The Orphan Collector

by Ellen Marie Wiseman

In 1918, St. Louis, Missouri, immediately closed schools, movie theaters, and banned public gatherings. Their death toll ended up being one-eighth of the losses in Philadelphia due to the Spanish flu. • Many people blamed the 1918 pandemic on Germans, claiming they were spreading poison clouds, or that Bayer, a German-owned company, had infected their aspirin. • To fight the Spanish flu, medical professionals advised patients to take up to thirty grams of aspirin per day, a dose now known to be toxic. It’s now believed that many of the October deaths were actually caused or hastened by aspirin poisoning. • In San Francisco, people without masks were fined five dollars and were called “mask slackers.” • The New York City health commissioner in 1918 tried to slow the transmission of the flu by ordering businesses to open and close on staggered shifts to avoid overcrowding on the subways.