Russell Shaw Antiquarian Books - Rare and Antiquarian Books and Manuscripts

A highly interesting first hand account of the destruction caused by this terrible illness. Written clearly and in legible ink script, the letter has some light discolouration to the paper, which is also quite fragile and has a few small closed tears. It is protected in a plastic sleeve. 4to, 2 pages + envelope.
'We have had a terrible epidemic of Spanish Influenza out here ane thousands of people were taken off by it. There were very few households which escaped the influenza and many families were completely wiped out. Cape Town alone had over 5000 deaths in two weeks and the total for the five weeks including natives and coloured was over thirteen thousand deaths. There are between two and three thousand orphans who have lost their parents…Alice, Bertie and Edie were all down with it,and I had my hands full…for no doctors could be got for love nor money…Alice was the most anxious as there were signs of it attacking the chest…nearly all the fatal cases lasted three or four days & then died of lung triouble & are buried the day after…the ordinary burials at our cemetery are about ten or twelve a day - but during the epidemic the burials mounted up to over three hundred a day. The undertakers could not meet the sudden demand for coffins & hundreds were buried in long trenches just wrapped in blankets or sacking. Many had to bury their own dead - digging the graves themselves…in some cases whilst not yet recovered from an attack of the Flu amd taking a chill a relapse set in & then they themselves would go under. I have seen nights I have never seen before and never want to see again, of motor lorries loaded up with dead, carts of all sorts taking bodies to the cemetery & poor people carrying their dead or wheeling them in wheelbarrows…the timber mills [made] hundreds of straight black boxes [for] coffins - and they looked terribly grim loaded twenty or thirty at a time on lorries going through the streets…' The 1918 flu pandemic (the Spanish flu) was an influenza pandemic, and the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus (the follow-up was the 2009 flu pandemic). It was an unusually severe and deadly pandemic that spread across the world. Most victims were healthy young adults, in contrast to most influenza outbreaks, which predominantly affect juvenile, elderly, or weakened patients. The flu pandemic was implicated in the outbreak of encephalitis lethargica in the 1920s. The pandemic lasted from June 1918 to December 1920, spreading even to the Arctic and remote Pacific islands. Between 50 and 100 million died, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history. Even using the lower estimate of 50 million people, 3% of the world's population (1.86 billion at the time) died of the disease. Some 500 million, or 27% (˜1/4), were infected. Tissue samples from frozen victims were used to reproduce the virus for study. This research concluded, among other things, that the virus kills through a cytokine storm (overreaction of the body's immune system), which perhaps explains its unusually severe nature and the concentrated age profile of its victims. The strong immune system reactions of young adults ravaged the body, whereas those of the weaker immune systems of children and middle-aged adults resulted in fewer deaths. This pandemic has been described as "the greatest medical holocaust in history" and may have killed more people than the Black Death.

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Size: 4to