Several of the scenes depicted
in Black Dawn: The Next Pandemic have been drawn
directly from accounts of people who lived through the "Spanish
Flu" pandemic of 1918-1919. Here are the original sources
upon which we based the dramatic scenes:
Empty
streets:
 In
the docudrama, nurse Jane MacDonald describes a trip through downtown
Toronto during the peak of the pandemic:
“I
went downtown today, in the afternoon, and
I didn’t see a single
soul. No cars, no bikes, no buses. Not a single store open. Y’ know,
it was really... creepy.”
Original account from the recollections
of Alfred Hollows of Wellington, New Zealand:
“Our death rate was really quite appalling - something like
a dozen a day – and the women volunteers just disappeared,
and weren’t seen again ... I stood in the middle of Wellington
City at 2 P.M. on a weekday afternoon, and there was not a soul to
be seen – no trams running, no shops open, and the only traffic
was a van with a white sheet tied to the side, with a big red cross
painted on it, serving as an ambulance or hearse. It was really
a City of the Dead.”
John M. Barry, “The Great
Influenza: The Epic Story of the Greatest Plague in History” (2004),
p333.
The dead and the dying:
In the docudrama, a reporter in India describes
the scene there:
“Hospitals
are so choked, it is impossible to remove the dead to make room
for the dying. Burning ghats and burial grounds are literally piled
with corpses.”
 Original
account from
the worldwide spread of “Spanish Flu” in October 1918:
“Perhaps the greatest horror was occurring
in India. All over India, immense mountains of bodies were rising
beside fiery ghats. Oozing through the slums of Calcutta, the Hooghly
River was 'choked with bodies.'
The Associated Press reported:
"Streets and lanes of
India’s cities
are littered with the dead. Hospitals are so choked,
it is impossible to remove the dead to make room for
the dying. Burning ghats and burial grounds are literally
piled with corpses."
Lynette
Iezzoni, “Influenza 1918: The Worst Epidemic in American
History” (1999), p94.
How death takes hold:
In the docudrama, nurse Jane MacDonald explains
how a flu victim dies:
“In
some patients, when their lungs are collapsing, they get bubbles
of air trapped just below the surface of their skin, starting
at their neck and sometimes spreading throughout
the rest of their body. And when those patients move they crackle
and pop like cereal in milk.”
 Original source from the Proceedings of the
Royal Society of Medicine. Here are a British physician’s
comments about the severe effects of the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919:
“One thing I have never seen before – namely the occurrence
of subcutaneous emphysema ” – pockets of air accumulating
just beneath the skin – “beginning in the neck and
spreading sometimes over the whole body.
Those pockets of air leaking through ruptured
lungs made patients crackle when they were rolled onto their
sides. One navy nurse later compared the sound to a bowl of rice
crispies, and the memory of that sound was so vivid to her that
for the rest of her life she could not tolerate being around anyone
who was eating rice crispies.”
John M.
Barry, “The Great
Influenza: The Epic Story of the Greatest Plague in History” (2004),
p235.
All hands on deck:
In the docudrama, nurse Jane MacDonald describes
the scene in the hospital to a television reporter:
“If
you haven’t
been in there, you, you couldn’t imagine it. Pools of blood
scattered throughout the rooms from several nasal hemorrhages. People,
staff can’t avoid stepping in the mess ‘cause the people
are packed in so closely together. Floors are slippery and wet
and... Cries and groans from the terrified just add to the confusion.
This is hell.”
 Original source: Colonel Gibson wrote about his
regiment’s
experience on the Leviathan,
a warship which ferried troops back and forth from Europe during
1918. It was also carrying the Spanish Flu, and eventually it became
a death ship.
"The ship was packed ... (C)onditions
were such that the influenza could breed and multiply with
extraordinary swiftness ... The number of sick increased rapidly,
Washington was apprised of the situation, but the call for men
from the Allied armies was so great that we must go on at any cost
... Doctors and nurses were stricken. Every available doctor and
nurse was utilized to the limit of endurance. The conditions during
the night cannot be visualized by anyone who had not actually seen
them ... (G)roans and cries of the terrified added to the confusion
of the applicants clamoring for treatment and altogether a true
inferno reigned supreme.
"It was the same on other ships. Pools of blood
from hemorrhaging patients lay on the floor and the healthy tracked
the blood through the ship, making decks wet and slippery.
Finally, with no room in sick bay, no room
in the areas taken over for makeshift sick bays, corpsmen and
nurses began laying men out on deck for days at a time. Robert
Wallace aboard the Briton remembered lying on deck when a storm
came, remembered the ship rolling, the ocean itself sweeping
up the scuppers and over him and the others, drenching them,
their clothes, their blankets, leaving them coughing and sputtering.
And each morning orderlies carried bodies away."
John
M. Barry, “The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Greatest
Plague in History” (2004), pp305-306.
| H5N1 is not considered a pandemic virus
at this time. There have been no human cases of H5N1 reported
in Canada as of January 11, 2006. |
Internet resources about the "Spanish
Flu" of 1918:
Further reading about the impact of the Spanish Flu during
1918-1919:
- John M. Barry, “The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of
the Greatest Plague in History” (2004)
- Eileen Pettigrew, “The Silent Enemy: Canada and the Deadly
Flu of 1918” (1983)
- Lynette Iezzoni, “Influenza 1918: The
Worst Epidemic in American History” (1999)
- Gina Kolata, “Flu: The Story of the Great
Influenza Pandemic
of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It” (1999)
- Fred R. van Hartesveldt, “The 1918-1919 Pandemic of Influenza:
The Urban Impact in the Western World” (1993)
- Richard Collier, “The Plague of the Spanish Lady” (1974)
- Betty O'Keefe, Ian MacDonald, “Dr. Fred and the Spanish
Lady: Fighting the Killer Flu” (2004)
- Pete Davies, “Catching Cold: The Hunt For A Killer Virus” (1999)
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