to all of you out there joining us today on this video cast for
Reporting, Recording, and Remembering the 1918 Influenza Epidemic,
a timely research symposium made possible through
cooperation with our colleagues at Virginia Tech as part of the ongoing
partnership between the National Library of Medicine
and the National Endowment for the Humanities to collaborate on research
education and career initiatives.
Today we will be learning the research outcomes
of Virginia Tech students studying the history of data in social context
through individual and collaborative primary source research
here at the National Library of Medicine, the Library of Congress,
the National Archives, and other collections and as part of their course
topics in the history of data in social context
being taught this semester by Dr. Thomas Ewing,
professor in Virginia Tech's Department of History and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies
and Research at Virginia Tech's College of Liberal
Arts and Human Sciences. During our symposium today the students
will present their research on various aspects of the 1918 pandemic
including newspaper reporting at the peak of the epidemic,
late September to early November 1918, contemporary social distancing policies
and procedures, and how contemporaries determined that
the epidemic was ending as well as how they remembered the
remarkable experience of this intense but relatively brief crisis in community health.
I'll be serving as one of the
discussants along with Dr. Nancy Bristow of the University of Puget Sound
and author of American Pandemic: the Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic,
published by Oxford University Press in 2012,
and Deborah Thomas, program manager for the National Endowment for Humanities
supported national digital newspaper program and
Chronicling America at the Library of Congress.
Also joining us will be Dr. David Morens, senior scientific advisor at the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Before I turn things over to Tom Ewing, I'd like to thank Tom
certainly for our collaboration in this regard and certainly also
the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities
for co-sponsoring this symposium as part of the NLM-NEH partnership.
I'd also like to thank my NLM colleague Lindsay Franz and everyone
at NIH video casting for their contributions
to making this webcast possible and certainly again to Tom and his students
as well as our discussants, Nancy Bristow, Deborah Thomas, and David Morens.
One final note for those who wish to see
the closed captioning of this program so select the cc icon on videocast
and for those on twitter please use the hashtag nlmhistalk
to follow along and share questions. So with that introduction I'll turn it over
to Tom Ewing. Tom?
Thank you Dr. Resnick, I very much
appreciate the introduction and especially appreciate the support
that you've provided uh the history of medicine division at
the national library of medicine um as you mentioned lindsey franz who's
helping with the technical side of this um and all of your colleagues uh it's
really been a wonderful partnership um with your office with your library
and also with virginia tech and so i welcome this chance
in unexpected circumstances um to to make this and continue this
connection um what you see now um is a list of the
um student participants in this project and i'm going to introduce them here in
just a moment um as well as uh you mentioned the the
three discussions listed here um and also
um we hope to have dr david lawrence join us as well
um i want to just uh follow up on what you said and
welcome um the three discussants uh professor nancy bristow author of
american pandemic um from the university of puget sound
deborah thomas from library of congress um and dr jeffrey resnick from the
history of medicine division at the national library of medicine
um all three of these discussions have been wonderful partners
um on previous projects um involving uh virginia tech um and also um uh
particularly around the the 1918 spanish influenza
uh dr bristow has made two visits to blacksburg
uh to speak to a teacher seminar sponsored by the national endowment for
the humanities in the summer um deborah thomas welcomed these
teachers uh twice to the library of congress um
where they could do research on their projects and and meet with
both the staff in the in this newspaper reading room but also other parts of the
library um and and dr resnick has welcomed the
teachers to the national library of medicine
um a couple times and has also uh welcomed virginia tech students to come
up and present their research um meet with the staff use the
collections um and so it's been a wonderful opportunity
for me um to to create these spaces for
students um and teachers to to learn about this topic um and think
about why it matters um i want to say a special thank you uh
to dr morin's um and also his collar colleague dr
jeffrey taubenberger um you can see in the photo that in 2015
for the neh sponsor seminar um dr calvin roger was able to meet with
the teachers three years later in 2018 both dr morris and dr calvin berger had
a chance to lead this seminar um as you can see
they are both very very in very very important positions these
days and i appreciate their continued
interest um in these research projects um in
studying history and particularly welcoming the chance
for students um to talk about their research i'm i'm
very pleased that dr morris i think will be able to join us
um later today as a discussion in this symposium
um but i appreciate that um things are extremely busy
um and this does give me an opportunity to say an incredible important thank you
to the national institutes of health specifically the national institute of
algae and infectious diseases the national library of medicine
national center for biomedical information and generally us public
health service i think we've appreciated in the last a
few weeks uh how incredibly important it is that
we have uh knowledgeable uh dedicated um
and persistent um people in these positions
taking care of not just the american public health but global public health
and this is something that that's come up
obviously in our own research projects but it's something that that
has come up frequently uh in the conversations with students
um and in the other work i've done so i will take this opportunity
to say thank you um for what you're doing
uh i wanted to also extend a real statement of appreciation to the 12
students who are in this class this semester
as i'll explain in just a moment when they signed up for courses in october of
2019 uh they had no idea uh what they were
getting into um and i appreciate their sticking with
this class in very very different circumstances um
i've put on this not only their photographs but where
they are now because we are not virginia tech did not
resume classes normally after spring break
um and not only did that mean that that the students were
geographically um uh dispersed um but their lives in many cases were
were really disrupted um you know that they've been dealing
with not only um taking classes in a completely uh
new and unexpected way um but i know from talking with them
um as well as other students and my colleagues you know many of them have
had to deal with um you know unexpected situations in
their families um in some cases illnesses themselves um
you know trying to help out as they can when you know perhaps their parents are
now taking responsible for for school-aged children
um you know and so what they've gone
through is in some ways a microcosm of what the whole country is
going through um but i really appreciate you know that
that they have um been willing to continue working on
this project all the way through and it's
you know very very happy to give them the opportunity to to talk about these
projects um when we were discussing this
presentation and the opportunity you know what we've learned from um
working with the historical materials but also
going through a related situation these days one of the things that came up
um and then i wanted to to give them a chance to to articulate
um was appreciation for people who are now caretakers uh nurses physicians
emergency medical technicians all the first responders so
um these are some of the names that they suggested the students in my class
uh people that they're thinking about whether these are family members or
friends or colleagues um and so again it's just a chance to to
acknowledge that publicly and say thank you um and just
be aware of you know people are are facing some very difficult
circumstances and yet really uh contributing um as they can so this
is a chance to to acknowledge that as well um i'm gonna provide just a
little bit of background on this class um and what happened um
and i've divided it i'm a historian so i think in terms of narratives and
and dates um and so the class is divided into part one before covet
and part two after covid um the courses as dr resnick mentioned is called topics
in history of data and social context um it's the first time this course has
been taught for jane's tech um and when i set up the course both with
the fall of course registration and then when we started meeting in january of
2020 um i had a couple of questions in mind
you know i wanted students to think about
um how deaths and influence occasions were counted
in um 1918 how do people respond to the epidemic what did they think
mattered what was important and then what did this
particular set of issues counting data uh review about some of the early stages
of epidemiology when the students came to our first
meetings in january i said you know that we were going to go up to
the national library of medicine in bethesda
in april uh which seemed a very very long way away
um and we were going to um have a chance to
meet with specialists work in the library um and they have a chance to
present their research and kind of a extension on that there
were really kind of three areas that i wanted the students to think about
the first was to do a newspaper case study and to use newspapers historic
newspapers available from the library of congress from the chronicling america
collection because this is one that's publicly
available anyone in the country can use this um and so it made sense in terms of
the kind of replicability of this of this research
to be able to do it that way but i also picked newspapers that came
from um states and cities and rural
communities that in many cases have been omitted um
for most of the major research on the 1918
influenza epidemic um you know and in some ways these were
i thought representative broadly of the country and you can see on the map which
states we ended up with and a set of research questions that i
asked the students to start working on um as they made their way through these
digitized newspapers so that was the first one was this kind of newspaper
case study what were people thinking about how was
the news being reported as it happened the second prior to this was to look at
the united states census um every year in the early 20th
century they put out a volume in cases multiple volumes of what were
called vital statistics but these only came from the
registration states so there are 31 registration states in 1918.
