A Mad Raging Womb

I didn’t cover whether being a woman made you more likely to be considered “mad” in last week’s memorandum—“Fit to be Tied (in a Straitjacket).”
For centuries this was so, but the situation is slightly better today.

From left to right, Judy Bernly (Jane Fonda); Violet Newstead (Lily Tomlin); Franklin Hart (Dabney Coleman); and Doralee Rhodes (Dolly Parton) in a scene from the 1980 comedy (about women being demeaned in a white-collar workplace), Nine to Five.

There are more women than men in the U.S., and more women than men are college-educated.
Yet, women run only 10.4% of Fortune 500 companies; and make up only 28% of the current (118th) Congress.
(These are considered “wins” because the Fortune 500 number hovered at 8% for several years, and 28% of Congress is the highest percentage ever.)

For twenty years, 2002-2022, American women (on average) have earned about 80 cents for every dollar earned by men.
(Women sometimes begin their careers at close to wage parity, but lose ground as they age.)
When the average is broken out by race and ethnicity, Black women earned 70 cents for every dollar, and Hispanic women earned 65 cents for every dollar earned by white men.
Companies don’t want employees to discuss salaries in the workplace mainly so women won’t find out how much more men are making than women.

Essentially, there are certain viewpoints about men and women that have been accepted since Greek and Roman times.
Women are viewed as less capable of rational thought and weaker emotionally than men.
To be a real “man” is to be considered strong, logical, and capable.
To be a “woman” is the opposite.
No matter how our own experiences make these ideas ridiculous, this set of beliefs still permeates our religions and Western philosophy.

Virginia Cunningham (Olivia de Havilland) in the center of a group of patients in 1948’s The Snake Pit.
According to the IMDb trivia on this film, at least 13 states changed their mental health laws after this film was released.

When films have dealt with lobotomy, they’ve usually portrayed men: poet Samson Shilitoe in 1966’s A Fine Madness; angry veteran Randle McMurphy in 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; and traumatized US Marshall, Teddy Daniels in 2010’s Shutter Island.
However, in most countries, between 60%-75% of lobotomy patients were women.
(In the U.S., the percentage was 75%.)
Lobotomy (the process of severing the cerebral nerve tracts) was praised for making women more compliant and “feminine.”

Penelope Hildern (Lorna Heilbron) in The Creeping Flesh. The story involves a paleontological skeleton, and an insane mother and daughter. This 1973 horror film is set in the Victorian era, and stars Peter Cushing (as her father) and Christopher Lee (as the madhouse administrator).

Men have long equated female sexuality and madness,
In the 5th century BC, Hippocrates originated the term “hysteria”
(The Greek word “hystera” means “uterus.”), and “hysterical fits” have been discussed ever since.
Flemish doctor Jean Baptist van Helmont asserted, in the 1600’s, that “women are more inclined to madness, depression, and bewitching or enchantment than men because of the influence of the ‘mad raging womb.’”
In the 1860’s, British Dr. Isaac Baker Brown thought he could “correct women’s functional disorders” by removing their sexual organs (for example, the clitoris or their ovaries).
The very influential British psychiatrist Dr. Henry Maudsley claimed, in 1911, that “uterine changes lead to an unstable brain.” 

In the past, asylums were used as a method to control women—especially wealthy women—enabling their male relatives to control that wealth.
(The image of the “mad” beautiful woman has long been romanticized.)
In 1799, famed English actress, author and royal mistress Mary Robinson wrote The Natural Daughter with Portraits of the Leadenhead Family, in which the lead character (Mrs. Morley) is falsely imprisoned in a madhouse.
Mrs. Morley is eventually able to free herself, and her own mother, from the asylum.

Still from 1948 film The Woman in White with Laura Fairlie (Eleanor Parker) and Count Fosco (Sydney Greenstreet).

Wilkie Collins wrote The Woman in White, in which hero Walter Hartright rescues a beautiful woman who has been drugged and carted off to an asylum, in order that her estate be inherited by Count Fosco’s friend.
The 1859 novel has been adapted multiple times.
The earliest play version was performed in 1860, and Andrew Lloyd Webber staged a musical version in 2004.
The earliest film version was a 1912 silent, and the most recent adaptation was a BBC five-part TV series in 2018.

