[The following is part of a firsthand account of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic’s first major killing grounds at Camp Devens, about thirty-five miles northwest of Boston, in September 1917.]
The entire camp was in chaos, the hospital itself a battlefield. The war had come home indeed. As they entered the hospital, they watched a continuous line of men filing in from the barracks carrying their blankets or being themselves carried.
Vaughan recorded this sight: “hundreds of young stalwart men in the uniform of their country coming into the wards of the hospital in groups of ten or more. They are placed on the cots until every bed is full and yet others crowd in. The faces wear a bluish cast; a distressing cough brings up the blood-stained sputum.”
Care was almost nonexistent. The base hospital, designed for twelve hundred, could accommodate at most – even with crowding “beyond what is deemed permissible,” according to Welch – twenty-five hundred. It now held in excess of six thousand. All beds had long since been filled. Every corridor, every spare room, every porch was filled, crammed with cots occupied by the sick and dying. There was nothing antiseptic about the sight. And there were no nurses. When Welch arrived seventy out of two hundred nurses were already sick in bed themselves, with more falling ill each hour. Many of them would not recover. A stench filled the hospital as well. Bed linen and clothing were rank with urine and feces from men incapable of rising or cleaning themselves.
Blood was everywhere, on linens, clothes, pouring out of some men’s nostrils and even ears while others coughed it up. Many of the soldiers, boys in their teens, men in their twenties – healthy, normally ruddy men – were turning blue. Their color would prove a deadly indicator.
The sight chilled even Welch and his colleagues. It was more chilling still to see corpses littering the hallways surrounding the morgue. Vaughan reported, “In the morning the dead bodies are stacked about the morgue like cord wood.” As Cole recalled, “They were placed on the floor without any order or system, and we had to step amongst them to get into the room where an autopsy was going on.”
In the autopsy room they saw the most chilling sights yet. On the table lay the corpse of a young man, not much more than a boy. When he was moved in the slightest degree fluid poured out of his nostrils. His chest was opened, his lungs removed, other organs examined carefully. It was immediately apparent this was no ordinary pneumonia. Several other autopsies yielded similar abnormalities.
Cole, Vaughan, Russell, the other members of this scientific team were puzzled, and felt an edge of fear. They turned to Welch.
He had studied with the greatest investigators in the world as a young man. He had inspired a generation of brilliant scientists in America. He had visited and seen diseases in China, the Philippines, and Japan that were unknown in the United States. He had read scientific journals in many languages for years, heard back-channel gossip from all the leading laboratories in the world. Surely he would be able to tell them something, have some idea.
He did not reassure. Cole stood beside him, thinking he had never seen Welch look nervous before, or excited in quite this way. In face Cole was shaken: “It was not surprising that the rest of us were disturbed but it shocked me to find that the situation, momentarily at least was too much for Dr. Welch.”
Then Welch said, “This must be some new kind of infection or plague.”
Source:
Barry, John M. “It Begins.” The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Penguin Books, 2009. 189-90. Print.
Further Reading:
Brigadier General Frederick Fuller Russell
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