Surviving past pandemics, part 1
I don’t have any documents from January 16 or 17, so for the next two days I am dipping into undated, yet unbelievably timely, materials.
In addition to letters and official documents, my grandmother kept a few binders which contained newspaper articles, quotations, and other ephemera. As I became familiar with the contents of the archive, I realized that many of these items were kept for very personal reasons and sometimes were related to each other.
This article from an unknown German language newspaper was in one of the binders. It was likely written in the spring of 1957:
From an unknown newspaper, probably published in 1957
Is the Asian Flu Seventy Years Old?
The Asian flu is not at all so new and overwhelming/irresistible as one has thought until now. This is the claim of the Dutch Professor Mulder. In his opinion the old people who were affected by the flu epidemic in the year 1889 were immune to the virus. This hypothesis will now be tested. Not that it would do very much good to many people at this point, because there will probably not be so many veterans of the flu from that time. But the proof that the mutations of the influenza virus in cycles of 60 years repeat themselves could lead to some interesting discoveries in our fight against this disease.
The 1957 flu pandemic killed more than 1 million people worldwide, as did the one in 1889.
For a few years, Roslyn and I had been meeting regularly to translate my family’s papers. Like everything, these in-person meetings stopped in March 2020. We restarted our translation sessions to Zoom in June after realizing it would be a long time before we’d again be able to get together. When Roslyn translated this article in August 2020, it was eerie and humbling. Here we were, trapped in our own homes, reading about previous pandemics.
Imagine my grandmother’s life. She was born in 1886, just in time for the 1889 pandemic. In the midst of wartime in 1918, yet another pandemic. And then, a world away in San Francisco in 1957, another one. Today it is easy for many of us to take good health and safety for granted. My grandmother knew that it all could disappear in an instant. We are learning that lesson ourselves.
After Roslyn translated this article, I first thought that Helene had kept it as an interesting curiosity. Here was a professor positing that people who had been exposed to the 1889 flu would probably be immune to the 1957. But there would be so few people still alive almost 70 years later, that his theory couldn’t be tested. In April 1957, my grandmother was just over 70 years old – she must have felt like a dinosaur.
It turned out that my grandmother kept this article for another reason – more on that tomorrow…