History repeats itself over 100 years down the road

Country Living with Francis Farragher

History does tend to repeat itself and especially so it seems in the case of health issues. In the middle of January, I penned a piece about probably the greatest pandemic ever to hit the world, namely the rather inaccurately entitled Spanish Flu that raged from 1918 to 1920.

There’s a large cohort of the population that’s still just a generation away from that health catastrophe that took its name from the fact that word got out about the virus when the Spanish royal family took ill with the flu.

However, most historians seem to agree that the 1918 flu was rampant in the battlefields of Europe during the first half of that year and may have been a major contributory factor in the ending of the Great War in November.

A century ago, information was a lot slower in being disseminated and the warring states across Europe and the world weren’t exactly too keen either on letting word get out about the great silent killer in the trenches.

Still, word spread mainly through the newspapers, word-of-mouth and letter-writing that this unknown killer was spreading through the world’s population, and like the coronavirus virus of today, there was a sense of helplessness about what could be done about it.

In many ways, there was a lot of similarities between the advice given out 100 years ago and today’s guidelines. Irish people read in their newspapers back in 1918/’19 about keeping away from crowded assemblies; engaging in good hygiene practices; not spitting in public; avoiding contact with people who had the flu; and staying away from wakes.

Now 100 years on, we’re beginning to hear the same advice about funeral gatherings and probably the dropping of the traditional Irish gesture of sympathy, namely the handshake.

According to research carried out by one Dr. Ida Milne, a researcher and authority on the Spanish Flu in Ireland, there was also an element of quackery in terms of some of the recommended treatments such as opium, quinine, large amounts of whiskey and brandy, as well as a number of poisons including calomel and strychnine, the latter a well known rat poison of some years back.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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