Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them

by Jennifer Wright

The press in Britain was even more severely censored during World War I. There, the Defense of the Realm Act declared, “No person shall by word of mouth or in writing spread reports likely to cause disaffection or alarm among any of His Majesty’s forces or among the civilian population.”10 In Britain, “journalistic outlaws” were threatened with execution.

Spain, however, was neutral during World War I. That meant the Spanish press could report on the flu and its growing number of fatalities without fear of being jailed or labeled unpatriotic. On May 22, 1918, Spanish newspapers ran an article about a new kind of illness that seemed to be sickening many citizens.

Hence, Spain became the culprit in the news reports.

The autumn of 1918 is often considered to be the “second wave” of the disease.19

Wilson had moral failings as large as the moon. He believed that immigrants to the United States represented “sordid and hapless elements of their population.”23 He literally kept African Americans in cages when they had to work on the same floor as white people because he didn’t want them mingling (much to the outrage of their coworkers, some of whom they had worked with for decades).

W. E. B. Du Bois wrote to him about his general belief that “segregation was not humiliating but a benefit,” and, specifically, about his forcible attempts to segregate people of different colors from working together, asking, “Do you know that no other group of American citizens has ever been treated in this way and that no President of the United States ever dared to propose such treatment?”24

That October—which was the deadliest month in U.S. history, and that takes into account periods like, say, the Civil War—195,000 people died of the Spanish flu.

Spanish influenza came to be referred to as “the plague,” as in the bubonic plague of the fourteenth century. That can’t be surprising.

Well, we jokingly, but not entirely, say that right now.

The Spanish flu is estimated to have killed somewhere between 25 million and 100 million people over the world. Around 675,000 Americans are thought to have died of it. That’s more than died in the Civil War, and the Civil War went on for four years.

If there’s another outbreak, mankind might not be so lucky as to survive. But we can at least avoid being so stupidly duplicitous.

Hahaha

There are certainly better ways for government officials to combat public health crises. Maybe at minimum they should subsidize funerals so no one has to bury their children in macaroni boxes. Planning for emergency response teams and finding volunteers early might also be a good strategy. Government leaders failed here, in just about every way they could fail, but, as terrible as Woodrow Wilson was, I am willing to admit he did have some other issues going on at the time. It’s the journalists I am most disappointed in. Perhaps because,

Often they defend the common man despite the wishes of those in power. They tell the truth, even when it would be easier to lie—when the government wants them to lie. That’s the highest possible aim of the fourth estate. Sadly, Senator Hiram Johnson’s 1917 claim that “the first casualty when the war comes is truth” proved accurate in this instance.

Oliver Sacks was a neurologist and a wonderful author of medical narratives like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. If you haven’t read it, do! You are reading this book, so you presumably like tales about strange medical conditions. All of his writing makes Sacks out to be a compassionate, smart, funny man, which is a view supported by his colleagues and patients and all who knew him. In his nonfiction account Awakenings, Sacks discusses how he “awakened” some of the longtime sufferers of EL. I will let him set the scene because I have nothing on him in the “writing nonfiction about medicine” game.

Wrong, Constantin. People often take whatever information about the world makes them feel scared or dumb and stuff it away as quickly as possible.

But, tragically, the effects of L-dopa didn’t last. Many of the patients were overwhelmed by tics. Some exhibited manic behavior.

The experiment was discontinued, although some of Sacks’s patients continued to receive L-dopa until the end of their lives.

The drug is still used to treat Parkinson’s today, but many patients experience a “wearing off” effect after four to six years.36 Sacks’s patients fell back into their former states and could not be awakened again. Does that mean that their brief awakening was meaningless? Well, if life is only important if it is going to last forever, the whole human race is in bad shape.

I’d rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefontal lobotomy. —TOM WAITS

By the twentieth century medical science had advanced to a point where unscrupulous individuals could cause irreversible damage to patients without actually killing them. And then they could call their procedures “successes.” And people were not vigilant enough, or not sufficiently aware, to say, “No, that is not what success means.” What happens when a “cure” causes more harm than good? Which brings us to lobotomies, the scariest procedure that you never want performed. This is a plague induced by human stupidity, not disease, but I couldn’t write a book on deadly medical horrors without talking about the terror wreaked by Walter Jackson Freeman II.

worrying about stuff serves a purpose. It’s not fun and can keep you awake at night, but it means you are capable of caring and solving problems. Which means you are qualified to be an empathetic, adult human being.

Spoiler for all of history: Joseph Kennedy was a monster.

