Louisville Unearthed: The flu pandemic from a century ago

Back in 1918, a flu epidemic killed some 50 million people worldwide; Louisville wasn’t immune. (Public domain photo.)

If you’ve tried to buy toilet paper in the past couple of weeks, you’ve already been affected by the COVID-19, or Coronavirus, scare. But at least so far, this is nothing like the pandemic Louisville (and the whole world) experienced in the early 20th Century – not by a longshot.

A little over 100 years ago, in 1918, a Louisville populated with about 230,000 faced an oncoming pandemic and began taking precautions fairly quickly, setting up makeshift hospitals and quarantining portions of the population. But it spread even more quickly than local health officials could respond, having been brought to the area by soldiers who had been involved in WWI.

Ground Zero, if you will, for Louisville was Camp Zachary Taylor, at the time the largest WWI Army camp in North America, accommodating more than 45,000 soldiers and officers. It was located about six miles southeast of downtown, and the neighborhood that exists there now is still known as Camp Taylor (for reference, it’s situated between the Audubon Park and Newburg neighborhoods).

According to InfluenzaArchive.org, on Sept. 24, local newspapers reported that more than 100 soldiers at the camp were ill with influenza. A day later, that number was 262. By the end of the month, the camp hospital was caring for more than 2,100 cases of the illness, which would be known as Spanish Flu.

(Spanish Flu was later identified as an early form of H1N1 virus, a version of which swept the world again in 2009 under the name Swine Flu.)

By the time the outbreak was all over, the outbreak at the camp killed 824 soldiers and landed 13,000 in the hospital.

Panoramic look at Camp Zachary Taylor, circa 1918. (Public domain photo.)

Once it hit the general population, it continued to spread rapidly. It wasn’t long before soldiers were being partially quarantined and restricted from crowded public places like movie theaters. Schools began to close and children were banned from many public places such as these movie houses for their own protection. People with symptoms were encouraged to stay home or to walk rather than take the streetcar to get where they were going. Schools and churches began closing.

“Social distancing” wasn’t the phrase then, but the practice itself was encouraged to help contain the influenza.

With hospitals filling up, home nursing became common, which not only got ill people the care they needed but helped keep them from public places. By early November, the city decided the pandemic was under control and began lifting bans and quarantines. But heading into December, the Spanish Flu again began picking up steam, as evidenced by school attendance being cut in half due to the flu during that time. Schools closed again, and children under 14 again were placed on a partial public ban.

The flu again subsided but saw another small spike in February 1919 before it finally was mostly squelched in Louisville. It took longer in other places around the state, and when it was all said and done, Spanish Flu would infect nearly 500 million people worldwide — roughly one third of the earth’s population at the time — and killing roughly 50 million of them, more than the total number of soldiers and civilians killed during World War I combined.

In Louisville, between just Sept. 26 and Nov. 16, 1918 (the height of the pandemic), Louisville doctors reported a total of 6,736 cases of the flu to the health department; 577 of those ended in the patients’ deaths. In all, Louisville’s total death rate for the fall and winter due to flu was 406 per 100,000 people. It was especially threatening because, unlike early observations on Coronavirus, Spanish Flu was as deadly to healthy people aged 20-40 as it was to small children and the elderly.

It bears noting that for the three years leading up to the worldwide pandemic, many doctors dismissed Spanish Flu as being a ‘minor infection.’ And ironically, Camp Taylor had been built in Louisville in 1917 because of Louisville’s state-of-the-art filtration system, making the water here some of the safest in the country at the time. Without that, the impact of the influenza here may have been more effectively contained.

Fast forward 102 years, and we’re all staring down the threat of a similar pandemic. But don’t get panicked, get educated. Wash your hands and maintain your space in public, because plenty of people are at risk, particularly older Louisvillians and people with existing health issues. Even if a case of Coronavirus may only mildly affect your short-term health, it’s only prudent to avoid transferring it to someone else for whom it could be far more threatening.

Let’s do our best to watch out for each other, just like they did in 1918. (And when you go to the grocery store, please remember that 1) It’s a respiratory virus, not a gastrointestinal one; and 2) Other people have to use the bathroom too.)

Every Friday, Louisville Unearthed will bring you an unusual fact, historical nugget, place, person, etc., that you may not know about our city.