Flu made 1918 'a very bad year'

By Theresa Vargas
Newsday

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Mary Loyola Engel was 10 — had yet to ride in a car and reveled in games of her imagination — when death and sickness swept across the world.

"I remember it very clearly," the now 95-year-old said last week. "Everyone was very frightened."

It was 1918, and the Spanish flu had stomped into almost every region, infecting parents and children, grandparents, and, in Engel's case, an older sister. Schools closed, theaters too, anywhere that people gathered.

"There was too much danger; we had to stay home," said Engel, of Rockville Centre, N.Y. "Sometimes the disease lasted only 48 hours and the people were dead. ... There were no antibiotics. They could just try to relieve the symptoms."

The outbreak sent Engel to her first wake. A young mother and baby next door died from the disease, and Engel remembers how the woman was laid out in her wedding dress, holding the child in her arms.

For Carmela Gillico, 89, the image is of her 3-year-old sister, Rose, in a similar scene.

"She looked like a little doll," Gillico said, a serene look sweeping across her face. "That was a bad year, a very bad year."

The disease spread across the globe until 30 million to 40 million people died, about 675,000 of whom were Americans. Doctors told of the disease consuming the body so quickly that a secondary infection of lethal pneumonia that is often associated with death in flu patients never developed before they drowned in the fluids filling their airways.

"We didn't have vaccines," Gillico said. "We had mustard plasters. We had chicken soup."

Patricia Wilson, a resident at St. Catherine of Sienna Village in Smithtown, N.Y., said she remembers her mother's cure, scrubbing down her five children and keeping them from venturing beyond the back yard.

"We had to stay off the streets and be isolated," said Wilson, 94. "We had to wash our hands for everything we did."

Her family was one of the luckier ones with no stories of loss. So, too, was Engel's.

After six months of isolation and experimental drug treatments, doctors released her sister back to her parents, and as a celebration they rented their first car to pick her up.

"We didn't know if we'd ever see her again," Engel said. "They really didn't think children would be able to make it."

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company