um and as you can see it's not broadly representative of the whole country
um it's very very representative of new england um in the mid-atlantic and kind
of ohio valley and sort of odd stretch across the middle of
the country and the west coast but there's a large
section of the country that's just not involved and you can't get the same
information about deaths and cause of death and age of deaths and so on
for all of these other states and so part of what we wanted to do
was to look at the census and how they reported on vital statistics
but we also wanted to find other information and so what we started
to do was to look at the annual reports that were put out by the states
uh before 1918 and look at some of their more granular information about this
disease and how it transpired um and again looking at um uh reports on
uninfluent deaths uh by age in some cases by
region by county um in some cases by month
and to think about how you know in this early stage
in this early in the early stages of this disease these health departments
were very actively involved in epidemiology they were trying to keep
track of these records and understand what was happening so
these were sort of the three parts uh that i was looking asking students to
look at during the first six weeks of the course
and then things changed so the students left for spring break
early in march halfway through spring break they got an
announcement that the university was converting all the classes to online
to remote learning they should not come back um and
that's when this class along with all the others changed to this format
we had to cancel the trip to national library of medicine
first because virginia tech prohibited all travel
and then soon after that national library medicine closed
um and so when the students came back i asked them first i asked them if they
wanted to continue working on this project and i did give them some options
uh to do something else but they all wanted to keep working
but then they really wanted to change the questions um that they were asking
about the 1918 epidemic they were interested in the ways that
looking at newspaper reporting could inform they're following the news
about COVID 19. um how to evaluate the accuracy of news
how to think about what's significant um how to balance you know short-term
changes with long-term processes you know how to
evaluate recommendations of public health measures um they were also
very interested in how effective was social distancing
in 1918 many of the practices that they were
being asked or required to follow um were the same ones that were
implemented in 1918 so they were interested in how do we know if those
were effective they suggested the question which i very
much appreciated which is how did people know the epidemic was
over um how did they know you know when
things were getting better um how did they anticipate
a possible second wave or another wave of the epidemic
um you know how do they remember the epidemic and here we are also
obviously very inspired by uh dr nancy bristow's work in american pandemic of
thinking about remembering this epidemic but they also wanted to think about the
lessons that could be learned um from studying this and so it was
following you know kind of the recalibration of
these questions that then the students began working in in these
four groups um and we came up with the title that
became the title for the symposium um in terms of reporting recording and
remembering um and so you're going to hear in just a
few minutes from each of these different these three student groups two students
from each presenting um what they've done in terms of looking
at these materials um and and the lessons they've taken
from that and how that relates to what we're going through right now um
virginia tech was was a story about what the students
learned um or we're learning in this course
which i very much appreciated and like i said we'll get to those
presentations in just a moment um but in thinking about you know how to
how to frame what the students are presenting it
reminded me how important history meant how
important history is during an epidemic why his dream matters
um as i mentioned at the beginning you appreciate the importance of expert
medical knowledge and informed health advice um there were certainly
instances of this in 1918 but there are also some instances when
the advice was back um and it was poorly framed and it was not helpful so we can
see that um we appreciate that behaviors
attitudes and interactions have consequences
you know the way people behaved as individuals but also as a society the
decisions made by governments did matter in 1918 and i think we can
learn from that um we can also understand um the events
the statements and especially the numbers
um related to the epidemic whether that's in 1918 with influenza or in 2020
with the coronavirus but i want to pick up on the last um of
these reasons to to think about history and
epidemic because it's become really um kind of
central to to how i approach this course but but
also to my other activities um which is the importance about
cultivating empathy for people as they experience
um different and frightening circumstances
you know i've been in a situation for the last a couple months
where um what i'm reading in the news what i'm hearing
talking to family or friends or colleagues is
you know frighteningly similar to what i'm reading um from 1918 in terms of
newspaper articles or looking at statistical information and looking at
statements from public health officials and
and making predictions and so on um and this is something that the
the american historical association has identified as one of the
the key skills um that history classes should be teaching um history is the
study of the human past as it is constructed and interpreted human
artifacts written evidence and oral traditions
history requires empathy for historical actors respect for
interpretive debate and the skillful use of an evolving set of practices and
tools and so one of the reasons i selected
this photograph and used it at the beginning of this
presentation and it was used in the news article that's on
twitter and various other places is i spent a fair amount of time trying to
think about what was happening with the people um in this photograph
um you know there are lots of ways to to research
um and to think about developing empathy for poor historical actors
um certainly in the case of the 1918 influenza
you know you can read letters you can read diaries um
you can read public statements uh you can read editorials in the newspaper
uh letters to the editor i mean there are ways that people articulated their
experiences of this disease and i think again dr bristow's
book american pandemic is a fabulous example of this you know really thinking
about um how do you understand the experience
of patients of nurses of physicians of community
members as they go through this disease this
epidemic but i was trying to do something a
little different in this course um which is to ask how we can use numbers
um and statistics and data to also cultivate this sense of
uh empathetic understanding for in history
um and this is challenging in the case of this photograph
um because the the people in this photograph
uh are not identified um we don't know who they
are uh there are as far as i can tell no names there's
no location other than new york city um what we have
are two pieces of information um and this photograph comes from the
national archives in college park maryland um and it's
contained believe it or not in a binder a
three-ring binder um that has the label spanish fuel
epidemic 1918 on the on the on the spine along with the skull
and crossbones um and you can see the photograph in
that collection and then on the back of the photograph
is the caption um which lists the name of the uh
photography studio studio underwood and underwood in new
york it gives you a caption masks for
protection against influenza girl clerks in new york at work with
masks carefully tied about their faces so that's all useful information um
but it also has the date on it october 16th 1918.
so that lets us put this photograph into a very specific
um geographical and chronological context
now this article decision this photograph was published in a newspaper
this came from chronicling america and specifically
uh the sun newspaper in new york city from october 27 19 so about 10 days
after the photograph was taken and there is a caption it's pretty
similar uh girl clerks that work with influenza
masks to prevent the spread of the epidemic which is crippled in many
business houses same photograph so we've got the
situation where we have um a photograph and captions which are
pretty similar but what's most useful here as i
mentioned is the timing because we don't know who these uh four
women are but we know what was happening at the
moment this photograph was taken because if we look at the sun
newspaper from october 17 1918 there is a extraordinary number
of victims of the influenza um 10 266 and day fall victims to grip here
doctors fail to report more than 50 of cases disease sweeping on i mean
these are stunning and graphic headlines that tell us at the very moment this
photograph was taken this was the context in which these uh
women uh were doing their work so there are
ways to think about numbers as part of this context so the united
new york health department provide a daily account of the number of
people in the city who died um from pneumonia and influenza from the
middle of september through the middle of november of 1918
so about two months and the red line obviously indicates
october 16th precisely at the moment that that photograph was taken
and as you can see both influenza and pneumonia cases are on the rise
and have been for at this point about a month and they will continue to do so
in the days to come this was an important way that the new york city
health department kept track of what was happening this is
a chart that was published two months later in december 1918
showing exactly um this increase in uh the daily deaths from influence
and pneumonia in this epidemic again the red line
shows uh what was happening at the time that photograph
um was taken um if you break out the deaths from influenza and pneumonia you
can see that the influenza deaths the pneumonia deaths were actually
starting to level off a little bit but the influenza deaths day by day
we're going to increase um and remain at a pretty high level um
for another 10 days after this photograph was taken before
they start to to to decrease um you know and here the
influenza deaths as i said are going to are going to keep going up
a little while longer um but if you were in new york city on october 16th
you were in the midst of you know a very frightening
um increase in in the number of people around you who are dying
from this disease the new york health department also kept track of the number
of cases and so the dashed line in this
case is showing the number of cases and as we've known for the last
several months now going through coba 19 you know
this is the question about how do you keep down the number of cases
flatten the curve and keep the number of deaths down so this was also something
you know in 1918 that public health officials were very very aware of and
very concerned about and so in this case um what you see is
the number of cases goes up faster than the number of deaths the number of cases
peaks about two weeks before the number of cases does now these are
actually weekly results so they're spread out a little bit more than
um if you look at the daily count but again
in october on october 16th if you look both the number of cases and the number
of deaths are going to continue to increase the number of cases
um will hit its peak in a few days and then it'll start to go down but the
number of cases is just going to keep going up
so again if we think about what's going on
or in the context surrounding these these girl clerks as they were
called um this is a really important thing to to think about
um the health department also provided statistics
on the percent um who died um excuse me got this going backwards
um you know from influenza and so you can see
in the early stages of this disease when the number of cases was going up very
quickly and the number of deaths are not going
up as quickly um it's a relatively small percent of those
who are reported with influenza who are dying
that changes and actually once you get past
um the peak of this the percent the number of cases and the number of deaths
go both go down but the the percentage of reported cases who are
dying remains actually goes up um so this is something
else to think about in terms of this context and also how we take these
lessons from 1918 to think about what's going on uh right
now um two more ways you can think about the
context using these numbers um the health department reported the
