The day the pandemic came to Hamilton
One hundred years ago, the city was devastated by a Spanish influenza crisis that was part of a global pandemic. It cost tens of millions of lives around the world. In Hamilton, medical authorities desperately tried to fight back a deadly virus that was k
THEY HAMILTON. KNEW IT WOULD HIT They just weren’t sure when, or exactly where, it would strike.
One hundred years ago — through late September and early October of 1918 — the first cases of Spanish flu were diagnosed at the Armament School of the Royal Air Service in West Hamilton, a First World War training facility located at what is now the McMaster Innovation Park.
It was thought the training facility outbreak had spread from flu cases at the Polish military camp in Niagara-on-the-Lake because of soldiers at each camp being in contact with one another.
WITHIN
WEEKS, the numbers of cases skyrocketed across the city. People started dying, beginning with several soldiers from the armament school. The first civilian death, on Oct. 3, was a 25-year-old woman named Hatty Wirchowsky, a housewife who lived on King Street West. Her sister would die shortly thereafter.
By the end of December, more than 9,000 people would fall ill in Hamilton with varying estimates from 418 to 635 deaths. The city’s population at the time was about 107,000, a fifth of today’s.
City health authorities did everything they could to cope. They tried to control the spread by telling people not to congregate. They desperately created makeshift hospitals to help the sick. And through it all, a young physician named Dr. William Jaffrey used his skills as a bacteriologist in a desperate effort to find a medical treatment to hold back the spread and limit the dying.
It was part of a global pandemic, a tsunami of illness and suffering that would eventually kill between 20 and 50 million people around the world, with 30,000 to 50,000 deaths in Canada. It was known as the “the greatest medical holocaust in history.”
The pandemic was a merciless horror aimed at a world trying to gain footing from the cataclysmic First World War. Just as the war was finally coming to an end, the flu was beginning, insidiously gaining hold with health-compromised soldiers who would carry the illness home with them to infect their families and friends.
WHO
WOULD HAVE thought with 16 million killed in the Great War, a great virus would come along to kill — by some estimates — three times that number?
The pandemic struck in three waves: The first in early in 1918 with mostly soldiers affected; the second in late 1918 that saw the worst of it, and then a third wave the following year that was not as severe as the second wave, but still devastating.
People at the time were used to seasonal flu, like we experience today.
But Spanish influenza was more severe in key ways. For one thing — unlike seasonal flu — Spanish flu tended to be hardest on young and healthy people. Many developed pneumonia, which killed them. In other cases, the virus itself caused the death by destroying the linings of their lungs.
Spanish flu symptoms included bleeding from the nose, stomach and intestine. Sometimes the victim would die in agony within 24 hours of being diagnosed.
Even doctors were succumbing. Dr. Clarence Graham, 33, died on Oct. 4., becoming the first of 401 influenza victims to be handled by Blachford and Son funeral directors.
Provincial health authorities told undertakers to bury the dead within 24 hours and public funerals were banned. In Hamilton, most of the fatalities ended up at the Hamilton Cemetery on York Boulevard with records showing 265 burials between October 1918 and January 1919, with a cause of death listed as either “influenza” or “Spanish influenza.”
Many people took to wearing masks in public places. However, Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. James Roberts at first did not recommend doing so because to him they prevented “the good old ozone from circulating through the nostrils and lungs, and that can do no good.” Eventually, though, face masks were recommended for people in public areas.
But he did much to discourage people from congregating together. Schools and theatres were closed, church services cancelled and store hours shortened. Street cars operated, but only with the windows rolled down.
Medical authorities had no vaccines to protect against flu virus infection, no antiviral drugs for treatment and no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections such as pneumonia.
“This was a disease of unknown origin. So they really didn’t know what was causing it,” said McMaster University professor emeritus Ann Herring, who edited the book “Anatomy of a Pandemic: The 1918 Influenza in Hamilton.”
“It was moving very quickly through the population and there was really nothing medical people could do to cure it or stop the epidemic other than to put into place wellknown public health practices like trying to stop people from congregating and spreading the disease from one another.”