Jessica Lange was nominated (in 1983) for a Best Actress Oscar for playing Frances Farmer in the movie Frances.
This film tells the story of Frances Farmer—a 1930’s film actress who was ostracized, institutionalized and lobotomized because she wanted to play by her own rules.
(There’s some confusion as to whether Farmer was actually lobotomized, but she was definitely held in a mental institution.) 

Mary Todd Lincoln (Sally Field) in 2012’s Lincoln. Mrs. Lincoln gave birth to four sons, but only one child outlived her.
She was holding her husband’s hand when he was assassinated.

That middle class, and wealthy, women were committed to asylums in the 1800’s (mainly by close relatives)—is well documented.*
In 1876, the former First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln, spent time in a private asylum.
Her last remaining son (Robert) had her committed because he believed she was having delusions, and because she spent money on unnecessary household goods—especially draperies and gloves.
(Mary Lincoln smuggled letters out to good lawyers, and notified the press.
After three months, she was released to the custody of her sister.)

Slowly, as the courts gave women more rights—and men had less financial control over their wives and mothers—the “tool,” of incarceration in madhouses, was used less often.
The 1974 Fair Credit Opportunity Act gave women the right to a credit card.
The Supreme Court ruling, Kirchberg vs Feenstra (1981), gave women some control of marital property, when the Louisiana “Head and Master Law” was disallowed.
(Recently, another Supreme Court ruling deprived women of their rights. In June of 2022, the Court overturned Roe vs Wade—the 1973 law which gave women the right to an abortion.)

Currently, the numbers have improved—with 50.8% of the people in mental hospitals being women—almost 50/50.
Yet, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, 27.2% of women experience mental health problems, while only 18.1% of men do.
(Perhaps, the reason is because women are more interested in changing their behavior, as well as more willing to seek help from doctors and psychiatrists.)

White, heterosexual men—especially of Northern European descent—are at the top of the caste system in American society.
Women, along with other groups and colors of people, are on lower rungs of the class structure.
As long as white men play their roles (or pretend to), they’ll keep their freedom, earn more, and retain their privileges.
Stepping outside those “norms,” however, may lead to varying degrees of social censure (including incarceration).

*Lunacy in the 19th Century: Women’s Admission to Asylums in United States of America, by Katharine Pouba and Ashley Tiamen, http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/6687

Fit to be Tied (in a Straitjacket)

Korean War vet Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) thought he could control his situation (by transferring from prison to a mental hospital) in 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

When I look up the word “mad” in my 1984 Webster’s dictionary, the first definition is “afflicted with a mental disorder, or insane.”

The second is “enthusiastic” (as in “mad about something”).
The third definition is “angry and resentful.”
(Some dictionaries on the web switch definitions one and three.)
“Insane” is defined as “afflicted with a serious mental disorder impairing a person’s ability to function.”

We live in social environments, and we function in those environments with varying degrees of success.
People—especially those who live in big cities—are used to living with street people who don’t seem to be functioning well at all.
I lived in New York City from 1972-1999.
While I lived there, I routinely listened to a woman chatting on an imaginary phone in our local Post Office.
I was harangued by a naked woman near Penn Station, and nearly knocked into the street by a homeless man on the Bowery.
On multiple occasions, in Turtle Bay, I saw a man wrapped in blankets clucking like a chicken.
As I walked to work, I concluded that living in New York was like being in a giant pressure cooker, and some individuals couldn’t hack it.

R.D. Laing (David Tennant) addressing his audience in the 2017 film Mad to be Normal.

Michael Gabon and Gabriel Byrne played patients.

Psychiatrist R.D. Laing was known for rejecting surgery, electroconvulsive therapy, and most medications to treat mental illnesses.
He wrote The Divided Self in 1960. (I remember attending one of his lectures, probably in the late 1970’s, and Tennant’s performance brings back memories of that occasion.)