number of deaths by occupation and office clerks was one of the
occupations that the highest number of deaths from pneumonian influenza
and half of those approximately were women
you can also see the age group presumably that would include
these girl clerks um the age from 20 to 34
made up just over a quarter of the total population and yet almost
half of the deaths from pneumonian influenza and one of the characteristics
of the 1918 influenza was this unusually high mortality
in the age groups of the 20s and 30s which is very unusual for influenza so
these are all ways that when we think about this photograph
and ask what was going on in the lives of the
people in 1918 we can combine this visual evidence with
the statistical materials and really kind of put them
in this context and think about as i mentioned at the beginning
you know how we can develop this empathy uh
not only for what was happening in 1918 but how that can then inform the way we
think about um the current epidemic or future
outbreaks so that's some background on the course
um on what we are hoping to accomplish early on and then again once we got to
the next stage so at this point i'm going to turn it
over to our first two presenters from the
influencing the influenza project and they're going to tell me
when they are ready to start and when they are ready to
advance the slides
okay i think we are ready um so we're going to be
reporting on the epidemic and my name is louisa glozenlova
i worked with fiona ian eliza and of course
professor ewing um fiona and i will be bouncing off of each other so
we'll just keep in mind that okay next slide
so these are the cities that we had focused on that tom had mentioned um
a couple minutes ago so the 12 cities the three of us specifically pulled
examples from hickory chattanooga and salem which is
where you'll see some of our headlines that we mentioned a bit later in the
powerpoint we focused on these different areas of
the map that helped us pull together a better picture of what was occurring in
the united states so it kind of pulled like different areas yeah so you
could see that on the next slide this one this is a graph illustrating
the 12 cities and their population based on the 1920 census um so the
lighter the circle the larger the population and
out of the three that we focused on chattanooga was the largest
followed by salem and hickory so unfortunately google graphics doesn't
isn't really colorblind friendly but as i said the lighter the circle the
higher the population next slide
so we wanted to look at the tone over the time period that
this epidemic occurred and we wanted to focus on
what kind of message or tone was being broadcasted to the public
so we found that each city had many examples of both
flashy and alarming headlines that reported tragedies
and could create panic in the public but as influenza began to worsen
in the late october and november stage more headlines were actually
took preventative measures to calm the public
as their fears began to appear so we wanted to dive into that
we were intrigued with the reactions that the public had to the messages that
were being broadcast as broadcasted and we think that it
definitely related to how the epidemic is handled which will be touched on in
the other groups next slide
so this is a timeline of the apexes for each of the 12 cities that we looked at
as you can see the majority of the first wave peaks were centered in
october of 1918. we focused on the first wave because the majority of our
headlines and news sources came we were able to
pull from those actually so as we had mentioned in the early
stages the newspapers were reporting with alarm and
you know alarm and panic tone at first but nearing january that switched
completely to a more calm and relaxed tone next slide
so this is a word cloud consisted of the words that we pulled from the headlines
as you can see the big or bolded words consist of panic
deadly bullets death and quarantine the one that stuck out to me the most
was actually epidemic just because we have been using it kind of
interchangeably with pandemic and i thought it was interesting to
connect that to what were occurring or what's happening with us
today um and also the as the littler words words
such as good care calm time and doctors were less
common throughout the newspapers but they definitely had some impact
next slide
my name is fiona and i'll be taking these slices
so we found lots of examples of public scares in the case studies that we
looked through headlines that compare the pandemic to
the world war were often made such as influenzas worse than bullets
were actually publicized in both chattanooga and salem
phrases like rapidly spreading until danger passes
and deadly disease drew the reader's attention to statistics reported
on the number of cases and deaths within these different cities
these words were used to capture the attention of daily readers to get
the public to understand how impactful the pandemic really was and
there are also articles of wild stories such as
a portland doctor who was scared into suicide for having
the influenza although he didn't even contract the flu at all
so these stories and the word choices that the articles
had really shocked the readers into taking precautions more seriously during
the peaks of the influenza next slide
so professor ewing helped us by creating this visual that
really shows the impact of the influenza at its peak each front page
in october 1918 from the 12 different newspapers were totaled up
to show how often the influenza was mentioned as a percentage
a third of these new newspapers mentioned influenza every day for the
entire month and were all located around the midwest
so from this graph you can tell much of the news was revolved around this crisis
so it was really crucial that the
information being consumed would help the public prevent the
pandemic from growing next slide so
um oftentimes the newspapers were also reassuring to the public
when many of the citizens don't really know how to react
in a crisis such as this pandemic so whenever there was improvement in the
city for no new cases or a decrease in deaths
newspapers would also have this good news to remind the community that their
cooperation is effective some articles were more
informative on warning readers to be like
one step a step ahead of the flu and to not be alarmed
and be careful about their actions um so in this article from the health
department in chattanooga experts had advised how to take care of
those who have influenza and how to take care of
themselves so suggesting suggestions similar to
today's like social distancing such as making sure to stay away from
others and to just go to sleep at home if you have the flu
were often mentioned as well next slide
so both these tones really helped carry across the real message of these
articles to be informed and to prevent the spread
of the flu news about how each city was handling
the pandemic was important for citizens to consume and newspapers were the best
way to spread this information about regulations and restrictions at the time
public bands and preventive measures were
really important to follow such as um not going to school
or wearing masks um it was and it was only the cooperation
of the citizens in each city to really do their part in helping
to keep their communities safe and reduce the cases and deaths
next slide it was also really important that
um credible sources released the information about
preventive measures in the chattanooga news
the united states public health service had a statement by the
commissioner of health that took up the fourth of the fourth of the page
in the newspaper to quote deliver the most active accurate information
attainable in regards to the influenza that it may be brought to the attention
of every man woman and child in the city of
chattanooga similarly physicians in salem came
together in a discussion to reassure the public that no drastic
measures such as closing the town were necessary in october
but as they were receiving the news of the rest of the country in
much worse conditions and later um it wasn't until once salem hit its peak
that the mayor of salem had announced a ban on public gatherings when the
influenza did reach the west coast and in missouri the columbia
board of health along with the mayor made announcements of closing public
schools in the city to prevent the spread of influenza next
slide
so this is louisa again and we're going to finish off with the
connections that we made to the coronavirus so we looked at articles
from npr ohio news and abc news um so we decided
to dive into these connections just to see if the media
and the public were reacting the same way as they were about 100 years ago so
the first one is just coronavirus and anxiety following the news made me have
a panic attack so i interpreted that as the news that they
were broadcasting was negative and
made them have a panic attack after reading it so it's definitely
not good um the next one is americans panic and play during the coronavirus so
definitely some people aren't taking it seriously
while others are in a panic and the last one being the news is
making people anxious you'll never believe what they're reading instead
so the pandemic has driven people into uplifting headlines
or the opposite next slide so these are a little bit more positive
aspects of the news if you're feeling anxiety a psychologist
offers tips to say clear-headed is there light at the end of the tunnel
um six signs to look for and lastly chrono chronic chronovirus
chronicles here's some good news amid the dire reports so the biggest
difference that we saw between these newspapers being released
is actually the different time frames so as we said in 1918
there was like the difference in tone was between
the peaks of the epidemic um following like
when it's actually getting bad or worse but
through the coronavirus it's like it doesn't depend on the time
they're being released it's just the new source as to which releasing so
if it's abc or cnn whichever news source you look at
they both have different tones which i thought was interesting
next slide
so in conclusion when we were studying the tone of the newspapers throughout
the 1918 pandemic we concluded that the reason why we were looking through all
this information was to figure out how it was being
released we found that the different techniques
of news being released impacted the overall public reaction
which correlates to how the pandemic was handled from each part of the world
thank you
thank you um louisa and fiona and your project members ian and emily um okay
so and just to those of you who may be joined us um
we're gonna go through the three presentations and then we'll have
comments um from uh nancy versus deborah thomas
jeffrey resnick and and david morris um if you do have questions um if you're
watching this on the live video cast you can tweet those
uh to nlm hist talk um and we will gather those up and
direct those back to the to the student teams so at this point
we'll turn it over to uh i believe jacob and josh in their
group
hi everybody um thank you for doing so my name is josh um presenting me is
jacob and we decided research on social
distancing and how it was uh relevant in 1918 and 1919
um matt me jacob and connor and of course you know
mr ewing we all uh contributed on this presentation all
right uh next slide so kind of starting off we wanted to
actually look at the differences in the type of social
distancing that was either enforced or recommended
in 1918 and that made a big difference as we'll
see later on but they kind of split up the various
categories here recommended everywhere there were basic
pre-measures covering covering when you're coughing
stigma with your six sick masks should be worn by medical staff
and to generally stay comfort like mentioned
the last presentation public reassurance
enforcement uh while limited included mandatory
masks businesses being closed and actually prohibiting activities relating
to war effort now why did not why didn't all states
directly go into enforcement from just recommendation
and that that's kind of where we bring the variables so what changed was
the the state the county the population the timeline of that
of the of the city itself and we'll get to this later in presentation but
some of the ones that changed were whether schools were closed whether
churches were closed uh public gatherings prohibitions uh
masks in public so that's kind of the middle section between just
recommendation and actual enforcement uh next slide
so for associating we decided to study indiana and missouri
this for a bunch of reasons too the annual reports
included specific county and city level data
about cases and debts and these acted as almost as control said
when we went back into the newspapers to look for daily or weekly data
we could repo we could compare it back to the annual report
both these states are registration states for 1918.
