CENTURIES OLD

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVI, Issue 173, 23 June 1926, Page 12

CENTURIES OLD

ANTIQUITY OF INFLUENZA. MEDIAEVAL SUPERSTITIONS. How old is influenza in epidemic form? AVho were the first people to suffer from the scourge, with its delirious headaches and its legacy of black depression? It is an absorbing study to plunge back through the vistas of history a\id discover how tho march of tho World’s progress, even the advance of civilisation, Las carried new diseases, as well as i.ew ideas, in its train. AVo now know that tho cold shivers of early' influenza shook French gallants in slashed doublets and hose. A\k> know, too, that its cruel headaches gnawed and throbbed beneath tho powdered wigs of English gentlemen of Anne’s day. If medical science of to-day could bo made retrospective, we might even find that those savage fevers of tho ’flu flushed worried faces behind steel visors in the romantic years when knights did combat. AVe might even have to revise much of our history. Many a king, many a noble figure whom, contemporary historians tell us died of “a mysterious ague” or'was “stricken with a palsy,” or was taken to his death-bed of a fever, may have caught a severe chill and developed fatal pneumonic influenza.

Medical science was then only in its rudimentary stages. A dense fog of ignoranco enshrouded the causes and the incidence of more maladies than those that could be diagnosed.

Divine wrath was believed to send the human race diseases as a chastisement, and to search for tangible earthly cause was considered a defianco of the decrees of Providence. In those days if grave pathologists in white coats had isolated germs on culture plates they would have beenburned at tho stake as dabblers in black magic. The name “influenza” has developed from tho word “influence,” which was applied with special force to a pandemic as early as the seventeenth century. At that period Italy feared it as the most deadly of pandemics. The French people called it “la krippe,” and regarded it as the death gage. PARIS RAVAGED IN 1557. Research to discover dates of influenza epidemics has reached impenetrable fogs round about the sixteenth century. Old records indicate than an epidemic of influenza ravaged Paris m L 557. It seems to have swept tho city so relentlessly that the church services were suspended and the law sessions abandoned. It has been established that epidemic influenza raged in various parts of tho world, in 1676, 1703, and in 1737. Emanations of active volcanoes were blamed for making people sneeze into their laco ruffs and their snuff boxes of the respective periods. Obviously more facts were available to definitely fasten on the “flu” the epidemics that blazed up in 1782, in 18U3, in 1833, and in 1848. It is clear that though influenza was known long before the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the opening up of new countries and the wider traffic in commerce that followed spread the seeds of many of tho later epidemics. Infection was spread by direct intercourse along definite trade routes in tho great pandemic of 1889. In that year it swept eastward through Russia, and its toll of human life was terribly heavy. Most estimates agree that the victims were numbered by millions. There was a desperate, headlong flight south of China, east into Siberia, and west through Russia to escape the deadly germs. Everywhere tho refugees carried infection with them. Influenza even reached the American continent and raged for several months. It broke out in Canada and simultaneously it flared up in Greenland. These two localities wero completely isolated, nor was there communication between them and infected Russia. That fact operated against the general tlmory, that -was propounded at the time, that the source of influenza was to be found in manations that bred in water-soaked ground under a burning sun. OLD THEORIES MODIFIED. Pathologists are now practically in agreement that a bacillus is the cause of influenza. In most or tho earlier epidemics of influenza thero was a general supposition that infection was carried through tho air. Now medical men have modified this view. They do not eliminate the possibility—facts do not allow them—but they are emphatic that infection with the air as carrier must be at a very short range. Research in ..the last great epidemic —that of 1918—showed that up to 20 per cent, of the people who were exposed to tho infection were able to resist it, and they become “carriers.” It has been established, too, that after influenza pandemics such as the disastrous two in 1889 and 1918 sporadic outbreaks of influenza in epidemic form usually follow. In these outbreaks the disease is usually of milder form. The 1918 epidemic lasted four months, claiming 479,000 lives in the United States alone. Since then there liavm been at least four sporadic outbreaks not nearly so extensive, but quite definite in form. That of 1923was by far the most destructive of these. In 1918 it was proved that infection travelled along the world’s trade routes as fast as in the face of the prevailing winds as with them. ' This fact, too, reacted against the theory of wind-borne infection. An interesting hut little known sidelight of the epidemic of 1918 was that just before it began a German submarine put in at the port at Cadiz in Spain. Half her crew were dead from influenza, and influenza broke out at once in Cadiz in virulent form,' and spread rapidly over a great part of Europe.— Sydney Sun.