bjgreen
(Image: National Archives)
By Betsy J. Green
(I had no idea when I was writing about the Spanish Flu epidemic for my 1918 and 1919 WBW books that another flu would be in the news in 2020, but I thought Edhat readers would like to read about how we coped with the flu a century ago.)
Back in August 1918, there were no cases of the Spanish Flu in Santa Barbara yet, but articles in the local paper recommended that people start wearing masks if they became sick.
A local doctor gave a talk at the Rotary Club meeting this month. “Every one of you . . . should wear a mask until your cold is over,” the doctor warned. “There is no other way, and unless it is started soon, the disease, grippe, will seize you in its clutches.”
There was no talk of handwashing. One hundred years ago, viruses and their transmission were not as well understood as they are today. (I’ll have more items about the Spanish Flu in Santa Barbara in future posts.)
Betsy’s Way Back When book — 1919 — is now available in local bookstores and at Amazon.com. This is the sixth book in her series of the history of Santa Barbara, one year at a time. Learn more at betsyjgreen.com
HandwashingThanks for this interesting post. !LA had less fatality than SF due to vigilance and draconian poliices. Not sure I am sold that handwashing was not part of the protocol. Found a great article on the topi: “In 1846, Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis was confident that bacteria and viruses played a part in causing diseases, but he had no proof…..Semmelweis determined that because doctors were not sterilizing themselves after performing autopsies they were passing along the disease to new mothers, causing illness and death. He instructed all of his staff to wash their hands and instruments with soap and chlorinated water before deliveries. As a result, the death rate of the mothers dropped dramatically, from 20% to 2%. The medical community could not believe that hand-washing so dramatically slowed the spread of germs…” Interesting historical question – why did his finding not find its way into SB protocols? LA protocols? THe article continues: ” Unfortunately, the good doctor was not tactful in arguing his case and was universally ridiculed. Semmelweis lived the rest of his life in relative obscurity.” Oh -thesource: The 1918 Flu Pandemic & the History of Hand-Washing. by Steven Dugan
In this case, the “deniers” were the scientific community, who resisted believing that maternal deaths were indeed caused by doctors not washing their hands after doing autopsies. The lone doctor was the “proclaimer” introducing new scientific information, that microbes cause disease and that handwashing prevents the transmission of certain diseases.
Ignoring what the data tells you does not make you a Galileo-level genius, and that’s what climate science deniers do. In the cases discussed here, the data on hand washing eventually won the day.
Not “the scientific community”, but rather practicing doctors because Semmelweis couldn’t offer a scientific explanation for why handwashing reduced infection. Scientists such as Pasteur and Lister looked at the data and developed the germ theory of disease. In the case of anthogenic global warming, not only is there overwhelming evidence that is it happening but the physics is well understood. The climate science deniers deny the former and are unfamiliar with the latter. http://www.thelearnedpig.org/ignaz-semmelweis-and-anthropogenic-global-warming/2490
Indeed, piggybacking off of Semmelweis and handwashing to justify climate science denial is typical of the extreme dishonesty from that quarter than I have commented on before. Semmelweis was not a “lone denier”, he was a lone confirmer — the deniers were the doctors who refused to believe the evidence. There was no “scientific consensus” — science had not weighed in on the matter; the germ theory of disease had not yet been developed, and there was no alternative *scientific* theory of disease. And there is no “lone denier” (of what? Of climate science!) comparable to Semmelweis (again, *he* didn’t deny the facts, he affirmed them) — there are a bunch of dishonest and ignorant yahoos. The counterparts to Semmelweis are the scientists … originally few in number, now universally accepting the reality of anthrogenic global warming causing climate change, just as we universally accept the reality of microbes causing disease.
It’s a great example of how a “scientific consensus” can be proven wrong, and a lone “denier” can be proven correct.
Thanks for another enjoyable early-Sunday-morning-read-over-coffee. And looking forward to another of your delightful talks this Wednesday at Rockwood!
My posts are based on articles published by the newspapers in Santa Barbara, not the entire world. There was no mention of hand washing in the SB papers during the flu epidemic in 1918-19.