both the states imposed closing orders early in october which gave us
a common timeline on which to compare the types of socialist notes
implemented and to look how the death rates for
influence and pneumonia changed both these death rates were
close to national average so we know we weren't looking at any outliers
they had even distribution of urban rural populations and we'll see it in
later precision why this was important to actually look at
the crisis the major cities um st louis kansas city and indianapolis
were included in the influenza encyclopedia
which had done you know a lot further than we had so we that also acted as
a comparison in the control the newspapers were available from the
chronicling america uh they were limited but we found that
there was stuff it was sufficient enough for our use
next slide yep so this is kind of going back to the
comparing the population between these two states before we move further into
the city and kind of data so the population for these two
states uh indiana with 2.8 million missouri
with 3.4 million and i think it is important to look at
the distribution in cities and out outside cities
where in outside cities actually a lot more more than half the percent of
population were outside of cities meaning more rural towns um places with
less exposure to uh extreme or emergency
medical attention and this this ultimately
led on to um play as a factor in determining the death rate of
influenza our next slide
this is another this is kind of more visual summary of comparing
india and missouri to all the registration states that were included
in the 1918 report um as you can see they racked up to
the total debts so missouri was as you see near the top
missouri and indiana were close in their death in the total debts
and we knew we're working with somewhere of a median
or an average of the total debts because new york obviously the most population
it was really high up there and then we have states like utah vermont which are
really low so we wanted to pick a couple states
that were kind of in the middle so we get some some
significant numbers as you can say um yep
yeah go ahead jacob
hey jacob
oh my bad i i didn't realize i was muted um okay uh is there any way you could go
one slide ahead and then come back to this one after
okay so um so yeah this is from missouri from october 10th
uh butler weekly report and this is just an article or a little piece
talking about the mayor of butler county
uh sending out an order to close schools churches
lodges and uh public gatherings throughout their locality so
we see here that like as the flu started to get bad
uh these localities are starting to take action sooner than
the states have and uh that's just kind of their they
they began to take action fairly quickly uh and then do you mind going back to
the slide before so this is actually one day after uh the
previous slide and this is an order from the governor
essentially saying the same thing that the
uh that butler county said the day before
is that you know they're getting rid of public gatherings
uh no churches kind of just shutting everything down on a state
level um all right next slide
or uh one more
so here we see indiana taking similar measures
to missouri they actually began this four days before um missouri did
with a state order uh shutting down schools
churches place of public amusement and uh forbidding public meetings
so yeah this is uh this is just kind of a case of indiana
beginning to take action fairly relatively quickly compared to
other states um and yeah next slide
so we see here that um despite despite indiana actually taking
statewide action before missouri they still had a massive
massively higher cases and case rates per thousand than missouri did
although they you can see that they both had a similar
timeline in terms of rise and peak and fall so um
yeah that's kind of the question we're asking is
why did this happen why did why did indiana despite
shutting down days before missouri have such a drastically higher case rate
per thousand and total cases so uh
next slide
yep so this is where we were looking at so like jacob mentioned in the previous
diagram where india had such a higher curve than missouri
even though both had a similar relatively timeline and we assume that
the social discipline was at least implemented in similar ways um we kind
of dived into the county level population data here
and we looked at indiana but county by county
and what we were looking at um was total debts relating to the total
population which means a higher population should
correlate with uh an increased number of total debts
however in two of the counties that we've
highlighted this is where these this correlation
this correlation was actually inverse uh floyd county and marshall county
these were two of not the lowest but two of the
lower lower populations however they had relatively high death
rates and we wanted to kind of go we're going
to highlight these and as you can see next couple slides
highlight the counties which displayed this kind of behavior
to morph to hone in and say you know ask the question as to
why is this is this because of the lack of medical tension or is this because
the lack of social distancing implementation throughout the county
um next slide so this is uh death this is this is related to
death rate not not just total debts so the ones that are
highlighted as you can see in analysis the death rate did not
correspond to total population in counties and like i mentioned before
counties with high death rates included many counties with relatively
small populations and it's important to look at the death
rate and not just a total number of debts
uh i we believe that it gave us a better proxy to kind of
um compare uh different counties and you know
newton county just to highlight couple 87th in population but
for number one in death rate and this was concerning because
we expected socialism throughout the state
in one uniform order um but however this wasn't the case at all as we'll see
um next slide so this is specifically the death rate from
influenza and again we kept seeing that the
highest death rates were from counties with low populations
lake county as you can see was one exception that which
was one of the highest populated and it was one of the
uh highest influenza rates now lake county i guess is kind of an
exception because it was it was an extremely urban town it
was it's an urban county and
the it didn't lie on the same scale as comparing the rural counties this was a
different factor that we're playing with um next slide
yep and to kind of summarize the same data from missouri
counties with low populations at high death rates from
as you can see all causes as well as pneumonia and influenza
some of the counties just to highlight them the highest death rates um
dunklin county we have springfield counties sedalia county
these were counties with relatively uh these counties had high-ish populations
but as well as high death rates and when we
go down to low counties such as carter county only 5 000 people yet
the pneumonia influence death rate was 8.36 relatively high
next slide
oh um all right yeah so um so this is a newspaper clipping from
lake county which as we previously saw has the had
the sixth highest influenza rate in indiana
and uh in this they decided to extend the closing order by a week
and you know they they talk about you know they have the um the
guidelines for no political meetings no you know public gatherings of any kind
all that stuff but it says uh in the clipping that
thoughtless individuals made it hard for them to enforce the orders
so uh political meetings are still being held people are
making an effort to open theaters and some people are even going to funerals
claiming a relationship to the deceased um so that definitely
played a role in lake county's uh significantly higher influenza rate
uh next slide
so here where uh it's looking at missouri again
and they're talking about like how they're counting the number of cases
and a lot of people thought that the situation may have been getting better
but as it turned out physicians had been very late in reporting their cases
and some people had been ill for like a long period of time before it was
reported so this it like almost had a resurgence
even i mean there was no true resurgence because they were already sick
but just in terms of public perception uh this came back
and dr norris uh the uh you know a secretary of the board of
health he was saying that the situation was no
better in the county and city than it was
uh in the military areas next slide
so this is talking about opening up missouri again
and the first ones that were the first things that were reopened were schools
because it was a lot easier to you know they
already have control of the population in the school
given that you know the adults have the authority over the children
so a lot easier to uh follow the guidelines
in that setting than it was just in the general public
um yeah next slide
yeah so here it's talking about um
sorry uh yeah so they opened up the uh guidelines from from their previous
bans on public gathering and social distancing guidelines
and there was a resurgence in cases approximately 300 in the city
there were fewer deaths but it as it says in the last sentence of this
clipping uh many doctors thought that the lifting
the ban on public gatherings was a mistake
and that it brought on a much worse situation than they were previously in
uh next slide
yep so to kind of conclude and and i just want to highlight one more thing
from the previous slide was that um the band was actually lifted so uh
the date on that was november 20th i believe two weeks ago so big and
remember the band was lifted in indiana um they
concluded that the the rate was low and it was fine to
open up social gatherings and whatnot however the the fact they opened up
social discipline too early led to a rise in cases again
um noting that influenza wasn't properly contained and a ban was needed
and this kind of extended indiana's i guess you could say timeline of the
crisis and as we saw indiana's curve became extremely high
part of it is because they were uh they were lacking in the timeline of
their social uh socialising and uh counter measures so to kind of
conclude our social decision research a couple
lessons that we learned where social distinct does result in lower infection
rates and lower death tolls but to kind of go deeper in that point
it's not just society it's also proper enforcement of social distancing
uh recommendations just to wear masks if you're sick or stay home
if you're sick um some of the newspaper clippings
insight into the fact that that wasn't actually the case when
whenever the government whenever it was a governor's order
whenever it was mandatory to wear masks in public
um limit social gatherings this is where we saw in the next week of those uh
nuclear clippings that the death threat was lowering and the
case is rising was lowering as well second second lesson like i mentioned
ending social studies too early and too quickly
will cause the death rate to increase once again and social distinct
bands will be placed uh one more time this is exactly the case that happened
in indiana and it might it we believe that it was a factor
in the high um in that in that high curve that you saw
in the diagram so kind of going back to our going like i
was looking forward to our next next steps in research uh immediate stuff
that jumps out to us is examining newspapers to understand the variation
in death rates by county and city so we looked at
um only specific specific counties specific newspapers
but to kind of compare you to i guess to go even
deeper in an understanding and to look at socialists in one county versus
another and to notice how that affected death
rate and how you know even that the change of minute
in that difference by menu it's still significant
because it still relates to how the situation is today
um next question is so does socialist thing make a difference in death rates
and while we can make a presumptive conclusion
right now with our limited research i want to you know refrain from that and
say that we actually do more research to kind of
quantify that result because only saying yes is not enough and especially when it
relates to today's situation just saying yes
make a difference it's not enough as we're seeing these boomers and flatten
the curve and it's important to quantify these
measures next slide
yep thank you all right thank you very much uh
jacob and josh and also your your teammates matthew and connor
um i really appreciate that um i'll have to admit
um i'm the one who added the next steps for research
um the more i study this topic the more i
discover there's more that needs to be done so i'm not necessarily
committing them uh to doing this um i did want to point out that
before we get to the next group dr resnick has offered
um if you are watching the videocast but you're not on twitter
um and you do have questions um you can send them to him
um to his email um when we get through this next presentation and we
get to the discussions i'll make sure that his email is visible
on the screen and then you can send them directly to
him or like we said use the hashtag nlmhisttalk
which is also on the screen okay let me turn over to the third group
um i believe katie and elisa will be the ones
presenting there
hi everyone um you can go to the next slide
i'm katie cromer my team and i focused on the remembering aspect of the 1918
influenza pandemic i want to introduce my group members
