CENTURIES OLD

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXI, 18 June 1926, Page 2

CENTURIES OLD

ANTIQUITY' OF INFLUENZA MEDIEVAL SUPERSTITIONS How old is influenza in epidemic form? Wild we ( re the first people to suffer from the scourge, with its delirious headaches and its legacy of black depression? It is an absorbing study (says a Writer in the. Sydney iS-dti) to plunge back through' the vistas of history and discover how the march of the world's progress, even the advance of civilisation, has carried new diseases, as well as new ideas, in its train. We now know that the cold shivers of influenza shook French gallants in slashed doublets and hose. We know, too, that its cruel headaches gnawed and throbbed beneath the powdered wigs of English gentlemen of Anne's day. If medical science of to-day could be made retrospective, we might even find that thcee saVage fevers.of the 'flu flushed worried faces behind steel visors in the romantic years When knights did combat. We 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 ludhrie'ntary stage: A dense fog of ignorance enshrouded the causes and . the incidence of more maladies than those that could be diagnosed. Divine wrath was believed to send tlie human race diseases as a chastise-, riient", and to search for tangible earthly' causes was considered . a defiance of the decrees of Providence. In those days if. grave pathologists in white coats had isolated germs on culture plates they would- have been burned at the stake as dabblers in black magic. The name "influenza" has developed frOm he word "influence," which was applied with special force to a prindemic as early as the seventeenth century. At that period Italy feared it as the most deadly of pandemics. Tlie French people called it "la grippe," and regarded it as tlie death gage.

PARIS RAVAGED IN 1557 Research to discover dates of influenza epidemics has reached impenetrable fogs round about the sixteenth cenury. Old records indicate that an epidemic o{. influenza ravaged Paris in 1557. It seems to have swept., the 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.the vyoi'lcl in 1676, 1703, and in 1737. Emanations of active volcanoes were blamed for making people sneeze .into their lace runs and their snuff boxes of the respective periods. Obviously more facts were available to.definitely fasten on the "flu" blame for the epidemics that blazed up in 1782, in' 1803, in 1833, arid in 1848. . It is clear that though influenza was known loh'g before the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the opeuinir up of new countries; ahd, Jtfie .wider traffic Iri commerce,,; that followed; spread the seedt of many of the; later, epidemics. Infection- was,spread by direct intercourse along,definite trade routes, in thereat, pandemic of 1889. In that year it swept eastward through Russia, arid its toll of human life; was terribly heavy. Most estimates agree that, the victims were, numbered by millions.,... -There was .a desperate, headlong flight soiithi>hto China, east into Siberia, and west through- Russia to escape the deadly germs'.*} Everywhere the • refugees carried ■ infection with them. Influenza even reached the American continent _and. raged for 1 -several months. It.hroke out in Canada arid simultaneously ..it. flared up" in Greenland. These two localities, were, completely isolated, h'.br was, there communication .between them and.' infected Russia. The fact operated against, the I general theory that was propounded at the time, that the source of influenza was to be found in, epianatiohs that bred , in watersoaked ground under a burning sun. Pathologists are now practically in agreement that a bacillus is the Cause of influenza. In most of the earlier epidemics of influenza there was a general supposition .that infection was carried .'through the air. Now medical men have modified this view. They do not eliminate the . possibility—facts 'do not allow tliem—but they are emphatic that infection with the air as carrier must be at 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 the infection were able to resist it,• and they -became "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 follows. In these outbreaks the disease is usually of milder form. Tlie 1918 epidemic lasted four months, claiming 470,000 lives in the United States alone. Since then there have been at least four sporadic outbreaks not nearly so extensive, but quite definite in form. That of 1923. was by far the most destructive of these.

In 1918 it was proved that infection travelled along the world's trade rdutes as fast in the face of the prevailing winds as with them. This fact, too, reacted against the theory of windborne infection. An interesting but little known sidelight of the epidemic of 1918 was that just before it_ began a German submarine put in at the port at C!adiz in Spain. Half Her crew were. dead from influenza, . and influenza broke out at once in Cadiz in virulent form, and spread rapidlv over a great part of_Europe.