If you got sick in 1918 you didn't have a chance. Folk healers could be found all over America

[NNN0LHI]

http://1918.pandemicflu.gov/life_in_1918/03.htm

Seeking Medical Care

Feeling Sick in 1918?

If you became sick in nineteenth-century America, you might consult a doctor, a druggist, a midwife, a folk healer, a nurse or even your neighbor. Most of these practitioners would visit you in your home.

By 1918, these attitudes toward health care were beginning to change. Some physicians had begun to set up offices where patients could receive medical care and hospitals, which emphasized sterilization and isolation, were also becoming popular.

However, these changes were not yet universal and many Americans still lived their entire lives without visiting a doctor.


How Did Ordinary People View Disease?

Folk Medicine:

In 1918, folk healers could be found all over America. Some of these healers believed that diseases had a physical cause such as cold weather but others believed it had a supernatural cause such as a curse.

Treatments advocated by these healers ran the gamut. Herbal remedies were especially popular. Other popular remedies included cupping, which entailed attaching a heated cup to the surface of the skin, and acupuncture. Many people also wore magical objects which they believed protected the wearer from illness.

During the influenza pandemic of 1918 when scientific medicine failed to provide Americans with a cure or preventative, many people turned to folk remedies and treatments. snip

Bacteriology did not revolutionize the treatment of disease. In the pre-antibiotic era of 1918, physicians continued to rely heavily on traditional therapeutics. During the pandemic, many physicians used traditional treatments such as sweating which had their roots in humoral medicine.

Reflecting the uneven structure of medical education, the level and quality of care which physicians provided varied wildly.

[derby378]

1. At least the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 was already passed

That law determined that any nostrum that made unverified claims to cure disease was "misbranded" and therefore illegal.

Didn't stop all of the quack peddlers, though, but it was a good start.

[lunatica]

2. My grandmother was 18 years old and she got sick

Along with many in the community. Obviously she was one of the survivors, but she was left weakened and sickly for a very long time. Her mother was sure she would die young, but my grandmother somehow became more and more healthy as she grew older. At the end she had angina but she lived to be 93 years old.

[CTyankee]

15. My mother was 7 yrs old in 1918. She used to tell me of seeing so many sick people

yet no one in her family got sick. She lived to be 94, and basically ended her own life by refusing to eat.

It's amazing that some people were just able to resist getting that horrible flu. My family must have been tough old birds...

[Occam Bandage]

3. Well, all that's about as effective as modern treatments for the flu, for most.

Our means of treating viral infections are still mostly rest and liquids. Can't do much. Sure, we're better at stabilizing people in critical condition, we have Tamiflu, and we can vaccinate, but for most people, once you've got the flu, 2009 and 1918 aren't much different in treatment.

[NNN0LHI]

5. The biggest difference is that when the patient of 1918 was overcome by a bacterial infection ...

... like pneumonia it was a death sentence. Now most of those people live after a short regime of antibiotics which weren't invented yet in 1918.

Sounds like a pretty big difference to me.

Don

[trotsky]

7. Not to mention fever-reducing drugs like acetaminophen.

An out-of-control fever was the cause of much morbidity and mortality.

[ieoeja]

14. I imagine climate controlled housing and indoor plumbing would help too. n/t

[Mojorabbit]

4. John Barry's book the Great Influenza

is wonderful reading on the evolution of medicine at the time. It is also chilling as it tracks the evolution of the 1918 pandemic.

[HamdenRice]

6. I interviewed elderly survivors in Africa. I wouldn't say "no chance"

In rural South Africa, the disease came to be known in Dutch-Afrikaans (which even Africans spoke), as "drie dag" or "drie da'e".

That means, "three day(s)." The reason was that once you showed symptoms, you had three days and at the end of three days, you either died, or if you didn't die, you were going to survive.

Lot's of heartbreaking stories.

I wasn't actually interested in the flu. It was that elderly people didn't know when they had been born and couldn't tell dates from their childhood. If you asked them about how old they were during drie dag, you could estimate their age and date the other events they talked about.

[wolfgangmo]

8. While I like the direction medicine took for parts for the last century,

It still kind of bugs me when some people talk about traditional medicine when they are referring to the medicine which was developed in the last 50 - 80 years. Not much of a tradition in a way.

Nothing is pure. Some folk remedies work. So do some pharmacological solutions. It depends upon patient and situation .

This post is most irrelevant. Just stickin my pet peeve in.

[omega minimo]

11. and many medicines based on plant and "folk remedies"

[haele]

9. My great-great grandmother was a midwife during that time -

And as she was a great reader of newspapers and was up on "the outside world", she was a popular visitor, so she was always out in the community, and had an eye on most of the people within a 20 mile radius.

According to her diaries, she would start treatment immediatly when she saw someone was getting sick with the Spanish Flu. She would start them on a regieme of steamed aromatics, have them resting and sleeping "sitting up" rather than laying down, and prescribed a hot mixture of elderberry brandy, lemon or grapefruit juice, good rum, a lot of herbs, and soups, sometimes before the fever started spiking and symptoms worsened. But two to three weeks rest was her primary prescription.
She never got sick herself, neither did her family.
She only lost about 3 patients - one she caught too late, and two who did not listen to her, and she ended up with over 500, especially when the soldiers from the community came back on leave.

Haele

[omega minimo]

10. An uninformed attempt to associate Chinese and herbal medicine with "superstition," "curses"

When it really counts, that sort of disinformation does more ill than good. A responsible physician knows "First, Do No Harm."

:thumbsdown:

[hedgehog]

12. I opened my refrigerotr to get lunch, and I had a choice between apples and oranges

along with good cheese and pure milk. Back in those days, an orange was a Christmas treat, if your family had the money!

[Warpy]

13. You also got quarantined

which meant that no, tough guy, you didn't get to go to work and infect everybody else.