who are alessia who will be presenting with me today
stephanie and miguel next slide
so we focused on some main questions when diving into how we can remember
this pandemic especially during current times as we
are in the cobin 19 pandemic and we wanted to find out three things
one what the recovery process looked like
two what kind of impact did the second wave
have on recovery and then three how can we use this data
to make sense of the pandemic we are dealing with in present day
next slide
so when we are discussing this pandemic it's important to mention
what types of bans and restrictions there were before
talking about the timeline of restrictions and when they were put into
place and when they were lifted which alacia
will be discussing later on so when we talk about bans the main
things that occurred were closing of schools
non-essential businesses and ending public gatherings
such as public dancing and movie theaters so the newspaper clipping on
the right is from ogden utah which states that
groups of three or more cannot gather on the street and stores
basically any public place there are also many
different kinds of travel restrictions for example there were restrictions on
public transportation which limited the number of people
allowed on street cars and certain certain health measures had
to be followed on those public transports
another interesting travel restriction to mention is that many cities did not
allow people to enter the city if they were unable to
display that they were in good health we also saw
that in many western cities such as san francisco
there was enforced mask wearing in public places
which is important to note as we are seeing some parallels to this now
as similar policies are being laid out across the u.s
and then lastly i want to mention in the oakton utah
regulations on the right there was also enforced quarantines inside homes
that were known with influenza so this consisted of maintaining
quarantine of the entire household so no one in or
no one out for at least 10 days after the last known fever
and what's also interesting to note here is that the existence of influenza
had to be made known in each household by placing a
sign like notification outside of that household
next slide and now alicia will be speaking on the second wave and some
timelines hi i'm alicia okay so there were only a
few cities that we looked at that had a second wave
with the cities that did have a second wave it was usually very mild
and no bands or restrictions were enforced because of the second wave
one city that we did look at that was an exception to this was salem oregon
where the second wave was actually worse than the first wave
since salem was one of the only cities we looked at in the west
this could be attributed to the fact that the pandemic spread from the east
side of the country to the west which could have caused a delay in
salem's peak cases in this city all the bands lifted after
the first wave were reinforced during the second wave
and the city held more caution in reopening the second time around
next this slide shows an overall timeline of how long the pandemic lasted
in terms of bans and restrictions on everyday life
the first wave of the pandemic started in october of 1918
which is also when cities began to enforce bans and restrictions as you can
see on the timeline and this continued all throughout
october by the end of october and throughout november
cities began to ease restrictions and lift the ban set in place
as shown this was a slow process because cities could not
open up everything at once without being cautious
pensacola shows a good example of this because in the middle of november they
lift some of their bands but they don't completely open up
until the middle of december the end of december
marks the end of the first wave and by this time all the bands and restrictions
are lifted for the most part now taking a closer look into the second
wave the timeline at the bottom the earliest one seen was in wheeling at
the beginning of december by the end of this december and into
january more cities started to see a mild second wave in the middle of
january is when salem's second wave restrictions were restated
and these restrictions stayed in place until early february
and by february 10th the second wave was over and this is when the new cases of
the spanish flu stop showing up for the most part next
slide
some of the commentary seen from the newspaper shows how life was affected by
the pandemic even after it was over a lot of times
there were advertisements posted in the newspaper for possible cures for the flu
and vaccinations to end the pandemic this provided false hope by making
people think the pandemic would soon be over or cured when that was not the case
as seen in the pensacola ad much after the pandemic this is about two months
after the end of the pandemic there were some mentions of generally
treating the flu this shows that even after the pandemic
was gone people had an overall greater sense of remaining
cautious to avoid getting sick in general
in the harrisburg newspaper there was a headline after the pandemic titled
50 000 children left orphans by influenza
this makes us realize that even after the flu was gone it couldn't just be
forgotten and things could not go back to normal because
life was completely changed for a lot of people due to the pandemic
including these children that lost their parents
another headline that stood out because it was used in a few of the newspapers
is this one titled coughs and sneezes spread
diseases and at the bottom there is
it says as dangerous as poison gas shells this provides evidence that the
pandemic had just as much of an impact on the country
as the world war did if not an even greater impact
next
so we looked at newspaper cover pages before during and after the pandemic to
see the overall shift in attention towards the flu during the outbreak
and these are covered pages from the harrisburg telegraph
to get a good idea of this we compared how often the war was spoken about and
compared that to how often the influenza was spoken about
so looking at the left one month before the pandemic there was no mention of the
pandemic no advertisement advertisements for
medication and obituaries occurred about once a week as seen the war has
the majority of the city's focus during this time before the pandemic
during the pandemic a month later the flu overtakes the attention of the war
each day there were at least 10 articles about the pandemic and there were
medication ads on every page during this time is when obituaries were
seen about every day or every other day compared to every week because this is
when most deaths were seen because of the flu
next looking at a month after the pandemic cases dropped the flu still
seems to be prevalent there are still some advertisements to
medication and this is when the flu and war both had the same amount of
attention in the press as you can see with the keywords
and then two months after the pandemic is when the flu stopped being mentioned
in the newspaper on a daily basis and this is when things start to shift and
the newspaper as a whole starts to resemble what it did before
the pandemic with the war being a main focus in daily life
next
i'd like to now provide some understanding on
the pandemic through nancy bristow's book
american pandemic which gives very important insight on the aftermath
so two weeks two takeaways that we believe to be of
significance when remembering the pandemic are how determined the health
workers were and the acknowledgement that mistakes
were made it's important to show how strong-willed
the health professionals were and as bristow states the public health
profession
elated asianly optimistic narrative forward-looking
confident full of expression of the opportunities the future promised
and this shows their determination and hopefulness for the future
which is a very powerful statement especially during this time
and the other takeaway is that mistakes were made
and as bristow explains in a lecture from dr
ravenel we must confess
we may small failure in our attempt to control the spread
so i think with this then the question becomes is have we acknowledged these
mistakes and have we learned from them which is a noteworthy thing to be asking
during the mists of coven 19. next slide
now that we've discussed the timeline of events and
their implications these are the conclusions that we've made from this
we cannot be quick to forget the devastation that influenza had
during 1918 and 1919 um not only lead to those who died but also
those who were affected mentally or emotionally and also for the
family members affected and we want to emphasize here that life
relatively went back to normal about two months after we saw the final cases
and to note here restrictions were lifted once they started to see a
decline in the number of cases in daily cases and
and then in most the second wave did not actually have a greater effect
than the first wave next slide
so now a question i'm sure we all have is how are we going to
take this information with us as we're navigating coven 19
in present day and how we're going to apply it
and here i want to mention both differences and parallels that the 1918
influenza pandemic has with the coven 19 pandemic
looking at differences we see a greater ability to remain anonymous
in present day as influenza deaths were largely advertised in newspapers and
then as i stated earlier in cities like ogden utah
households were forced to place signs outside of their
outside of their homes if they had influenza
and then another aspect is how technology differs
from what we saw in 1918 this includes tracking the spread where in the
influenza pandemic there was a lack of transparency for various reasons
of recording how many people affected were affected and how many people died
and now we're seeing multiple different tracking websites where we can figure
out in real time just how fast things are spreading and
figuring out where the hot spots are things like that so in general there's
quicker access to information in present day and it sort of went from
updates and local news from cities to the national news because of social
media and mainstream media now with parallels we see in both 1918
and in present day um many different claims from the media
about potential cures or remedies claiming to help with influenza
as we're seeing now with claims to help the coronavirus
and in 1918 we saw in many different newspapers
ads for things like vicks vapor rubs and other medicines
just as we are seeing now with people claiming
things about hydroxychloroquine or pepsi as a cure and those affected
we are also seeing talks about a potential second wave
which we also saw during the influenza pandemic but they were not as aware
of a second wave as we are today and i think in general it's important to
be aware of all these claims that are being made by the media
and the last parallel that we see is that there must be a decline in cases in
order to begin reopening society
so as shown in the newspaper on the newspaper clipping on the right from
1918 they were waiting for to see a decrease
to go back to normal and in summary the parallel is that we
are currently in the same situation and waiting for a decrease in cases
to reopen society to our new normal thank you professor ewing if you want to
take it from here
indeed thank you very much katie and alicia and also to your
teammates stephanie and miguel um so that's uh the end of the student
presentations um at this point i'm going to turn it
over to dr nancy bristow and then deborah thomas from the library
of congress and ask for their comments uh dr resnick has some comments and has
also been collecting questions um and so he can
you can integrate those into his comments as
well but nancy let's go ahead and start with you
well thank you so much for including me having heard those presentations i am
especially delighted to be here with my distinguished colleagues but
especially with the 12 students who did this incredible work
i am really impressed by the research questions that drove your work
by the careful methodological choices you made
and and in turn really the findings that i think have such significance for us
right at this very very moment i think you've
demonstrated really beautifully professor ewing's very point that that
history matters um and that we can actually learn a
great deal by crunching numbers and by also integrating in the people of the
past in this way that's empathetic and i think all three
of these projects show exactly how that can be done
for group one i was really really intrigued by
this question of the message or tone that they put forward i think
your discovery is quite fascinating and certainly resonates with the same dance
i think i saw which is this complex position that
leadership seems to find itself in or to believe itself to be in between
panicking the public so that they take things seriously and
then worrying that they may alarm them and so wanting to go to the more
reassuring tone and clearly that is a dance that must be
very or a tightrope to walk i'm not sure the right metaphor
but i think you captured that really well and that's a really important thing
because i think it's as you say an ongoing issue for us right now in 2020
a couple of other things i really loved about what you did was the ways in which
your project really highlights something that i think people forget
about this time period 1918 100 years ago
and that's how important the newspapers were that this was really the source of
