The United States entered the Great War on April 6, 1917. Thousands of Americans were trained and sent overseas, where they mixed with military personnel and civilians from Europe, Africa, and western Asia, creating an ideal environment for the spread of influenza. The first wave of the epidemic struck Europe in the spring of 1918. Demobilized servicemen carried the disease back to Boston, where the deadly second wave began in early September.
Hundreds of sailors in training at the Navy’s Harvard Radio School were billeted in college halls and in temporary barracks on Cambridge Common; they mingled freely with locals and went on day trips to nearby tourist spots. On September 8, alarmed by the high number of cases, Navy medical personnel placed the school under a 10-day quarantine. By then the epidemic had spread into civilian Cambridge.
Mayor Edward Quinn vowed to turn the city into a “disease fighting machine.” City schools were closed–“some 3,400 students were reported ill … nearly a quarter of the total enrollment” (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the 1918-1919 Influenza Epidemic, http://www.influenzaarchive/org). Church services and lodge meetings were banned and soda fountains, ice cream parlors, pool rooms, bowling alleys, billiard halls, and public auction rooms shuttered. Everyone wore masks.
There was a city-wide shortage of doctors, nurses, and hospital beds; cases multiplied too quickly to count. District and Visiting Nurses were dispatched wherever needed; residents “offered their automobiles and services as operators to get them about. During the next five weeks, from September 25, [the nurses] made 2,527 calls.”
35 Bigelow Street. The Cambridge VNA was established in 1904.
On September 27, the Board of Health declared a public emergency, which enabled them to commandeer the Merrill School and convert it, room by room, into an emergency hospital for the seriously ill. Initially, no “nurses or doctors could be found in the usual way and we had to depend on volunteers. It is greatly to the credit of many married women who had been trained in hospital, and to the schoolteachers unoccupied … who cheerfully volunteered their services [and] gave up their homes to assist in this emergency. Others who could not do nursing volunteered for other duty [such as clerks, organizers, and supply managers] and the firemen also gave their days off to assist as the hospital.”
By early October every classroom was in use and every bed (more than 105) occupied. The Massachusetts State Guard erected a dozen tents in the school yard, and influenza patients who had developed pneumonia were moved there.
The Red Cross supplied beds, linens, towels, and surgical aprons and donated “all food which may be needed for patients and nurses and again all medicines and drugs.” Navy physicians served with doctors from other parts of the country that had been dispatched to Cambridge by the state health department.
Cambridge citizens rallied, including Mr. J. Frank Facey, chair of the Committee on Public Safety, who neglected his own printing business to arrange transport for people and supplies, including food stuffs. The Cambridge Neighborhood House on Moore Street became a food distribution center, and Alice Moore, the head worker, supplied soups wherever needed.
By mid-October, the peak of the epidemic had passed. The city lifted the ban on meetings and allowed shops to reopen. The outdoor camp at Merrill was dismantled, although the hospital remained open until November 6. Schools resumed on October 28. From October 4 through the end of 1918, 3,014 cases of influenza were reported; by the end of February 1919, Cambridge had lost 688 residents to influenza and to flu complicated by pneumonia.
On November 11, 1918, the Great War came to an end, and Cambridge celebrated.
Wild and Hilarious Scenes Enacted on Monday on Receipt of News of the Signing of the Armistice
Great story about the citizens of Cambridge working together for a common cause for the welfare of city, state and nation.