| hauntedheadnc |
Apr 26, 2020 6:26 PM |
The local news down in Greenville, SC, about an hour away from where I live, steps back in time to see how their city handled things the last time we had a pandemic like this:
Opinion: How Greenville endured pandemic and quarantine in the early 1900s
By Dr. Courtney L. Tollison, Furman University
Quote:
One hundred years ago, Greenvillians were under quarantine. Like us, they didn’t go to school, the theater or the movies. Like us, they ordered food at cafes and restaurants and waited outside. Like us, they wore masks, spent a lot of time outside, and physically distanced themselves, though they remained 5, not 6, feet away from one another.
Like us, they feared the effects of a global pandemic. Though the Spanish Influenza they confronted from 1918-1920 was deadlier, ultimately killing upwards of 50 million globally and 203 Greenvillians in October 1918 alone, the act of quarantining was not as foreign to people living then as it is to us today.
Between 1905 and 1920, Furman University students were quarantined six times on account of measles, meningitis, mumps and the Spanish Influenza. Men training at Camp Sevier, Greenville’s World War I training camp located near modern-day Wade Hampton Boulevard, operated under quarantine restrictions in November 1917 due to a measles outbreak. When the most virulent outbreak of the Spanish Influenza infected Greenville in late September 1918, residents had already been under quarantine earlier that year due to an outbreak of meningitis.
The pandemic of a century ago arrived in three waves over the course of 16 months. Though the second wave was the most virulent, Greenvillians were quarantined again in January 1919 and February 1920, with partial quarantines in 1922 and 1924. There was no vaccine for Spanish Influenza, just as there is no vaccine for COVID-19. However, It wasn’t until the 1930s that medical researchers realized that strain of influenza was viral and not bacterial.
According to oral histories recorded in 1980, Naomi Sizemore Trammell of Poe Mill suffered so badly that she wanted to die, while Ila Hartsell Dodson, then a young girl living on West Avenue near the village of West Greenville, remembers “(b)urning up with a temperature.”
Jessie Lee Carter’s mother helped sick neighbors in Brandon Mill village: “My mother was never afraid of the flu….She said she know’d the Lord was going to take care of her. If (H)e wanted her to have the flu and die, that’s the way for her to go.”
On Fifth Street in the Woodside Mill village, Geddes E. Dodson’s entire family contracted influenza. “I remember we was all so sick, my mother just got up and went to waiting on us, giving us aspirins and hot lemon tea. I had a mattress on my bed, and I perspired so much till it went through the mattress and dripped on the floor. ...It was an awful feeling. We didn’t know whether we was going to live or die….That was the rottenest sickness I ever had in my life.”
Architect Joseph G. Cunningham contracted a mild case of the flu and was eager to return to work. Every day, to deter him, his wife Beulah simply pointed outside, where, from their house on East Park Avenue near Springwood Cemetery, the daily transport of the dead passed.
|
Source. |
Prev