news for people all over the country whether you lived in a major city or a
small town much of your news or most of your news
or all of your news came from newspapers so the way you
foregrounded them i think was really effective
and then i think that really helps to open up the the
important question about the need for getting good and accurate information
from the authorities if the newspapers are the place where that was happening
what kind of information were we getting and again that's why i
love the work you did exploring you know your discovery about the ways in which
there was this sort of panicky um flashy i think was the language you
used um to talk about how they were at first sort of wanting to alarm or at
least excite the public maybe to sell newspapers and then the need to step
back into a more calming reassurance what becomes clear as we
then turn to the other two projects i think
is how important it is if on the one hand the public needs to be kept
calm i think the public most of all needs good information and i think
that's what we really is reinforced by the other two projects
which again were both also terrific the second one i again in the context of
covet 19 any research that can continue to
enforce the idea that social distancing works
is so so important and you've done the sort of granular work
that helps us see one more time but in a distinctive way
that social distancing works but that it also needs to be sustained
and that it needs to be enforced and i think that's particularly interesting
because that's not something that's been much in the conversation
in the united states and yet talking with with scholars from other parts of
the world enforcement is quite powerful for
instance in the city of paris where you can only travel one kilometer you
can only be away from your home for one hour and you have to carry a piece of
paper with this information on it every time
you go and the fines are enormous if you're caught breaking the rules i
was really intrigued in turn for group two by two things that struck me as
surprising and one was the fact that all death
causes also seemed to have this strange um
counterintuitive factor of lower population having higher death
rates and i'd be really curious but that takes us beyond the flu
more significantly i think is the question i was left with about the ways
in which thoughtless individuals i think was the quotation these people that were
breaking the rules were causing a real problem
and for me that's really a counter-intuitive discovery
that it was about people breaking the rules but they're breaking them in
smaller communities where people would actually have known each other
i would have expected a heightened sense of social responsibility in a place a
small town i live in one where people really do know each other
and where they'll know who it is that's breaking the rules
so i'm really curious about the i think you've really opened up something that
that will offer other historians and scholars
questions to try to answer in addition to those that your professor
mentioned and then finally for group three
let me wrap up again i think this is so important to
look at the ways in which the public doesn't does not focus its attention
particularly in a context in which at the moment
covet is clearly the center of our attention in 1918
right it had to fight with the war in a sense to be paid attention to
and i'm fascinated that you were able to discover that in the midst of the
pandemic the coverage was really quite robust
not all scholars have reached that conclusion and that's an important
corrective i think and then you confirm for me one more
time that a month after the flu is still there but two months
after it seems to have disappeared and the war
against takes the public's attention and i really appreciate then finally
this important caution that you give us that we have to be careful about the
ways in which we move on and that remembering is something more
than the newspaper coverage but that we have to continue to remember all those
people who are actually being critically impacted by this by their own
health issues uh in the aftermath or by those that
they lose the orphans but also the mothers and fathers the aunts the
sisters the husbands and wives but this thing
will need to be remembered in the aftermath and i'm grateful i think
that so many archivists around the country are already engaged
in that work so finally let me just say a final word of thanks to all of you for
including me and especially to the students
for giving me some new ways to think about what i'm seeing right now which i
think is what some of the best history does so thank you for that
thank you nancy we really appreciate the comments
um and there's a lot to to to think about
um there and i know from our previous conversations that
um you know when you studied this topic and wrote the book
that didn't end it for you you continue to think about why this topic matters
and why we need to study history so we appreciate
you making these comments um deborah thomas i think we'll turn it over to you
um you have a unique vantage point on on the person responsible for all of these
newspapers um so go ahead with your comments hi
uh thanks for having me today and uh i wouldn't say i'm the person responsible
for this it's quite the national effort um in
that uh the national endowment humanities and
the library of congress sponsored the program
that's put all these newspapers together um and also
and with the uh with the collections that have been developed by uh state
libraries and historical societies and and uh universities all over the country
that have been the materials from their collections
into chronicling america so it's really quite a large effort
that's gone into creating this repository
that you guys have made such a great use of um it's exciting to see
your ability to pull out the pieces of information from the site
uh from the collection that are driving the questions and the research
interests that you have and they're really showing us why newspapers are
important in terms of historical study um
in the way we think about newspapers both at the library of congress and in
the program is that newspapers um are the voice of the community the
historical record of the community and this kind of
analysis both cross geographically
different kinds of communities different size communities really points out why
that's an important aspect to add newspapers into the primary sources
that researchers use across uh different types of disciplines
um i think the in the in the first
presentation uh it was um interesting it was very
interesting to understand a little bit about the
dynamic of the um the tone uh in the newspapers
um depending on the timing and then the comparison today
with our news sources today where your conclusion was
it more depends on the source of the news um
as than over the timing of the news um which is very interesting
um and that sort of speaks to the world of journalism we're in today as opposed
to the world journalism we were in earlier in the century um
the second pro project um was also interesting and i really appreciated the
difference you the parallels you brought in between
indiana and missouri and the cross section
of those two different geographic locations
and how the localities actually were taking action before the states were
that's a very interesting perspective to bring to it
and one of the questions that i that brought your your research into lake
county uh brought to mind for me was you uh
investigated and discovered that um there was
disobeying of orders going on as dr bristow was saying
um and i wondered whether the newspapers actually
would contain more of the community tone of why that was
is it was it something in those commun in that community
that you know they didn't like law and order or
um there were a lot of close-knit families who didn't consider each other
different uh different people needing in needing
public spacing or social distancing um i wanted to know if the newspapers
themselves contained that community information
on why that would that kind of behavior would be happening
um and in the third presentation um i was interested i appreciated all
the information about um the details that was in
or in the newspapers the different types of information um
the ads the regulations um the uh information on the bands and also the
perspective on that long-term effect um and how
and how you utilized the imaging in the news
the functions and features of the website to
pull out um the comparisons between the different
uh front pages over time you you use the hit highlighting features in the website
to show the frequency of the of the keywords
across the different uh periods that you were looking at
um so i thought that was really fascinating and
we'd love to have any feedback you as students have on the website itself
um and the use of the collections and um we'd love to hear from you uh you can
reach me our website at ndnp tech
at loc.gov with any comments you have um or i'd be happy to answer any
questions you have about the site now and i'll turn it back over to tom great
thank you deborah i appreciate that i i did not mean to suggest that you were
the only person involved in this and i know from working with many of
your colleagues that um it's a huge effort not only excuse me
from the library of congress side but also all of the state organizations
that are supplying um all of these newspapers and
digitizing them and of course we want to thank the
national endowment for the humanities um for providing a lot of the funding
for that project which has been is a wonderful resource
for any kind of historical analysis um as as someone who started doing
newspaper research on microfilm um as did nancy bristow and
david morin's um the potential the the opportunities created by keyword
searching are uh astonishing um
dave if you're there um this would be a good chance to
um make any comments dave morris if you have them
i am here can you all hear me yes we can okay great
all right well thank you uh thank you for inviting me and thanks to the
students for some really thought-provoking presentations
um i won't babble on for too long but a few things that really struck me i
want to comment on and i'll do that if i can um i think the first
in the first talk the talk of louisa and fiona um
commenting on the the tone of the message is
it's actually something that was commented on a lot of the time
and it's been covered by historians professional historians since that time
um you know the the city fathers and the public health leaders were divided in
what to do they hadn't seen something like this before
and so some took the the track of trying to
play down the alarm and calm and soothe and others took the exact opposite track
and there was quite a bit of discussion about this at the time so
um and if you think about it there had not been an influenza pandemic
in the last 30 years the one before 1918 was in 1889
and the one before that was in the early 1830s different
years in different places and so there was really no experience they had to
make this up as they went along using public
health um reactions that were related to other
diseases which i'll mention in a minute um if you're
interested there was a very interesting tv movie about 30
years ago that was about royal copeland the
director of health in new york and a leading public health
nurse who had this dialogue about the very question about how to frame the
message and whether public health should be
aggressive and honest or whether they should try to cover it up
in this film which i don't remember the name of
really got into that issue very well it's a bit silly it's a tv
movie half hour or an hour movie but it does get into this very issue
um on the other two presentations by josh and jacob and by katie
they provoke a lot of thoughts and and one is when you think about what
we're now calling social distancing and i would
i would put that in a larger category of public health actions that
individual people can do as opposed to organized public health actions like
forcibly isolating you as i said before the public health
actions that were on the books at the time of 1918
didn't relate to the last pandemic 1889 because there were very few public
health actions then but they related to what was going on in
the decades before that and if you go back to the 1850s which is
you know 70 years before the 1918 pandemic
there were a number of diseases for which public health actions were common
one of them was scarlet fever which though at that time was deadly for
children and if you had scarlet fever in your
family um not only might the public health people came come and
post a quarantine sign i shouldn't say quarantine an isolation
sign on your door can force you to stay inside but
they but they would eventually remove you and disinfect your house with
carbolic acid and you couldn't get back in for
up to a week then later on in the 1800s there began to be aggressive public
health controls against tuberculosis when we
realized that we were having a tuberculosis pandemic and it was
the major cause of death of adults and um
so beginning around the 1880s or so i can't remember the exact year
there began to be aggressive municipal public health
recommendations which included um not spitting wearing masks and all sorts
of public public health things posters everywhere
that were really the prevalent thing on the books when 1918 came along so a lot
of the 1918 actions um such as social distancing and various