In The Divided Self, Dr. Laing said: 

When I certify someone insane, I am not equivocating when I write that he is of unsound mind, may be dangerous to himself and others, and requires care and attention in a mental hospital. However, at the same time, I am also aware that, in my opinion, there are other people who are regarded as sane, whose minds are as radically unsound, who may be equally or more dangerous to themselves or others and whom society does not regard as psychotic and fit persons to be in a madhouse.

Essentially, Dr. Laing was saying that it’s difficult to determine what behaviors are “mad,” since people are reacting to difficult circumstances.
Sometimes, it can just be a matter of what behaviors we are willing to accept from others, or who is in societal control.

Hollywood movie actress Frances Farmer (Jessica Lange) had strong political viewpoints.
According to the screenplay for 1982’s Frances, she ended up being lobotomized in a mental hospital.

Dealing with “mad” people is a problem in communities, especially as cities became larger.
It’s disturbing to be physically threatened by “unpredictable” people, and this frequently happens in cities.
However, since curing people was not an option, locking them up in asylums became the solution.
John Higg’s book, William Blake vs. the World, mentions the London Vagrancy Act of 1714.
It dictated that “homeless people who appeared to have lost their reason could be restrained and confined.”

One of Glenda Jackson’s first film roles was as a madwoman pretending to be assassin Charlotte Corday in 1967’s Marat/Sade—about inmates in the Charenton asylum performing a play for French society.

Confining people was the purpose of asylums like Bedlam (the London hospital founded in 1247), and Charenton (the Paris hospital established in 1645).
Bedlam was also once one of London’s leading tourist attractions.
Londoners, and tourists alike, enjoyed the “antics” of unfortunate patients until 1770—when the practice of displaying patients in a “human zoo” officially ended.

Before a person could be confined to Bedlam, an admission form was filled out.
One question was whether the prospective patient was “melancholy, raving, or mischievous.”
Of course, “raving” and “mischievous” patients were more of a problem for madhouse managers, than melancholy ones.
Raving patients often needed to be held in chains, and were sometimes very loud. 

By the late 1700’s, doctors began to experiment more with actually curing mental disease.
George III, the King of England from 1760-1820, was “treated” for his mental illness with bloodletting, being placed in a straitjacket, and caustic poultices.
Other than the introduction of talk therapy and hypnosis (1890s), the treatment of mentally ill people didn’t change much until the introduction of psychosurgery and electroshock therapies in the late 30’s.
In the 40’s, insulin comas were induced are a “cure.”

In 1946’s Bedlam, Nell Bowen (Anna Lee) challenges conditions at the asylum, and is herself committed to the madhouse by evil George Sims (Boris Karloff, on far left).

(Anna Lee played wealthy matriarch Lila Quartermaine for decades in General Hospital.)

Great and Desperate Cures, by Elliot S. Valenstein, tells the story of lobotomy*—and other radical treatments—for mental illness.
Lobotomy (surgical severance of cerebral nerve tracts) was first introduced in 1935; its’ main purpose was to pacify patients.
Electroshock therapy also began to be used around that time, mainly for depression.
Until psychotropic drugs were developed in the 1950’s, these treatments were widely used to control patient behavior.

According to Valenstein’s book—in the four years between 1949-1952—at least 20,000 lobotomies were performed in the U.S. alone.
(However, Britannica says it was more like 50,000.)
Many surgeries were performed by Dr. Walter Jackson Freeman II—a doctor who helped popularize lobotomy, and helped transform it from a hospital procedure to a “simple office” procedure. 

Dr. Freeman performed lobotomies on patients as young as four, and also on dementia patients.
He performed his last lobotomy in February of 1967.
(This was the third lobotomy he performed on this particular patient; he’d also operated on her in 1946 and 1956.)
However, the third time wasn’t “the charm.”
He accidentally caused a hemorrhage, and she died.

Over the years, doctors stopped using icepicks for lobotomies and started directing electrodes into brain targets.
By the time Great and Desperate Cures was published in 1985, lobotomy was in disrepute, but occasional psychosurgeries were being performed.
Forms of psychosurgery, and electroshock, are still being used today, but to a limited degree.

