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Quote of the Day, A Real Pandemic
My grandfather (Harvard Medical School class of 1904) was a doctor in 1918.
My mother remembers hearing Dr. Frank Easton of Craftsbury Common, Vermont, tell of having so many patients to treat that if there wasn’t smoke coming from the chimney, he knew it was too late and drove on to the next house. He and his son had driven by one such place when his son saw a face in the window. They went back and found a little girl sitting in the sunshine, trying to stay warm in a cold house. Her parents and brother were dead. She was one of the many orphans the flu epidemic created.
Here’s the family almost 20 years later in 1937. The son was Dan and my father is holding his son. My relative Nancy Easton, who was married to his son, sent me this photograph. She found out about my book GPS Declassified and contacted me.
Hitchcock filmed part of the The Trouble With Harry in Craftsbury Common. A storm blew down all of the fall foliage and he filmed the rest of it in California.
Wow. A timely quote and one that reminds us that much about the delivery of frontline medical care has changed in a hundred years, just as the image of loneliness–the poor little girl by the window trying to bring some sunshine and warmth into her life–reminds us that much remains the same. She was lucky to have been seen by your grandfather and his son, who went back to help her.
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I read a quote – I think on Instapundit, but maybe on AccordingToHoyt – that went to the effect that if you were in a deadly pandemic you did not need the press telling you that you were in a deadly pandemic 24/7. You knew. If the press keeps having to remind you how deadly it is, it probably isn’t very deadly.
My family has skated along this past year with very few changes. We’re not prone to panic either by nature or by the fact we don’t have TVs. Or a combination.
The CDC is effectively serving as the pandemic’s PR department.
They should stop that.
Someone told me that back during the Spanish Flu, they brought people on cots in hospitals outside in the sun because they knew the sun acted as a disinfectant and was healing – I’m not sure they knew it helped produce Vitamin D in the body, one of the elements that has been advocated against COVID. Thank you for sharing your family history and picture. We learn from our past history – the very things that they want to erase and make us forget.
My father, who was born in 1910, suffered a burst appendix during the Spanish flu. He was hospitalized for nearly a month, and recalled the hospital overflowing with flu patients. Sick people where ever they could fit a cot.
I find that life is much more peaceful since I turned off the TV in March 2020.
This was in a post some time ago:
It doesn’t get much more Vermonty than Craftsbury Commons.
A great, but sad story.
Yup
Mark Steyn also discusses this kind of thing, in the best-interview-ever from 2006:
https://www.adrive.com/public/DS9Nut/NARN%2012-02-06%20NARN%201%20Hour%202%20Mark%20Steyn.mp3
I might even still live in Vermont, except I a) want a job and savings for retirement, and b) filthy commie hippies.