other things were borrowed from activities that were
already in place for tuberculosis
i also want to mention that it's not it's not been very well discussed by
anybody including historians but there there was an in 1918 there was
enormous amount of self-isolation that is people saying
you know what bad stuff is happening i'm going to get out of here
and in fact it turns out if you look at history going back
even into the ancient times the even before any understanding of the
germ theory the concept of self-isolation from an
epidemic disease is intuitive in people you know stone
age people will do that and um uh you know they somehow
intuitively understand if you're with a bunch of people you're gonna get sick
and die so not let's not be with a bunch of
people and um you know one of the best recorded
examples of that is in 1348 when the plague came to uh to europe
uh the bubonic mnemonic plague came to europe people self-isolated themselves
those who were wealthy enough and able to do that and we have
that recorded in the famous book the cameron by giovanna buccaccio
in which italians in um in forensa and florence uh who were you
know wealthy young people went out into the florentine countryside
and isolated themselves and then there was this book written by
boccaccio purporting to be it's a novel it's not true but um the
situation is true that people isolated themselves and thereby
didn't get the disease so it's an interesting thing to
uh to think about that um you know public health actions
are are sort of a mixture of things that public health
experts do and things that are intuitive for people to do
um and then i think and that relates those comments relate to both
josh and jacob's presentation and to katie's as well
and one last thing i want to mention because i think it was katie
somebody mentioned i think it was katie who mentioned the um advertisements in
the paper for medicines and things like that
this was an era 1918 was an era in which various nostrums and things
were advertised in the newspaper all day
every day all the time whether there were
pandemics or not and you could buy you know think these drugs weren't regulated
very well you could buy anything over the counter including poisonous things
and this began to change in 1902 when we had the beginning
of an fda-like activity in the marine hospital service which became the public
health service and then later on in the late 1920s we
had an fda but drugs were beginning to be slightly
regulated at the time of 1918 but still you could find them in every
news every major newspaper i think that was published would have
various drugs being advertised most of them quack medicine
and um people you know didn't really know that at the time the average
consumer wasn't aware of what was a real legitimate drug and what was just some
snake oil medicine and when a pandemic would come along i would think they
would rush to get anything that would work
which is exactly what we're seeing now so i'll just stop
stop there and thank you all this has been a really very interesting
set of discussions thank you thank you dr david morris i really appreciate
um not only your comments on these presentations but
um all of the experience and knowledge um that you bring to this topic um you
know you and your colleague dr jeffrey tabenberger have been you know
so important in keeping awareness up um in the public about the significance
of the 1918 influenza we had the centennial just two
years ago so that was a good chance to review the lessons
but everything we've seen over the last six or eight weeks is just a reminder as
you said you know that these public health
measures um are ones that require you know changes
in behavior they require understanding they require knowledge um
but they also require you know consistency in the in the
messaging um and as you pointed out in 1918 you really do see this division
um sometimes you see the same person you know taking both sides
saying this is a this is a problem we have to do something but don't worry
don't be alarmed and that's um you can imagine how that would be challenging
for the population um okay excuse me before can i just butt
in for one second because you mentioned dr tobinberger i
just wanted to say that dr tubman berger is online not through um not through the
zoom connection but through the other one but he's listening uh very intently
and he and i'll speak for him and say he's
very grateful too so okay please convey our thanks to him uh
he's also doing incredibly important important work right now
uh all right dr resnick i think if you want to make some comments and then i
think you've mentioned um some questions coming in to your
email so if you want to if you can um summarize those or are
select from those and then we'll um turn it back over to the
students to to respond to some of these questions and comments
sure thanks tom um before i begin let me share
my email address j e f f r e y period resnick r e z n i c
at nih.gov a publicly available email address if anyone wishes to email
me directly i'll be happy to convey questions
i have uh three already which i'll share at the end of my comments
and if any any others come in i'll certainly add them so i i'd like to
focus my comments on these excellent presentations
um speaking to uh your slide number 14 tom which
addresses uh the important perspective of
why history matters during an epidemic to my eye these presentations reflect a
really remarkable moment as historical research pursued in real
time that is in a real historically significant time
each one demonstrates how and why history matters they do it very well
and why taking a long view of a current event
in this case the pandemic we're all facing can help us think more critically
and learn lessons about the present uh and think critically about the
foreseeable future as well as the distant future in which
our society will inevitably face another pendant as
societies always have these presentations help us understand
the very currency of history if you will as we experience a historic moment again
in real time and appreciate this moment in the
continuum of history past present and really future but
there's another aspect of these presentations which
i just would like to surface they give us pause to realize
that the current pandemic itself will one day
be a historical moment which will be studied in the context
of past epi pandemics a future generation will look back on these
presentations and i would argue this symposium and
others that are being held as examples of historical research at a
historic time reflecting on the past through the lens
of the present and with an eye to the future
this realization can help us appreciate that just as newspapers of
the 1918-1919 period have become sources through which these students
have studied the contemporary pandemic media of today
so very very much of it born digital will become tomorrow's historical record
through which future scholars will study the covid19 pandemic
and certainly as nancy bristow mentioned in her comments archives and libraries
and i'll add including the national library medicine are now actively
acquiring selected portions of this massive
born digital record of the current pandemic to preserve it for
that future historical research and scientific research
it makes me wonder uh perhaps 100 years from now um i'm going to go out and live
here that a great grandchild of one of the students who presented
today will look back on the project of her or his great
grandmother or great grandfather to make sense of a
pandemic that they will be facing and how preserved digital media of the
early 21st century holds lessons for that future point in
time i realize this might be pie in the sky
thinking but then again here we are at a historic time learning how these
students have appreciated the historical record
to make sense that past and certainly the present
their work and here i'd like to underscore what dr morin shared
is part of a historical continuum stretching back 100 years and further
back relevant to today and pointing to what
really is a future historical record so with those comments uh let me share
the few questions that i've received and they're excellent ones
um in the current pandemic someone writes
the rationale for flattening the curve is not to overwhelm
hospital capacity at any given time was there similar discussion or strategy
regarding hospital capacity in 1918. i'll start with that question and then
i'll share the others uh in due course so is there to the
students uh was there a similar discussion or
strategy regarding hospital capacity in 1918
that the rationale for flattening the curve then was not to overwhelm hospital
capacity at any given time
anyone see that in the primary source material
so this is probably a question um from the newspapers
anyone want to handle that one
i'm gonna have to you know do the teacher thing and call on somebody
my newspaper the one i looked at was salem
they talked about a shortage of nurses so
they didn't really talk about um taking measures for social
care for not overwhelming the hospitals but they did
like mention shortage of nurses so they were considering taking like
um women from the city and making them or teaching them how to
be nurses but i didn't see any like effort
towards relieving the um hospital capacity
thank you alicia that's that's helpful um i mean i think
uh the place where this comes up most acutely as nancy bristow knows very well
um was on east coast cities so so boston initially philadelphia new york put out
urgent uh pleas um to have nurses sent to those
cities and then of course because the war was going on many uh
physicians and nurses had been drafted um or had
volunteered and had gone into the to the army medical corps um so they
weren't even in their cities or their or their home towns and
so you do see evidence of that in some of these newspapers i don't
remember any examples um you know where public
health officials articulated exactly the the sequence that we we
heard right in the beginning of code 19 you know which is if we can
again the term flattening the curve if we can decrease
the number of new cases you know we can delay
the the number of deaths the number of hospitalizations and so on that as far
as i have seen in the historical materials um was not part of
the the kind of predictions or the calculations
but you could certainly see that in the example i started with from new york
city you know which is that there is about a
week to 10 day lag between the increase in the number of
cases and then the increase in the number of deaths so that is exactly the
curve you know that we we are dealing with
right now um and trying to trying to to approach i
mean one of the things that's important about
the 1918 influenza is that um in many communities the first victims um
were either in army camps um that were often located outside of but relatively
close to major cities or in the case of
university towns like columbia missouri or blacksburg virginia
um the first cases and even sometimes the first deaths
were among the recruits and the trainees and the officers
um and so that in some of the initial coverage in the newspapers
actually started with those populations either the army camps outside the cities
or if it was a university you know the the students
um and so the you start to see some of the attention
there and then it spreads more broadly um into the rest of the community
uh more questions jeff yes uh so thank you both um so another question
that was received was a question about the first
wave of the pandemic actually being in the spring
of 1918 and uh this individual asks if the students or you
tom could explain the earliest wave and i think this
question probably arises because of the emphasis
on the newspaper reporting that the students shared being
at the peak of the pandemic so from late september to early november
1918 and perhaps uh there wasn't the emphasis on the
earliest wave of of the pandemic so could you speak to that
and and with the confirmation that it was actually spring of early spring
uh a spring of 1918 uh the pandemic didn't
begin in the fall of 1918 if you could talk to that point
this questioner would appreciate it yeah let me let me address it briefly and
then one of the questions the students asked
um or started with when they were doing the newspaper projects
was uh when did the first cases appear in those communities um so
let me let me address the the main part of that question and then
if there's any of the students who want to talk about that um
from their newspaper case studies they would be welcome to do so
um i'm actually going to defer to our i'm going to quote
uh i believe dave moran something that he said
um when he talked with the the uh teachers in the summer seminar a couple
years ago um and i hope i don't get this wrong he
said there are lots of ways um there are lots of ways where the
influenza you know kind of suddenly increases
it's noticed in some places and in other times it's not
um some times there's an increase in cases but
very few deaths and so it doesn't get a lot of attention
um and so i think if we you know if we think of
waves visually the metaphor you know where they
rise up and then they go down and then they rise up again that's not
necessarily the best way to actually understand what what the
sequence was in 1918 it's a little bit misleading
um the the most frequently cited example um comes from kansas um in early
march 1918 where there was a sudden increase in cases