Perhaps, because the surgery involves the human brain—the seat of creativity—creatives have been fascinated by the idea of lobotomy.
In 1966’s A Fine Madness (novel and screenplay by Elliott Baker) poet Samson Shilitoe (Sean Connery) undergoes a prefrontal lobotomy.
Most of us remember 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (based on a 1962 novel by Ken Kesey), which portrays both psychosurgery and electroshock therapy.
In 1994’s The Shadow (set in the 30’s) villain Shiwan Khan ends up with part of his frontal lobe excised.
Martin Scorsese’s 2010 film Shutter Island (set in the 50’s) also deals with this subject, but it would be a crime to explain the plot, if you haven’t seen the film.

Push comes to shove when people assume that they are functioning well enough, but society thinks they are NOT.
That’s when policemen and psychiatrists step in, mentally ill people are killed or seriously injured (sometimes, as they seek help), psychotropic medications are prescribed, and patients were once given electroshock treatments, lobotomized, or placed in padded rooms and straitjackets.

Today, the country is polarized.
On one side there are Trump supporters who believe Democrats are “brainwashed by mainstream media,” and “evil” by nature.
On the other side, there are Independents, Democrats and RINOs who are baffled as to why people still follow a person like Trump.
Terms—like derangement, brainwashed, insane, psychopathic, unstable, crazy, idiotic, mad and evil—are tossed around.
(Listen for these words as you watch Sunday morning news shows.)
Each side can’t figure out why the “other side” thinks the way they do, and so they consider the opposing side’s “strange and unacceptable thinking” to be “mad.”
Thank goodness, TPTB no longer believe “mad thoughts” can be excised through surgery.

*In Great and Desperate Cures, Valenstein describes a lobotomy: “after drilling two or more holes in a patient’s skull, a surgeon inserted into the brain. . .instruments. . . often without being able to see what he was cutting, destroyed parts of the brain.” (Lobotomy was a very imprecise business.)

A 40,000-book Personal Library

I recently read Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions by Alberto Manguel.
However, I was left with two burning questions after finishing the book: where did his library end up, and how large was the collection that he packed up?
Wikipedia (not Packing My Library) gave me the answers.
Alberto Manguel donated his 40,000-book collection to the Center for Research in the History of Reading, in Lisbon, Portugal.

Alberto Manguel is a novelist, translator, editor, reviewer, and library director.
Over his life, he’s lived in at least eight countries—Argentina, Canada, Israel, France, England, Tahiti, Mexico and the United States (New York City).
I wonder how many times he’s packed up his books, and how long some sections of his collection have been in storage?

The burning of the Library of Alexandria.

I especially enjoyed the ten digressions in Packing My Library.
One digression is about the Library of Alexandria, which some historians say was consumed in a fire started by Julius Caesar’s troops in 48 B.C.
Manguel believes, however, that only the overflow of books (near the port), was actually set aflame.
He considers the great library’s actual fate to be a mystery.
The digression mentions some of the great plays that were lost forever with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria—72 by Euripides, between 63-73 by Aeschylus, and 116 by Sophocles.

Scene from Games of Thrones, showing the vast library of the Citadel.

My husband and I are long-time bibliophiles.

However, our combined libraries aren’t even close to 40,000 books.
One of our brother-in-law’s parents were both librarians, and their joint collection (all left to him after his parents died), was once bigger than ours.
It was never close to 40,000 either.
I think I understand why Mr. Manguel packed up all his books.
He was in his early 70’s when, for various reasons, he had to give up the large space (in France) which had held his spectacular collection.
He needed to make sure that his books had a good home—a home that he could visit, on occasion—but not one that he owned, or paid rent on.

Manga version of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

A few years back, Marie Kondo (Konmari) wrote The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up—all about how we should only have items around us that we truly need.

As a result, I do attempt (periodically), to “prune” my book collection.
(We only have so many walls, and we need room for new books.)
I go through each shelf and follow her advice—deciding if each book “brings me joy.”
Some books bring so much joy, that they’re added to the stack near my bed.
Others don’t, so I place them in a box to be donated.
(I find that I miss certain books years after I’ve donated them.)

