Spanish Influenza hits Summerside in the fall of 1918
When the flu that would become known as Spanish Influenza struck in 1918, the final year of the Great War, an estimated thirty million people worldwide died. While claiming far more lives than the war, newspapers buried the pandemic beneath war reporting.
Spanish Influenza was like no flu the world had ever known. It didn’t seek to kill little ones, the elderly or the sick. Rather it attacked the fittest of young adults, pregnant women and indigenous people. It acted much like other flus in that it caused a terrible headache, fever, chills, aching body, runny nose, and cough, but there, the similarities ended. Spanish Influenza viciously went for the lungs, setting up pneumonia that so deprived the body of oxygen that victims turned blue and then black as they drowned in their own fluids with their lungs collapsing. Bleeding from the mouth, nose, eyes, and ears was
common. Spanish Influenza was impatient and killed swiftly. A victim could be fine in the morning and dead by nightfall. In 1918 the medical community was unaware of viruses and chased after bacteria in their
combative battle for a cure. A mere sneeze proved a deadly weapon that placed millions of organisms into the air breathed by all. Though thought to have come out of Spain, history has proven it was American soldiers who carried the virulent virus to Europe in the spring of 1918 – “it was not planted by the Huns.” Quickly it began to kill young healthy soldiers on both sides of the conflict more effectively than guns. Slyly it made them carriers of a silent killer.
It was returning soldiers that brought it to Canada, and not one community escaped, though Quebec and Labrador were hardest hit.
It first appeared in Quebec on September 8th and spread like wildfire. Communities tried to protect themselves by quarantine.
Prince Edward Island went so far as to quarantine itself from the Mainland. Regardless, it arrived, and the province banned church, school and public gatherings as the epidemic “swept over the province from end to end.”
Summerside public officials were concerned for people’s health, but did not want to negatively impact the economy of the town by preventing public gatherings, and closing businesses. The Board of Health took a wait and see attitude. But as more and more quarantine signs went up outside homes, the board decided on October 24th to prohibit public funerals and order all businesses, with the exception of drugstores, butcher shops, restaurants, and hotels closed by 6 in the evening, including Saturday, the big shopping night.
By October 30th the town of 3000 had 190 cases of influenza. In a matter of four weeks Summerside buried eighteen of its citizens – the same number it had lost in four years of war. By mid-November the crisis was over, restrictions lifted, and life resumed, but the scars of the epidemic were carved deeply on peoples’ souls.