Blue Death - The Spanish Flu Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
Note: Scotland is produced and designed to be heard, not read. We encourage you, if you are able, to listen to the audio, which provides insight which is significantly different to how it appears on the page. Transcripts are generated from the original scripts of the episodes. They may be slightly different to the corresponding audio and may contain errors.
Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast
Episode 18 - Blue Death - The Spanish Flu
LINLITHGOWSHIRE GAZETTE: “It is not uncommon now to see one seemingly in the best of health today, and hear of him dead a few days later.”
- The Linlithgowshire Gazette, 1st November 1918
MICHAEL PARK: It didn’t come from Spain.
It didn’t start in the slums of Madrid or spread from some cafe owner with a cough in Catalonia.
It didn’t begin as one thing in Malaga and become another by the time it reached Seville.
They only called it Spanish Flu because newspapers in the Iberian peninsula were the only ones talking about the spread of a new kind of virus, sweeping through the plains which the rain in Spain might fall mainly on although I doubt anyone’s really done the research.
It is 1918, and the world is still at war. The grind and repetition, the attrition of the trenches on the Western Front has been going on for almost four years and although there are signs that the German lines might finally break, morale is at an all-time low.
The closer the war comes to its end the more miserable its combatants become. If you’ve sat in a hole having people sitting in another hole try to riddle your body with shreds of metal for literally years you’d be pretty hacked off with the whole thing too.
At home, people were raging. Whether you were British, French, German, Austrian, Italian, Hungarian - let’s not list everybody - things were looking pretty bleak all round.
And all the while the papers told you stories in tiny columns at the bottom of the paper about a killer virus affecting the Spanish main.
You might have been struggling to put a meal on the table, but at least there wasn’t a flu outbreak to contend with.
But it was there. It was creeping up the back closes, down country lanes, flying through the spatter of an uncovered mouth on Buchanan Street, a spit on the pavement on Princes Street, a sneeze on Perth Road, a cough on the High Street.
They didn’t want people to know. Why would they? People were miserable enough and a bad flu season was nothing to get het up about. Why worry people unnecessarily?
From Be Quiet Media, this is Scotland, a podcast about history and where we made it. I’m Michael Park.
Wave One: it is March 1918
Mud squelches and clags and it gets in your boots and seeps through your puttees. They’re the cloth wrapping that’s supposed to provide protection and support up your leg but in reality just gives the moisture somewhere else to congregate.
You’re not the first to get the illness. The doctors call it la grippe - and it’s been spreading like wildfire - if a wildfire would take in this absolute cesspit. It’s not that bad really. You get a cough, sore throat, bit of a headache and most importantly you get a couple of days rotated off the front.
It would be a godsend if it didn’t subside inside three days. Better to be laid up in a hospital in étaple than getting a bit of shrapnel in the neck South of Peronne while the Germans burst through the lines with their big spring offensive.
It didn’t seem worth it any more.
People came back from the hospital at etaples and then they’d cough. And then they’d splutter. And then someone sitting next to them enjoying a long draw on a cigarette that they didn’t yet know would kill them - if a bullet didn’t get them first - and they would get a cough and then splutter and feel weak and feverish and have to be taken behind the lines.
It spread quickly and left almost as quickly. The doctors called it the three day fever. Could have been worse but it was taking an awful lot of people off the front lines.
There wasn’t any real explanation for it but at least people weren’t dying of dysentery because that was messier. They could go back to the front line, wherever it was at that point. It was moving faster than they could keep up with as the Germans mounted their last great offensive of the Great War.
MID ROLL
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Wave Two: it is September 1918
When you sneeze more than 500 million virus particles are spread to those nearby. That might be fine if you’re a healthy adult but if you’re a soldier on the Western Front that’s not eaten a proper meal in weeks, or you’re a German civilian, or you’re living in Glasgow where troop and supply ships regularly steam up and down the clyde, you’ve probably been struggling to get decent nutrition.
And flu does what it does. It starts off as one thing and then it mutates. It’s the virus’s prerogative to stay alive - just like it’s yours.
And if you’d caught the flu during the first wave of the virus then guess what - you’d probably have survived. But this isn’t the same virus that ripped through the trenches a couple of months ago. This virus has grown arms and legs.
And it’s carrying a machine gun.
As troops step off ships, returning home to Scotland after their latest harrowing tour in the muck and mire of the Western Front, the virus walked off with them. H1N1 - you might know it as Swine Flu walked off troops ships on the Clyde and straight into the heart of the nation.
As troops took their chance to go home, some for the last time before the end of the war, the virus followed them on the railways to their homes all across the country. Some would go to Aberdeen, Kilmarnock, Ayr, Inverness, Dundee, Kirkcaldy, Hamilton... suddenly no-one in Scotland was safe from a virus that few people knew anything about.
There was no doubt that people were starting to get sick at alarming rates. There was no doubt that many people in local communities were starting to die of whatever it was that was gripping them, but the papers continued to refer to a flu pandemic affecting the European mainland.