first in an army camp and then a little bit in the community but
there's not a lot of attention to pay to that at the time um
it's only subsequently that that the army medical corps go back and say oh
yeah there were a lot of these cases and they were influenza um it then
appears in europe um in the summer of 1918 this is where
it gets the name spanish influenza because there are a lot of cases in
spain um and because spain is a neutral in world war one there's
more possibilities of reporting um on cases than there are in the
belligerent countries um but already by june of 1918
uh international newspapers in including britain in the united states
are reporting on the number of cases not only in spain but also in germany
and then in england um so you clearly have
you know a lot of cases um that are that are coming to public attention not just
of the the medical community but also with um
obviously the military are interested in this
um but also civilians in the newspaper and this actually becomes a crisis
on the front lines because the the german
uh army in particular they have so many men
um out sick that it really affects um their capacity to to launch a new
offensive which they they want to do at the end of summer of
1918. but then it comes to the united states
and this is where it's not only becomes most widespread but most deadly um and
so you can talk i think about a genuine wave of influenza um
starting in in late august early september in
uh massachusetts camp devon's outside of boston
and then spreading across the country um unevenly uh inconsistently um
but you know by uh september october early november
it's everywhere and that's why the case studies each the students looked at
really focused on on those stages um so it depends on
whether you call that the first wave or the second wave
you know that then then you talk about um you know how it goes away and then
comes back um in many communities but i think what
what the group that um presentation that katie and alicia made from the third
group is really saying that that other wave that starts in november
is also very uneven um but it's uh but it's
also not nearly as deadly um it goes on
longer and so many people do die um in that in that
stage but it doesn't have the intensity um you know where we're in a big city
you're talking about hundreds of deaths each week or even in smaller communities
you know tens and twenties and you know in a small town
um so it is there are very very different stages and again
as they mentioned given what we're going through right now with covet 19 this is
an urgent question um you know not only
uh what's happening with case rates and death rates
but if you relax social distancing measures too soon
too quickly what will happen you know will you
have uh an increase in infections and then an increase in death so this is
exactly uh what we're trying to figure out
through through this project um from the students anyone want to talk
about what you found in your newspaper in terms of
um some of these early reports and then what happens
as the the number of cases start to to increase
um i think as you mentioned before like just to reiterate that
it was difficult to track um like where people would say oh it's the first
flavor the second wave as there was really only newspapers to
look at and the newspapers are dictated by the media so like as
a historian you don't really you can't pick up
on um things if it's not being reported so and the media didn't pick up on the
increasing number of cases until like early october or late
september in a lot of different cities and then also um just looking at the way
it spread it was also hard to track because of
that as it kind of spread through um the country from like
eastern cities to western cities so it's the timeline is kind of all over the
place when you look at it um in terms of that so yeah that's just
another reason why it's difficult to have a
consecutive timeline thank you katie i appreciate that that that was very very
helpful um and i think one of the things that
was surprising i'm thinking of the the second group um you know in those
examples they cited in missouri and indiana many of these
communities that follow the closing order issued by
the state board of health did so before they had any deaths and in
some cases not even any influenza cases and that's where you see i think going
back to um nancy bristow one of your questions uh
there is some resistance to that you know why do we need to
to close the the theaters or close the schools or especially cancel
church services when you know no one around here is being sick
um and that gets into this whole you know what people in the big cities are
getting sick but not here in these communities and so this is why
you know we're especially interested in in some of these smaller counties
smaller populations that seem to have such high death rates
both overall and also from uh particularly from influenza
um and asking you know is it is this a question of
demographics or something about these populations that that's
increasing these death rates or is it more specifically
how they implemented these public health measures or or perhaps did not
um so those are some of the things we're continuing to look at
jeff were there more questions uh yes um there were several pertaining to
um death rates by racial disparity if the students or you could speak to
the degree to which they came across any evidence of rates of sickness
and or fatality by race and to what extent was this data recorded in public
health statistics and how did it surface in the newspapers
that were studied so we we looked at this
some using the the us census documents um fiona i don't want to put you on the
spot but as i recall that was something your group looked at
early on you want to address that yeah i was just about to
kid make a comment about it um yeah specifically
my we had a group that looked at comparisons
between um those of color who uh contracted influenza or pneumonia and
those of white populations um and we found that um normally they would
have uh colored or they would um
have attention on those who were black that
um had african-american descent who um who contracted influenza in those cases
were much smaller but they also had a category
just colored and we didn't know if that pertained to
any other minorities because they weren't specified
um oftentimes there were no there were often like obituaries and
information in the newspapers about notable white individuals who
um who contracted influenza and um it was important that they were
showcased so that you could uh the public could see oh these were uh
individuals who were were very uh significant in their
communities and it's important to pay attention uh to how this uh
influence is impacting the community but oftentimes um
for colored or african-american cases those were only given as numbers
they weren't really uh specified as to who contracted it how
they contracted or anything like that and
obviously the numbers were much smaller but
there were there was some record of um like influenza cases by race
fiona thank you that's very helpful um and this is certainly something that
that deserves a lot of attention not only in doing
research on the 1918 influenza but um you know as we think about the
connections and the continuities to the discussions now
um about how um covet 19 rates both for infection for testing but also
for deaths um you know how they they perpetuate
racial inequalities in our society and particularly the kind of structural
issues around um around health uh i want to give
credit for the 1918 influenza to vanessa northington gamble
um professor of history at george washington university who's done a
couple of really excellent research projects
comparing the way that influenza not only was
not only the death rates within the population
but particularly attention to this disease um and she made
extensive use of the african-american newspapers
um from 1918 many of which are in chronicling america
um because you know in the in the mainstream newspapers the white
newspapers which has been the focus of this project
they often paid very very little attention to
minority populations um and they just would disappear
um the health departments you know they did pay attention and
often would uh classify um in their vital statistics you know race
was one of the important categories that they used
um along with uh gender and age and occupation
and they were of course uh obsessed with uh
immigrant status um and so they you know would compare
uh death rates um not only between uh citizens or by ethnicity but also by
uh birthplace of mother because they were really wanted to make sure
um you know they wanted they wanted to prove um you know that native-born
populations were healthier than those born from immigrant parents
um and went back generations and so this was a
a primary concern in the early 20th century
um and it needs to be part of the discussion and as fiona mentioned
you know often there was a single category there would be
a category of white and then there would be a category of colored
and depending on the state um that may be
only african-americans but uh particularly in the west coast
um that could also include uh uh japanese americans chinese americans um
or the over marching category mexicans um
so even those that kind of statistics that
that were you know coded by race aren't always reliable
uh in terms of addressing these questions um and certainly this
something that nancy bristow has looked at
uh looks like quite extensively um in american pandemic
um as well as looking at uh differences by
um uh social class uh and gender um in her work so i would encourage
whoever asked that excellent question um you know to go and look at those
materials um and follow up on those uh we have just a
couple minutes left jeff were there any other
questions um there are two that i'll pull out
um they addressed the subject of impact of the pandemic um several questions on
the degree to which the newspapers uh show evidence
uh oh i can't hear you i'm concerned a closure of usual
activities and uh can you hear me now tom yeah
okay uh these are questions about impact the degree to which uh the
newspapers show economic impact on usual activity
that closed and impact on directly on hospital personnel
and hospital uh challenges that the pandemic caused this was addressed
briefly but i've gotten several questions about
these economic impact uh and and hospital impact
okay any students any of you see this in your newspapers
and this evidence of kind of community impact stephanie
yeah so our group tried to look for how the stock market was affected and
how day-to-day economic things were affected we really
couldn't find much in the newspapers but one of the big
things was all of the advertisements started
focusing towards home remedies and medicines to
cure or help influenza basically the entire
focus was shifted whether it be economic whether it be
just articles all of it was focused towards influenza
and so they didn't really focus on how the stock market or how the
economy was doing more than switching the focus on
to kind of a distraction
thank you yeah that's that's helpful and actually this
there is there was a question posted on twitter
um about the war and the relationship between influence and the war and i
think that you know as i think back on this project
and and what you that all the students have have done
researching it's incredibly important to remember that
this united states was in the middle of a war the war comes to an end
on november 11th um and one of the issues for these public health measures
is you know can people go out and celebrate
the end of the war um they desperately want to go out and
you know and have a parade and see each other and
you know under the you know the the public health guidelines up
through the end of october that that wouldn't have been allowed
um and so i think there is this sense in which
the war comes to an end in most places the disease recedes
you know where the number of everything goes down it kind of falls out of
attention in the um in the newspapers um you know and
that's a really important part of the context for understanding
you know not just what happened during the influenza
um but why people didn't remember it um and again this is something nancy
bristow in her book you know looks at really um thoughtfully
is why did this kind of recede from public
memory really until the last 10 or 20 years
when there's been a lot more attention to it by historians
um and then obviously now um because of the
the parallels um i'm watching the clock this has been wonderful um thank you
very much to all of the students um for pulling
together these presentations for all of your work this semester
um my thanks to uh uh the discussants uh nancy bristow
deborah thomas uh david jeff resnick and especially
david morens uh who was able to join us um and and offer his comments uh my
thanks to lindsey franz for national library of medicine for managing the
technology um i think we just barely made it um
and i appreciate everything that national library of medicine has done
not only to host this video cast but all of their support for
student projects over the years so thank you very very much appreciate it jeff
did you have any final comments oh tom thanks to you
thanks to our students and nancy deborah dave morins and everyone out there
listening um much appreciated your time and
attention and kudos to the students for their
outstanding research so thank you all very much and thank you tom thank you