Given Away, A Sicilian Upbringing: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918--Excerpt from Given Away, a Sicilian Upbringing

"Returning from the Great War having seen death and destruction all about him, Gianni was unprepared to find his parents buried in a cemetery under a marker labeled, Mr. and Mrs. Caldarone, originally from Carini. The marker was barely proper as no one was about to claim responsibility for the old man and woman who had succumbed to the Spanish Flu. No relative would claim them, and their only child was at war in the trenches despite his former disbelief in violence and aggression. When he returned, it was the villagers that broke the news to Gianni that his parents were dead and the few, miserly items that they owned had been sold to pay the gravedigger.”

Excerpt from Given Away, a Sicilian Upbringing

“I had a little bird, Its name was Enza,

I opened the window,

And in-flu-enza."

Children's Rhyme, 1918

The Influenza Pandemic

of 1918

The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351. Known as "Spanish Flu" or "La Grippe" the influenza of 1918-1919 was a global disaster.

To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States; but papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain (such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII), creating a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit— thus the pandemic's nickname Spanish flu. This pandemic has been described as "the greatest medical holocaust in history" and may have killed more people than the Black Death. It is said that this flu killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has killed in 24 years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. (Barry, John. “The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History.”).

In the United States the Spanish flu attacked quickly and brutally leaving scores of corpses that few survivors were willing to touch. The Alaskan territorial government hired gold miners from Nome to travel to flu-ravaged towns and bury the dead. The miners arrived in Brevig Mission shortly after the medical calamity, tossed the victims into a pit two meters deep, and covered them with permafrost.

: A ward at Camp Funston, Kan. showing the many ill patients who caught the 1918 Spanish influenza.

Horrifying as the flu was, its reign of terror was mercifully brief: By late 1919, the flu had largely disappeared. Although its survivors and their children faced lifelong health problems.

: Dr. Shirley Fannin, Epidemiologist:” There were so many people dying that you ran out of things that you’d never considered running out of before — caskets.”