The influenza and other epidemics

In early 1919, before the full force of the influenza pandemic was felt in Australia, there were doubts expressed in the Journal about the veracity and balance of media reports.

The profession has to thank you [the Journal] for your dignified protest against the hysteria and exaggeration which has distinguished the press of Sydney in connexion with the present epidemic. I believe in those three millions dead in India about as much as I believe in the three millions who accompanied Xerxes over the Hellespont. Both numbers simply signify Oriental historians' and American journalists' ideas of a large number, and are incredible. And when the Herald says outright that this is the most terrible visitation that has ever attacked mankind, and that it has killed more people than the war, one wonders whether one is awake or dreaming.

Journalists ought to read history. I wonder is there a single one in Sydney who has ever read a detailed account of the Black Death; and yet that was the turning point of history and the source of almost all the troubles which afflict society to-day. There is no doubt that it was to a large extent the ordinary bubonic plague . . .

. . . We have so long been certain that no other disease but the plague could have caused such a catastrophe that we cannot bear to think that there may possibly be another. Was it pneumonic plague? . . .

It does seem to me quite possible that at the time of the Black Death there was for the first and only time in history a combination of the plague and the strange disorder which is now knocking at our doors. Hence the unparalleled mortality. But that does not justify us in calling this disorder by the dreadful name of plague. . . .

. . . the Oriental plague . . . rendered cities almost uninhabitable for thousands of years, till about 1700, when man conquered that dreadful enemy without his knowing how he had done it. He began to lock up his foodstuffs and his stores of grain; he built his houses better; perhaps he became cleaner in his habits; in other words, he kept the rat at a distance, and, without the rat, . . . you can have no plague.

The story of the plague is the most dreadful in all that narration of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind which Gibbon called history. It has slain uncalculable millions; during the Middle Ages it was the unquestioned Captain of the Men of Death; it was probably almost the normal cause of death for centuries; no man can even venture to guess at what the world might have been had there been no plague. And yet our hysterical journalists apply that name of awful omen to the comparatively harmless disease which we have so far kept at bay. . . .

But once more I wish to emphasize the hysterical folly of fixing the dreadful name of plague on to this influenza. Let us thank our God that we shall never more be subject to that terror of the human race.

C MacLaurin FRCS, Sydney
Med J Aust 1919; 1: 71-72