Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

by Gina Kolata

Overnight, Fort Devens became a scene out of hell. One doctor, assigned to work in the camp that September, wrote despairingly to a friend about an epidemic that was out of control. The doctor’s letter is dated September 29, 1918, signed with his first name, “Roy.” Nothing more is known about who he was or what became of him. His letter was discovered more than sixty years later, in a trunk in Detroit, and was published in the British Medical Journal in December 1979, having been sent in by a Scottish doctor, N. R. Grist of the University of Glasgow, who saw it as a cautionary tale. Roy wrote: “Camp Devens is near Boston, and has about 50,000 men, or did before this epidemic broke loose.” The flu epidemic hit the camp four weeks earlier, he added, “and has developed so rapidly that the camp is demoralized and all ordinary work is held up till it has passed. All assemblages of soldiers are taboo.” The disease starts out looking like an ordinary sort of influenza, Roy explained. But when the soldiers are brought to the hospital at the Army base, they “rapidly develop the most viscous type of Pneumonia that has ever been seen. Two hours after admission they have the Mahogany spots over the cheek bones and a few hours later you can begin to see the Cyanosis extending from the ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the colored man from the white. It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes and it is simply a struggle for air until th...