Cover of Margareta Magnusson’s The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning.

Another book on the subject of possessions—and having enough space for them—is Margareta Magnusson’s The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter.
One point in Magnusson’s book is: “Someone will have to clean up after you.
Whoever it may be will find it a burden.”
Her book made me worry about what would happen to our treasured book collections, if my husband and I died together, not separately.
What would our families do with our valued books?
(None love books quite as much as we do.)
Would our carefully-selected books be donated to a library?
Would they be sold?
Would lovely older editions be tossed in an alley, and only the newer books given good homes?

According to a March 2023 Gallup poll, Americans say that they read less than 13 books a year—the smallest number since 1990.*
Reading among subgroups—like the college-educated—is going down more rapidly.
A few famous people (like Bill Gates) say they read over 50 books a year.
(That’s a number my husband and I are comfortable with.)
However, other well-known people (like Kanye West and Donald Trump), brag that they don’t enjoy books, and have never read for personal pleasure.

My husband and I both realize that to be a lover of books—to the extent of owning a lot of them, or carrying them about—is to be an “oddball.”
The purchaser of our condo, a few years back, refused to buy that apartment unless we first removed the built-in book shelves.
(We were deluded enough to believe that book shelves were a “selling point.”)
Recently, when my husband and I brought books and newspapers to a hospital ER waiting room, a young man warily asked us (as if he was dealing with crazy people) if we really planned to read “all that stuff.”
Yes, we did!

Scene from Twilight Zone's “Time Enough at Last” with Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith) enjoying a book, before his eyeglasses are accidentally crushed.

A favorite The Twilight Zone episode deals with a book worm—Time Enough at Last (season one, episode 8).
This episode features Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith) as a bank teller who “lives to read,” and cares little for human companionship.
(According to the IMDb trivia for this 1959 episode, of the 92 episodes that creator Rod Serling wrote, this episode was Mr. Serling’s personal favorite.)

One of the plot points in Time Enough at Last is that Mrs. Bemis (Jacqueline deWit) dislikes her husband’s love of books, and has actually destroyed some of them.
This lack of harmony is not the case in our family.
Both of us have loved libraries and reading since early childhood, and we are in complete agreement about “book love.”
We routinely point out interesting paragraphs to each other, and read them aloud.
We’re fans of book stores, catalogs, sales and festivals.

Hamlet (Lawrence Olivier) holding an open book.

When asked by Polonius what he was reading, Hamlet responded: “Words, words, words.”

My husband is something of an extrovert, and I’m very much an introvert.
Although Henry Bemis was an introvert, I’m sure that’s not a factor in loving books and reading.
For a while—after COVID hit, in 2020—I found it hard to pick up a book.
This change in my behavior made me realize that I was in an emotional crisis.
After a few months, I was back to reading every day again, and I knew that all would be well.
Reading books is one of the things that makes life worth living.

* According to researchers at the Australian National University, Estonians own an average of 128 books per household, with a third of respondents owning 350 books, or more. The average American household only owns about 29 books.

Condemned to Repeat the Past, Part Two

As I pointed in my previous post; there were some similarities between the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic and the current COVID-19 pandemic.

In 1964’s Masque of the Red Death, Prince Prospero (Vincent Price) faces the embodiment of the Red Death (also Vincent Price).

The world had over one hundred years to prepare for another pandemic, but somehow public health never received the funds it needed (after the 1918 Spanish flu).
Perhaps, the memory of the 1918 pandemic was just too frightening, and the experience had to be buried.
Perhaps, being fully prepared for a pandemic is just impossible.

We've known for a long time how human disease can affect history.
Justinian’s Flea, by William Rosen, explains how the Bubonic Plague (541-549 AD) “killed at least 25 million people; depopulated entire cities, and depressed birth rates for generations,” leading to the Dark Ages.
The 1918 Spanish Flu at least doubled or quadrupled that number, killing an estimated 50 to 100 million people.
However, that flu likely led to the Allied forces beating Germany, and winning WWI,* also shaping history in that sense.
We’re waiting to learn had much COVID-19 will affect this era.
One fact seems obvious.
But for COVID, America would likely be in the middle of a second Trump term.

