‘DR. FRED’ ORGANIZED FIGHT AGAINST 1918 FLU PANDEMIC
Vancouver’s first public health officer surmounted lack of resources
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
The spring of 1917 cast gloom even on the happy English Bay home of Frederick Theodore Underhill, his cheerful wife Beatrice and 13 children. In Europe, the war that was to have ended by Christmas 1914 had become a meat-grinder in which the daily death toll was 6,000 men. Yet even worse was coming. By mid-1917, reports trickled in of a mysterious illness in the Far East.
One taking note was Underhill. Vancouver’s first public health officer had recently updated his medical qualifications in the discipline, returning to the University of Edinburgh to do so. And it was a good thing, too, because by 1918 he would be in the midst of a des- perate battle against an enemy that threatened Vancouver like no army ever had — the Spanish Flu. It killed five times as many victims globally in a few months as the First World War did over five years.
Underhill was born in 1858 near Birmingham, England, into a family of physicians. His father and both his grandfathers practised. On leaving school, he did menial chores for a surgeon until he, too, could enrol in medical studies at Edinburgh. He went into practice, married, started a family and served as surgeon for a militia regiment. In 1884, he and his wife, with six children, moved to Mission. They arrived just in time to be driven from their new home by flood waters.
In 1904, having served as a travelling doctor in the Cariboo, he became Vancouver’s public health officer. He quickly established a reputation as a resourceful, forceful advocate for public sanitation, vaccination, education in hygiene and creating a clean public water supply. Vancouver had one of Canada’s worst infant mortality rates. Underhill reduced it to record lows.
His great triumph was anticipating the coming epidemic. He championed frequent handwashing, a ban on public spitting, the wearing of medical masks by people in public occupations. On Oct. 18, 1918, ignoring complaints, Underhill abruptly ordered all schools and public entertainments closed. By Oct. 25, there were 1,300 hospital cases. By Oct. 27, a patient died every hour. The terrifying pandemic killed 778 in Vancouver, but “Dr. Fred” saved thousands. When he retired, the city said: “Handicapped by lack of funds, by lack of staff and by public apathy, he never gave up the fight against dirt and disease, and in his quiet unspectacular way, he achieved great victories.” He died April 17, 1936.