Rude Health

Maurice Gueret on the war we’re waging

Lessons from 1918

Two years ago, I reviewed a new book by Irish academic, Dr Ida Milne. Stacking the

Coffins, pictured right, is a mesmeric read about Spanish flu, and how it impacted on our country, particularly on ordinary families. If you are looking for a wider view to get you through the Covid-19 crisis, rather than the current diet of daily statistics, this is the book. See if your local bookseller can deliver it, or failing that, maybe ask Mr Bezos, proprietor of Amazon. It’s also available for Kindle. Spanish flu came at us in waves, and we need to remember this when orders are given to relax the social and working restrictions we have become used to. That pandemic lasted a full two years, from January 1918 until December 1919. It may be wishful thinking to imagine there is only a single curve to be flattened. The advantages we hold over our great-grandparents are in both communications and vaccine discovery. Our great hope is that before the first year is out, many of us will have been immunised against this coronavirus. As I write this piece, Ireland’s coronavirus death toll is in the low hundreds. It’s sobering to recall that 23,000 of our ancestors perished here from the Spanish flu. Among her conclusions, Dr Milne suggests that the major impact of our last pandemic was on neither politics or medicine, but on the private lives of individuals and families. Fear, the loss of loved ones and changed economic circumstances were the things that bore down most upon real people.

Pandemic lingo

The language of war is too easy. Somebody on the BBC has been speaking of the ‘Battle of Britain’ spirit exhibited by NHS staff during this pandemic. The following day, there was a big story about the dearth of personal protective equipment (PPE) in hospitals and care homes. Another commentator suggested this could be Britain’s Dunkirk moment. So much for Basil Fawlty’s exhortation not to mention the war. It’s not only a British thing. Across the Atlantic, the waves of deaths that struck New York, Detroit and other cities were carelessly compared to the Japanese air raids on Pearl Harbour. President Macron of France also declared: “Nous

sommes en guerre”, but had the good sense not to mention whether his favourite battle was Hastings, the Somme or Waterloo. Newspapers have done a difficult job well in the current pandemic. Bringing obscure medical specialities to the masses is never easy. Top marks to the London Times for carrying an interview with an Ebola and Aids expert who they headlined as the ‘Mick Jagger of Microbiologists’.

The whiff of rock ’n’ roll wore off later in the interview when they described him as a cross between Louis Pasteur and Indiana Jones. We live in strange days. Being just an expert is not enough.

Confession

Priests and doctors have one thing in common. We like to accuse them of not practising what they preach. I felt sorry for the chief medical officer of Scotland who resigned when it was revealed that she had travelled from Edinburgh to her holiday home for two weekends in succession. The sin was that this contravened her own advice. We wouldn’t be too forgiving of our Leo if he spent a weekend barbecuing outside a Courtown caravan, having advised mobile-home sites to close. Unusually for a chief medical officer, Dr Catherine Calderwood is a maternity specialist by training and not a public health doctor. She hails from a well-known medical family in Belfast and did her medical training in Glasgow. She isn’t the only doctor to get into trouble over coronavirus. New Zealand’s health minister is Dr David Clark, a Presbyterian minister whose PhD is in existentialism rather than epidemics. Earlier this month, the Ironman fan blotted his prayerbook by riding on a mountain-bike trail that was more than two kilometres from his home. Not only that, he drove his family 20 kilometres for a walk on the beach. Luckily for him, he didn’t have to resign. A quick confession and penance were enough.

Indecent exposure

Talk abounds about how doctors and nurses should dress for self-protection in the pandemic. Glad to spot that somebody has spared a thought for patients. There was a recent call in a medical journal for a dignified redesign of hospital gowns and less use of them. But some doctors worry that abandoning gowns may hinder examination and cause important signs to be missed. This debate is as sure to continue as cold bums.