British actor and political activist, Sir Tony Robinson praised Catharine Arnold’s Pandemic 1918 on the British cover jacket, predicting (in 2018) that “another pandemic could be just around the corner.”

This article is about the differences between the 1918 Spanish Flu and COVID-19.
(Since scientists don’t fully understand either pandemic, a layperson writing this article is an absurd project.)
One difference is in the symptoms.
Both viruses were “shape-shifters,” and each were mistaken (at first) for the common cold.
In Pandemic 1918, British author Catharine Arnold [Note the British spelling of medical terms.] describes symptoms of the Spanish Flu, as the second wave hit, and the disease developed into a more aggressive form:

In the summer of 1918. . . victims collapsed in the streets, haemorrhaging from lungs and nose. Their skin turned dark blue with the characteristic ‘heliotrope cyanosis’ caused by oxygen failure as their lungs filled with pus, and they gasped for breath from ‘air-hunger’, like landed fish. . . Others suffered projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhoea, and died raving as their brains were starved of oxygen.

Catharine Arnold recounts how the Spanish flu starved President Woodrow Wilson’s brain, and he became delusional during his serious bout with the flu (in April of 1919)—during the Paris peace conference.
President Wilson dragged himself out of his sickbed, and rearranged the hotel furniture, saying (perhaps, in a letter or diary):

The greens and the reds are all mixed up here and there is no harmony. Here is a big purple, high-backed covered chair, which is like the Purple Cow, strayed off to itself, and it is placed where the sun shines on it too brightly.

The California State Board of Health advocating that to avoid the 1918 Spanish Flu, people should wear masks.

Essentially, the 1918 Spanish Flu was a bird/avian flu (H1N1 influenza A) and the infected animal (whose virus infected a human) in COVID-19 was (most likely) a bat.
Victims of the 1918 Spanish Flu died from secondary bacterial pneumonia, while victims of COVID-19 usually died from organ failure.
According to the Columbia University Department of Surgery website, hundreds of patients in the U.S. have received double lung transplants, due to COVID-19.

Dr. Edwin Jenner of the CDC (Noah Emmerich) whispers to Sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) in The Walking Dead (“TS-19,” season 1, episode 6) that “Everyone is infected.”

The zombie is an allegory for infectious disease.

Besides the difference in symptoms, the two viruses hit different population groups.
COVID-19 mainly kills people older than 65, as well as people with comorbidities (like diabetes and obesity) and impaired immunity responses.
However, the 1918 Spanish Flu tended to strike people between 20-40, enjoying the prime of their lives—fit vigorous soldiers, and young women of child-bearing age.
Young Walt Disney caught the Spanish flu at the age of 17.
James Thurber was 24 when he became ill.
Georgia O’Keefe was 31.
All of their lives could have cut short if they had died from the flu.
(What we need to remember is that this was just a tendency, and NOT a rule. All types and ages of people caught the Spanish Flu, and all types and ages of people are catching COVID-19.)

Dr. Kimberly Shiroma (center, Tamilyn Tomita) in the 1990s American TV series about fighting biological disasters and conspiracies—The Burning Zone.

While the German DVD packaging is on the web, we're unable to locate an English language version. The series also doesn’t seem to be currently-available on streaming services. 

Wonder why???

While there’s little evidence that there was asymptomatic spread with the Spanish Flu, it’s evident that there was asymptomatic spread with COVID-19.
In Dr. Deborah Birx’s book, Silent Invasion, she comments that “asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic, and even mildly symptomatic spread are particularly insidious, because, with these, many people don’t know they are infected.”
She comments that it was a “huge miscalculation” for the CDC to expect “the new coronavirus to behave like seasonal or pandemic flu.”
Dr. Birx determined that there was asymptomatic spread with COVID-19, and she used math to accurately predict the number of cases.