Journal of the American Medical Association wrote: “It is inconceivable that a procedure which effectively destroys the function of this portion of the brain could possibly restore the person concerned to a wholly normal state.”6

After the operation she was unable to walk or talk. She was incontinent. Some of her siblings stopped visiting her. Even with years of rehabilitative efforts, she was only ever able to speak a few words. The nurse who assisted at the operation quit the profession altogether.8 However, at the time the public never learned about what happened to Rosemary or cases like hers. It was in neither the Kennedy family’s nor Freeman and Watts’s interest to let people know about the horrifying effects of her operation.

Many of the people who were lobotomized were untroubled by the results. According to John B. Dynes and James L. Poppen in their 1949 American Medical Journal article “Lobotomy for Intractable Pain,” after patients were operated on, “they never admitted they were mentally depressed and at no time did they show grief or shed tears.”12 However, all of the patients that Dynes and Poppen surveyed who before their lobotomies had been classified as “normal” or in some cases in an “anxiety state” were afterward classified as “retarded” or “euphoric” (which, as far as I can tell, meant “mentally impaired but pleased about it”). In addition to feeling no depression: “They were indifferent to sorrow or grief, and seemed incapable of sensing or appreciating the feelings of others.”13

So, no depression, but also qualities of sociopaths?

That “sparkle” was “adult intellect.” Discover magazine lays out the situation more clearly: “The operation did have disturbing side effects. Patients often suffered major personality changes and became apathetic, prone to inappropriate social behavior, and infatuated with their own toilet habits. They told pointless jokes and exhibited poor hygiene.”17 So they often behaved like toddlers.

In the vehicle Freeman carried with him a portable electroshock machine, a tape recorder for his notes, and his instruments. He toured eight states over five weeks and performed 111 operations.23

JFC

The popularity of the procedure was due to the fact that, at the time, there were very limited treatments available to help the mentally ill.

Between April 1, 1947, and September 30, 1950, 1,464 veterans were lobotomized at VA hospitals by VA doctors.32

Mentally ill women were generally institutionalized by their husbands or fathers—without consent required—and, until the 1960s, doctors were not obliged to reveal their treatments or risks to the patients.

Somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of lobotomies were performed on women, despite a greater percentage of men being institutionalized.

am inclined to say the fault is with Freeman. If the man who invented lobotomies couldn’t explain the procedure well enough to make it clear that it has nothing to do with a lung disease, he was advertising it in a dangerous way. He made lobotomies sound like a cure-all for everything.

Freeman used lobotomies to treat everything from “excessive eating” to drug addiction to alcoholism.

In the 1950s Freeman lobotomized a woman suffering from nothing more than severe headaches.

How did no one prosecute him?

By 1950 the Soviet Union banned lobotomies as “contrary to the principles of humanity.”46

Moniz had just won the Nobel Prize for pioneering the surgery in 1949.

And then, of course, there is Ken Kesey’s 1962 book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which could well be subtitled Lobotomies Are Bad and So Is Conformity.

Part of the blame lies with a midcentury zeal for conformity. People were willing to sacrifice whole personalities to make those who seemed different and unusual more like everyone else. Some who turned to lobotomies desperately yearned for a cure for their ailments; others were suffering from nothing more than human frailty.

Still, there were many people, especially during the Depression, who believed that paralysis was a kind of moral failing and that “the world has no place for a cripple.”9

The purpose of all vaccines is to expose the body to a weaker version of a disease, which will cause the body to create antibodies to fight that disease. Vaccines in general act like training wheels for your immune system.

It is notable that a famous Republican war hero president was desperately urging the American people to make free medical treatment available to its citizens. Do you like to discuss politics? If so, this fact may be useful to you someday.

Sometimes people ask me when I believe America is due for another plague. I invariably reply, “Well, we literally just had one.”

People, more than anything, want to go about life as normal, even during a plague. But AIDs is not less horrific for that. Indeed, the shadow of the mishandling of the AIDS crisis hangs over this entire book. I did not want to write a chapter on AIDS. That is because I think it is my role to tell the stories of people who are already dead and cannot speak for themselves.

The surgeon general was sending reports endorsing condom usage in 1986. What was Reagan waiting for? I do not know if medical progress on the disease could have been accelerated. But I certainly know that a leader can change the way the public responds to an outbreak of disease.

historically, quarantines extended primarily to those who had less wealth, power, and social clout.

“Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to find our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again to the ancient constellations of my childhood, comforting myself that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.”