inventor Leo Baekeland, creator of the world’s first commercialized plastic, “documented his life prolifically” in diaries, laboratory notebooks, photographs and correspondence, according to the museum’s archives center, which houses 49 boxes of the inventor’s papers. Baekeland’s fall 1918 journaloffers succinct summaries of how the epidemic affected his loved ones. On October 24, he reported that a friend named Albert was sick with influenza; by November 3, Albert and his children were “bett...
From the Vermont Historical Society
From the age of 11 to his death at 75 in 1951, Dorman B.E. Kent recorded his life in diaries and letters. These papers—now held by the Vermont Historical Society, where Kent served as a librarian for 11 years—document everything from his childhood chores to his views on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and his sons’ career progress. Of particular interest is Kent’s fall 1918 diary, which contains vivid descriptions of his own bout with influenza. On September 24, he wrote (as mentioned ab...
Partially transcribed by Lisa Powell of Dayton Daily News
Donald McKinney Wallace, a farmer from New Carlisle, Ohio, was serving in the U.S. Army when the 1918 pandemic broke out. The soldier’s wartime diarydetailed conditions in his unit’s sick bay—and the Army’s response to the crisis. On September 30, Wallace wrote: On October 4, the still-ailing farmer added, “Not a bit well yet but anything is better than going over to the hospital. 2 men over there have Spanish Influenza bad and are not expected to live. We washed all windows and floors with c...
From Utah State University’s Digital History Collections
When Helen Viola Jackson Kent’s children donated her journals to Utah State University, they offered an apt descriptionof the purpose these papers served. Like many diary writers, Kent used her journal to “reflect her daily life, her comings and goings, her thoughts, her wishes, her joys, and her disappointments.” On November 1, 1918, the lifelong Utah resident wrote that she “[h]ad a bad head ache all day and did not accomplish much. Felt very uneasy as I found out I was exposed to the ‘flu’...
- Meilan Solly
Sep 30, 2021 · Primetta Giacopini was two years old when she lost her mother to the Spanish flu in 1918. Primetta Giacopini contracted COVID-19 earlier this month and died on Sept. 16. Josh Edelson/AP
Oct 12, 2010 · The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919 was the deadliest pandemic in world history, infecting some 500 million people across the globe—roughly one-third of the population—and causing up to...
Apr 15, 2024 · Influenza pandemic of 1918–19, the most severe influenza outbreak of the 20th century and among the most devastating pandemics in human history. The outbreak was caused by influenza type A subtype H1N1 virus. Learn about the origins, spread, and impact of the influenza pandemic of 1918–19.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The year 2018 marks two somber, temporally linked centennials—one marking the end of World War I, which claimed 18 million lives, and the other marking the most unprecedented natural disaster in recorded history, the so-called Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918–1919, which claimed tens of millions more lives (1, 2).
Apr 4, 2020 · April 4, 2020. ‘Everybody was so afraid’. A century after an earlier pandemic, oral history projects have preserved the voices of those who survived. Nearly everyone who survived the 1918 flu ...
