Pestilence in the Magic City
“La Grippe everywhere.” - Frederick Putnam, January 13, 1890.
In late December 1889 through January 1890, reports began appearing in Muncie’s newspapers about a lethal influenza pandemic that raged across Europe and in America’s east-coast cities. The Muncie Morning News wrote on January 3, 1890 that “influenza is spreading everywhere. Many deaths in New York. Fully one hundred thousand cases now in the metropolis.” Within days, the pandemic spread into Indiana, causing outbreaks in every major city, including Muncie. On January 15, Muncie diarist Thomas Neely wrote in his diary, “A great many of our citizens are having what is called the La Grippe.”
Known variously as the Russian Flu, Asiatic Flu, or La Grippe (French for influenza), the 1889–1890 influenza pandemic first appeared in Turkestan during the summer of 1889. By December, it had devastated St. Petersburg, Russia and from there, it spread across the northern hemisphere in four months.
The pandemic was the first in an era of rapid transportation and urbanization. Thousands of miles of new inter-city rail lines spanned Asia, Europe, and North America. Steamers crossed the Atlantic in as little as six days. The Second Industrial Revolution also had swelled urban populations. In east-central Indiana, the Gas Boom had lured thousands of new workers into cities.
The Russian Flu was also the first pandemic widely reported in newspapers, which spread knowledge of the pestilence ahead of its arrival. However, the news didn’t quell outbreaks, as there was no firm scientific understanding of how, exactly, influenza spread. At the onset of the Russian Flu, epidemiologists had made new advancements in germ theory, but not enough to practically advise how to ‘flatten the curve’ of infection. Recent studies point to Influenza Type A-H3N8 as the likely culprit.
The Russian Flu came in waves, the first of which occurred in the winter of 1889–1890, followed by recurrences in spring 1891, winter 1891–1892, winter 1893–1894, and early 1895. Exact numbers are difficult to determine, but epidemiologists today propose that the basic reproduction number for the Russian Flu was between 1.9–2.4. This means that an infected person, on average, spread it to about two people. The case fatality rate was somewhere between .1% and .28%, on par with typical Influenza Type A epidemics, but significantly lower than the Spanish Flu and what faces us now with Covid-19. Historians estimate that the Russian Flu killed about 1,000,000 people worldwide.
The first reported Russian Flu cases in Muncie occurred late in the year. On December 30, 1889, the Muncie Morning News wrote that “the victims to the disease as far as known are Vic Silverburg, S.P. Brundage, Howard Hibbits, Frank Miller, George Fifer, and others.” The report ended, “the boys have the disease in a mild form and will probably survive. It is to be hoped the epidemic will not spread any farther.”
The Morning News was wrong. Within weeks, Russian Flu spread rapidly across Muncie and with it, the specter of death. Newspapers published victim lists. While not comprehensive, they included names of prominent Munsonian families — Heath, Turner, Neely, Wysor, Calvert, Hibbits, Swain, Sweigart, and Russey — just to name a few.
Muncie diarists Thomas Neely and Frederick Putnam also made diary entries about the pandemic. Neely wrote on January 11 that “almost everyone has the influenza, or La Grippe.” By mid-January, Neely wrote almost daily notes about victims, including his son Lon. At month’s end, he recorded that “La Grippe is prevailing at an alarming extent.”
Putnam’s entries were similar, writing on January 31 there were “many new cases of the La Grippe or influenza and leading to pneumonia. It prevails over this country and all foreign countries and in many places, fatal, as in several cases here.”
For those afflicted, they suffered and died at home. The Home and Ball Memorial hospitals were years away from being built and the Whitney Hospital, on South Council Street, was little more than a doctor’s office.
The Russian Flu died down significantly in spring 1890. Later that year, the Indiana Board of Health reported that 388 Hoosiers died from it between October 1889 and September 1890.
The abatement was short lived. Successive waves of ‘La Grippe’ appeared again in the Hoosier state, closely matching world trends in spring 1891 and winter of 1891–1892.
This latter wave was especially horrific, worse than the initial outbreak. Neely wrote on December 22, 1891 that “there seems to be an almost epidemic of Grippe in Muncie and in nearly the whole world.” Putnam’s entries run parallel and include the progression of the disease as it plagued his wife, Susan. On Christmas Day, he wrote, “Grippe is considered a dangerous condition. Susan doing nicely although impatient. Much sickness in town.”
The pandemic’s third wave reached its height in January 1892. After New Year’s, city schools extended their break into January. On the 15th, the Morning News wrote that “the grippe is still ravaging and many notable persons are falling victims to the epidemic.”
There aren’t reliable numbers as to the extent of the pandemic waves in Muncie. However, E. Thomas Ewing wrote in his 2018 paper, “La Grippe or Russian Influenza: Mortality Statistics During the 1890 Epidemic in Indiana” that “approximately 3,200 died specifically of this disease” between 1890–1893
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is very different from the Russian Flu. There’s still much to learn about it, but we do know that it probably is far more deadly than what occurred in 1889–1995, by a factor of ten.
We also know that societal-disrupting pandemics, while unprecedented for many of us, weren’t unknown to our forebears. In the days before modern medicine, people just grinned and bore it. Many died, often under ghastly conditions. While significant challenges lie before us, they aren’t that dissimilar to what was overcome by previous generations.
The historian Charles Rosenberg wrote in “What Is an Epidemic” that the societal response to epidemics occurs in a “predictable narrative sequence.” In the beginning, “most communities are slow to accept and acknowledge an epidemic,” primarily as a “failure of imagination” and as a threat to “economic and institutional interests.” The turning point arrives after people start dying “and the sick must suffer in increasing numbers before officials acknowledge what can no longer be ignored.” The next stage in the drama arrives as society creates a new framework to understand the changed reality. In antiquity through the early modern era, “the epidemic had to be understood primarily in terms of man’s relationship to God.” In recent centuries, the new framework was “more secular and mechanistic” with explanations that “could provide a measure of understanding and thus promise control.”
The final stage is a societal negotiation for a public response, a “visible acting out of community solidarity” with a set of rituals “whether in religion, in rationalistic pathology, or in some combination of the two.” In the end, according to Rosenberg, “epidemics ordinarily end with a whimper, not a bang. Susceptible individuals flee, die, or recover, and the incidence of the disease gradually declines.”
However the end, we’ll only get to it with new behaviors of community solidarity. We’re Munsonians, after all, and our history shows us that nature randomly places terrible challenges in our way. Yet, by working together, we can overcome them with collective action, while mitigating the worst aspects for the most vulnerable among us.
(Originally appeared in the Star Press on March 18, 2020: https://www.thestarpress.com/story/news/local/2020/03/18/bygone-muncie-pestilence-magic-city-russian-flu-pandemic/5073320002/).
