Through the veil of nearly 90 years, Paul Schenker remembers people lining up outside any rowhouse they saw a doctor enter. Then a teenager in East Baltimore, he watched his neighbors wait anxiously to plead for a remedy, for anything that might cure the influenza.
Now 103 and living in a condominium on Park Heights Avenue, the retired surgeon recalls how helpless he felt when his own mother became ill.
"Everyone was frightened," Schenker recalls. "I was frightened. I knew it was a deadly disease."
It was the fall of 1918. While America fought the final battles of World War I in Europe, the homeland was attacked by a virus that would kill as many as 650,000 Americans - more than were lost to all the battles of the 20th century.
Death came so swiftly, so abundantly, that Baltimore could not furnish enough coffins. Soon it lacked for gravediggers.
Few nowadays are familiar with what transpired during an event that some call the "forgotten pandemic." It was long neglected by historians even though as many as 50 million died worldwide by the next spring. Tributes were paid to war dead or disaster victims and rarely to those lost to the flu.
Instead families have handed down their private memories. To bring them to light, The Sun asked readers to share their accounts. Among the dozens who responded were several, such as Schenker, who had first-hand experiences. Many of their recollections appear online or in this article, a part of Baltimore's history that would otherwise go untold.
Lately scholars and health care planners have been tracing the flu's trail through society. They are learning not only how the pandemic crippled institutions but also how it affected human behavior, revealing the need to anticipate psychological as well as physical trauma. The threat of avian flu makes their findings relevant.
The 1918 flu caused havoc in part because the virus selected the hardiest along with its usual victims among infants and the elderly. Now scientists think they know why: A reconstructed form of the 1918 virus triggered a powerful immune response that can destroy the lung.
There are parallels to the response in present-day avian flu victims, says Laurie Garrett, an author whose expertise includes infectious disease. "The immune system goes haywire," she says. "And the people who seem to have had the harshest response are the ones with the most robust immune systems."