COVID-19 is reaching double the number of countries on the globe as the 1918 Spanish Flu did—likely, as a result of greater air travel, and the greater intertwining of economies in this century.
In 1918, communities in Alaska could protect themselves with armed guards, and South Pacific islands could bar visitors from landing.
Today, few places are remote enough to prevent contagion.

It’s also interesting that while I can’t find any indication that people caught the Spanish Flu more than once, people are coming down with different strains of COVID-19 multiple times.
Sometimes, patients even have two strains of the COVID virus at the same time!
Public health officials urge those over 65 to make sure that their vaccinations are up to date.

*According to Pandemic 1918, by Catharine Arnold: “By May, influenza had crossed effortlessly over ‘No Man’s Land’ to hit the German army. . . the disease affected 139,000 men during June and peaked in early July.
Influenza had brought the all-conquering German army to its’ knees, while the Allies, stricken too, took advantage of their enemy’s weakness to regroup.”

Condemned to Repeat the Past, Part One

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

—George Santayana, The Life of Reason (1905)

Edvard Munch did a series of self-portraits as he was recovering from the 1918 Spanish Flu.

Famous painters who died of the flu included Egon Schiele and Gustave Klimt.

I think of George Santayana’s aphorism often when I think of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 (the “forgotten pandemic”).
When the office I worked in shut down (in March of 2020) because of COVID, and higher-ups asked employees to all work from home, I also recalled John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza, Gina Kolata’s Flu, and Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague—all books that I’ve read over the years. 

Conspiracy theorist Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) wears his homemade hazmat suit, and places an anti-vaccine flyer on a car, in 2011’s Contagion.

Those books were all in my “disease library” because I’m “somewhat obsessed” with epidemics, pandemics, viruses, plagues, and diseases.
Part of this obsession is due to my Sicilian grandmother (Maria) dying, at the age of 22, in October of 1918 from the Spanish Flu.
She died in a tiny Chicago apartment with my eleven-month-old father, and his 27-month-old toddler brother, nearby in a crib.
No one is sure where my grandfather had wandered; but (according to family lore) my great-uncle (Sam), discovered his dying, pregnant sister-in-law during a wellness check.
In doing so, he likely saved his two nephews from starvation and death.

The 1996-1997 TV show The Burning Zone , which combined epidemics with X-Files-style conspiracies, only lasted 19 episodes, but I was riveted by every episode.

It starred from left to right, Agent Michael Hailey (James Black), Dr. Kimberly Shiroma (Tamlyn Tomita), Dr. Daniel Cassian (Michael Harris) and Dr. Edward Marcase (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). 

I just finished other, more recent, books on this macabre subject—Catharine Arnold’s Pandemic 1918, and Jaime Breitnauer’s The Spanish Flu Epidemic and its Influence on History.

These two books come at the subject from a more personal angle than the scientific perspectives of the books mentioned above—emphasizing the lives, and deaths, of the victims.

Until I read these books, I didn’t realize how much my Dad and Anthony Burgess (the famed British author of the novel A Clockwork Orange), had in common.
His young mother (Elizabeth) was found dead of the Spanish Flu, with her dead eight-year-old daughter in her arms, and her 21-month-year-old son (Anthony Burgess) playing nearby.
(The Spanish Flu, and COVID-19, have in common that they produced a high number of orphans.) 

The Spanish Flu and COVID-19 have several other issues in common.
Both caused death all over the globe, and had significant impacts on the global economy.
The commonly-held belief is that the 2018 Spanish Flu killed 50 million people, but according to Pandemic 1918, “Spanish Flu killed upwards of 100 million souls during 1918-19,” and the true figures are unrecorded.

According to the World Health Organization, there have been nearly seven million deaths, so far, due to COVID-19. 

Elegant mask-wearers in 1918 London. 

Both pandemics ignited public debates over the wearing of masks, and the “mask lesson” was ignored in 2020.
In 1918-19, countries and states created mask laws, so that people could make this minor sacrifice for the collective good.

A streetcar conductor refuses to allow an unmasked rider on board in 1918 San Francisco.

