For her new novel, the author dug deep into research about Philadelphia during the Spanish flu outbreak—never imagining that a new pandemic was on its way.
BY ELLEN MARIE WISEMAN APRIL 24, 2020
When I visit my grandchildren, I wave through the window but I don’t go inside. It breaks my heart not being able to hug and kiss them—but at least we can FaceTime later. During the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, nobody even had tha
As a novelist who recently spent two years researching and fully immersed in the lives of everyday people during the 1918 pandemic, it’s impossible not to compare that crisis to today’s.
Before I began my research, I knew little about the Spanish flu until a reader told me about the nurses who visited the sick at that time, many of whom found entire families dead, or both parents deceased and the children starving. I was shocked to learn that the Spanish flu infected roughly one third of the planet’s population and killed an estimated 50 million people over the course of two years, with a particularly cruel wave during the fall of 1918. Some estimates say the virus killed twice that many.
Death was quick, savage, and terrifying. The virus turned victims bluish-black, and drowned them with their own body fluids. The victims would be fine one minute and incapacitated and delirious the next, with fevers rising to 104 to 106 degrees. The poor suffered the worst, with the largest loss of life happening in the slums and tenement districts of large cities, but it also infected Walt Disney—then a teenager training with the Red Cross in Chicago—and killed Donald Trump’s grandfather.