Physicians, she said, didn’t realize they were dealing with a virus. It was assumed the ailment was bacterial. It was not until 1933 that the contagion was finally isolated, allowing medical authorities to develop an effective vaccine.
“It’s well understood that the only thing that really worked during the 1918 epidemic was TLC, tender loving care,” said Christopher Rutty, a University of Toronto professor and Canadian medical historian. HOSPITALS
QUICKLY FILLED and other local buildings — such as Ballinahinch on James Street South, and the Jockey Club hotel at Barton and Ottawa — became temporary isolation hospitals.
Dr. William Jaffrey was the city’s pathologist at the time, filling in for Dr. William Deadman, who was in Europe helping with the war effort. And Jaffrey found himself in the middle of influenza spreading in Hamilton with hundreds of deaths.
But more than that, he set out to help the living by applying his bacteriologist background to the problem, working on a vaccine to prevent people from getting sick and a serum to assist those who were ill.
Others were doing similar work, such as the Connaught Laboratories
Medical authorities had no vaccines to protect against flu virus infection, no antiviral drugs for treatment, and no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections such as pneumonia.
in Toronto, but very few on a local level.
Today, a granddaughter of Jaffrey, a Toronto-based jazz guitarist named Margaret Stowe, is trying to spread word about the physician’s efforts, which were well reported by Hamilton’s three newspapers, The Spectator, The Times and The Herald at the time.
“It’s such an important story and it has been totally — 100 per cent — overlooked,” said Stowe.
“He was intensely huddled over his microscope and doing experiments and tests in his laboratory at the city hospital, trying to come up with something useful against the influenza, which he did.”
The vaccine was of dubious benefit because it was built around a false idea that Spanish flu was a bacteria rather than a virus. But experts today say there may have been some benefit to an antiviral serum that he prepared from blood samples of people who had been sick and gotten better.
He advertised in local newspapers, saying: “In order to prepare serum for the cure of Spanish influenza it is necessary to have blood from those who have been infected and whose temperatures are again normal. Volunteers to save life with their blood are being called for by Dr. Jaffrey at the city hospital. Only a small quantity of blood is necessary to save a life. If you are recovered, give some of your blood ...”
Rutty says “the idea was if you get somebody who you know has had flu and recovered from it, then theoretically they have some sort of immunity.”
But he noted “it was very hard to know what was actually happening because of the medical science of the day.” Rutty says Jaffrey’s efforts to pass on antibodies might have helped some people who were severely ill with pneumonia.
A story in the Hamilton Herald said a local doctor was taken to the city hospital in critical condition, and it was thought that nothing could save his life.
Jaffrey had just completed an experiment with a serum and as a last resort gave an injection of the new serum. The result showed a marked re-establishment of vitality, and the article said “three later injections has put the doctor far on the road to recovery.
“The first experiment with the medical man was so satisfactory that in every serious case at the hospital, when the serum can be had, an injection has been made and invariably it has proved successful,” the article said.
Rutty says it’s possible the serum might have helped by creating some immunity to pneumonia. But it’s also possible patients simply recovered on their own. He doesn’t believe there were any negative consequences with the serum or the vaccine.
“In theory it could work, essentially trying to pass immunity on from one person to another. But there was no way to measure that. That was the problem. What happens when the timing of the treatment was at the same time as the patient was going to get better anyway? It’s very hard to associate the two directly,” said Rutty.
“At that time it was a real crisis and people were doing whatever they could do. Most places didn’t have anybody doing what Dr. Jaffrey was doing. For a doctor on his own initiative to say ‘I am going to do this based on what was known at the time,’ to honestly try something that had been tried in different contexts before, it was a good thing.”
There were other people doing similar things in other parts of the world, he said, because that was the prevailing understanding of the roots of the illness.
“It wasn’t anything that new, but he was pioneering in a local sense to do something in response. He took a brave approach to do something locally. He applied what he knew and he was able to provide some measure of hope to deal with the crisis,” said Rutty.
“The first experiment with the medical man was so satisfactory that in every serious case at the hospital, when the serum can be had, an injection has been made and invariably it has proved successful.” HAMILTON HERALD Oct. 25, 1918