San Francisco, California, was a hotbed of debate in this regard.
According to Pandemic 1918, a San Francisco attorney fought the strict mask ordinance, arguing that it was “absolutely unconstitutional.”
(Enthusiastic policemen had filled the San Francisco city jails with unmasked scofflaws, and arrested 110 people on October 27th, 1918 alone!)
According to Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History (by Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta), Trump, and his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, “were adamantly opposed to actively promoting the use of masks, and face coverings began turning into a partisan Rorschach test of whether you were with Trump or against him.”
While some people refused to wear masks in 1918, it was never politicalized as it was in 2020-2023.

President Woodrow, the president in 1918, and President Trump were both flu victims, and they both came very close to death.
However, both presidents also downplayed their respective pandemics, and politicized their responses.
According to Nightmare Scenario, Wilson’s “dishonesty about the scope of the outbreak led to more sickness and more death.”
According to Abutaleb and Paletta, Trump’s lack of empathy,* worry about his “tough guy” image, and thinking mainly about economics also led to unnecessary deaths.
Although the U.S. developed superior vaccines—and produced them more quickly—the U.S. had a higher death rate than Britain, Germany, Canada, Japan, and many other industrialized nations.

Americans were encouraged to “Eat More Onions” to keep Spanish Flu at bay.

During both pandemics, there was confusion as to possible treatments.
When New York doctors placed children with Spanish Flu on the Roosevelt hospital roof (to get the benefit of fresh air), the general public called it “outrageous.”
In 1918, British doctors used potassium permanganate (a general disinfectant) on public schoolboys to treat flu.
In 2020, Trump grasped at straws, and touted the old anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, and the Ebola drug Remdesivir, as “magic” cures, before either drug could be vetted for the new off-brand use.
Hydroxychloroquine turned out to be not useful at all!

We’ve all heard of “long COVID.”
While people can get “long COVID” after having either mild COVID symptoms, or severe COVID symptoms, people who recovered from a bad case of the Spanish Flu (like President Woodrow Wilson) “were sometimes left with a lifetime’s legacy of nervous conditions, heart problems, lethargy and depression.”
(Pandemic 2018, by Catharine Arnold.)
“Long Spanish Flu” and “long COVID” sound very similar to laymen ears.

We still aren’t certain of the identity of “Patient Zero” for the Spanish Flu, or COVID-19.
According to 2004’s The Great Influenza, the 1918 “Patient Zero” was an U.S. army cook who died in Haskell County, Kansas, in early 1918.
However, Pandemic 1918 (published in 2018) places Patient Zero a year earlier, naming Private Harry Underdown—an English soldier who died in France, on February 21st, 1917.
As to the location of COVID-19’s start, our government places COVID’s transmission from animal (a bat?) to a human in Wuhan, China—either in a “wet” market, or in a lab.
However, in April of 2020, the deputy director of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Zhao Lijian) taunted President Trump, alleging that the virus “might have” originated in an American soldier who traveled to Wuhan. 

The comic No Ordinary Flu, produced in 2006 by King County in Seattle, Washington

You can read the entire comic HERE.

Essentially, the U.S. had over one hundred years to prepare for another pandemic and while the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations all wrote playbooks, and published white papers, the threat wasn’t given nearly the budget that it warranted.
The horrors of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic weren’t mentioned in school textbooks, or even covered well in medical textbooks.
The world decided to forget the lessons from the “greatest medical holocaust in modern history”—part of the U.S. edition subtitle for Catharine Arnold’s Pandemic 1918—and paid the price in 2020-2023.

This is Part One of my article comparing the 1918 Spanish Flu to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This part deals with the similarities between the two pandemics.

Part Two, next week, will deal with the differences.

*President Trump seemed to exhibit little empathy for COVID-19 victims. This is odd because his grandfather, Frederick Trump, died of the Spanish Flu in late May of 1918. According to Trump biographer Gwenda Blair, Frederick was out walking with his 12-year-old son Fred (Trump’s father) when he suddenly felt ill and was rushed home to bed. He died soon after.