The above is an excerpt from a North Dakota nurse’s vivid and painful letter to the editor about the Spanish influenza, published in the December 1918 issue of AJN. To read the entire letter, click here (and then click on the PDF link in the upper right corner of the page) or click on the excerpt itself. We’ve combed through our archives for articles dealing with various influenza epidemics and threats of epidemics, and found some fascinating material that puts what we’re currently going through in some perspective. To see the entire collection of articles, covering 1918 to the present, click here. (Note: some articles are free and some are accessible only to AJN subscribers. The older articles are available only in PDF format.)
“Pitiable Indeed” – AJN Archives Reveal Nurse’s Firsthand Account of 1918 Flu
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About the Author: Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor
Senior editor, American Journal of Nursing; editor of AJN Off the Charts.
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My Grandmother grew up on a farm outside of Wahpetan, North Dakota. She and all of her family survived the Spanish influenza without a single loss. Bizarrely, She actually had fond memories of it because she enjoyed playing pretend nurse to sick family members. She did remember, though, that there were a lot of familiar faces in the town she never saw anymore after 1919. I suppose being only 7, not losing family, and being mostly isolated on a farm, she didn’t really physically see the impact of it all to have bad memories of the time.