The first wave had done what flu normally does. Rampantly infected people and killed a selection of the weakest people in society. The kids, the elderly, the usual suspects.
The second wave’s mutation hit the motherload of flu mutations. It went for healthy adults between 20 and 40 years old. If flu strain mutations were operating in a corporate structure, this one would be getting a pay rise, a promotion, and a corner office overlooking the mucus lake in the middle of Central Park.
The flu didn’t just knock you down and force you to cough yourself to bits. It triggered an intense response from the human immune system which triggered a rapid release of immune cells and inflammatory molecules. It’s called a cytokine storm and in simple terms it overloaded the healthy immune systems of young adults. That could cause any of the following symptoms… often all of them
PUBLIC HEALTH QUOTE:
Fever
Fatigue
loss of appetite
muscle and joint pain
Nausea
Vomiting
Diarrhea
Rashes
fast breathing
rapid heartbeat
low blood pressure
Seizures
Headache
Confusion
Delirium
Hallucinations
Tremor
loss of coordination
MICHAEL PARK: It also caused something called Heliotrope Cyanosis which, due to a lack of oxygen in the in the blood caused patients’ extremities - their nose, their lips, ears, fingertips, toes - to become discoloured, turning a lavender grey hue or sometimes even blue. The disease quickly picked up the nickname, the Blue Death.
Those who died of the flu often turned black due to the de-oxygenated blood in their bodies - but that name was already taken.
People on the streets only began to take the seriousness of the problem to heart when schools and other public buildings began to close in fear of the outbreak. Doctors didn’t know what to do, mainly because they were liable to get sick themselves whenever they went near patients.
The Perthshire Advertiser said that the flu...
PERTHSHIRE ADVERTISER: the flu ‘usually begins with a sharp attack, an out-and-out seizure, and even doctors have had to stop short in their rounds of visitation and go to bed. The most effective remedies are said to be quinine and toddy.’
MICHAEL PARK: Quinine and toddy would do the square root of hee haw to stop the flu once it got its hooks into you. The entire medical profession was at a loss since there was no vaccination and “hope nobody coughs near you otherwise it might be time to lie down and die” doesn’t seem like very reassuring advice.
PERTHSHIRE ADVERTISER: ‘…the very considerable reduction of sugar and fat in the national diet has weakened the power of resistance of the individual… the whisky drinker says the seat of the trouble is the scarcity of his favourite spirit; across the Border some allege that the poor and thin quality of the beer is at the bottom of it. The smoker asserts that a perpetual cloud of tobacco smoke ensures immunity from infection, and the sniff-taker has steady belief that no microbe can exist where the mull is in constant request. One set of opinions is perhaps just as reliable as another. What we are up against is that the disease exists and is spreading.’
MICHAEL PARK: The opinions were mostly rubbish. What couldn’t be denied was that in Glasgow alone there were 310 deaths from the flu every week.
The Assistant Medical Officer for Glasgow, a Dr MacLean knew that the potential of those infected still struggling to go about their daily lives was one of the greatest dangers.
DR MACLEAN: "The best preventive as far as spreading the diseases is go to bed. The heroic attitude is most desirable. It means trouble for others. Relief may be found in the discriminate use of the following: equal parts of pine oil lavendar oil and eucalyptus oil - to which a little menthol may be added."
MICHAEL PARK: It is 1918 and there is nothing you can do to protect yourself short of hide yourself away and hope that it goes away. The doctors can’t cope, the undertakers can’t cope, there are more bodies than coffins and by the end of 1918 at least a quarter of the total deaths in the entire country - possibly as many as half - can be attributed to flu.
Scotland is devastated by the end of a war that has taken away a significant portion of its young men, and now an unstoppable killer - a murderer - is here to take the rest.
And it’s just getting started.
Wave Three: it is February 1919
There was a point where things seemed to be returning to normal - whatever normal was - and the death rate was slowing down a little.
The Spanish Flu is a strain of H1N1 virus was an early evolution of the one that caused the Swine Flu outbreak in 2009. A smart virus knows that the longer it can keep its host alive the longer it has to spread to other hosts and spread, and propagate, and live.
Viruses learn. Viruses evolve.
Thankfully this means that they generally become less deadly as they mutate.
But the Spanish Flu, as viruses go, wasn’t very smart. By killing people within a couple of days of infection it was more difficult for the virus to spread to others. That being said, the disease still managed to infect a third of the world’s population and kill more than 50 million people worldwide.
I guess what I’m saying is, cover your mouth when you sneeze.
CREDITS
You’ve been listening to Scotland, it was written and produced by me, Michael Park and is a production of Be Quiet Media.
Additional voices in this episode were provided by Jamie Mowat, Chris Moriarty and Mitch Bain.
The music for every episode of Scotland is by the human ADFGVX cipher, Mitch Bain, you can check out more of his work by heading over to Facebook and searching for Mitch Bain music.
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