Back in 1918…

NHS workers could do worse than examine the experience of another London hospital during the Spanish influenza pandemic just over 100 years ago. Today, that hospital is named St Charles and offers walk-in care at the northern end of Ladbroke Grove, Kensington. But in 1918 it was known as St Marylebone Infirmary and had 744 beds for the “sick poor”, many of whom had tuberculosis and other chronic lung conditions.

In October 1918, as a second wave of Spanish influenza spread across Britain, its wards were inundated with pneumonia cases…

“All training, and indeed every sort of trimming, went by the board,” Hood recalled in his notebook 30 years later. “The staff fought like Trojans to feed the patients, scramble as best they could through the most elementary nursing and keep the delirious in bed!”

The timing was bad because around half of all trained nurses were in military service.

“Each day the difficulties became more pronounced as the patients increased and the nurses decreased, going down like ninepins themselves,” Hood wrote. “Sad to relate some of these gallant girls lost their lives in this never-to-be-forgotten scourge and as I write I can see some of them now literally fighting to save their friends then going down and dying themselves.”

Hood made the nurses wear lint masks and advised them “not to interpose their faces too near the blast of those coughing”. But when it came to tending to a fellow nurse, many refused to wear the masks for fear of distressing their colleague.

In the case of one nurse, Hood noted: “Nothing I could do or say had the slightest effect in influencing her to diminish the risks to herself. She was consumed with a burning desire to save her … inevitably, the nurse developed a lung infection, dying soon after the woman she had been nursing.”

By December, Hood was exhausted and went on sick leave. When he returned in February, the epidemic was still raging and two more nurses had died, bringing the fatalities to nine.

“One poor nurse, I remember, with a terribly acute influenzal pneumonia, became so distressed she could not stay in bed and insisted on being propped up against the wall by her bed until she was finally drowned in her profuse, thin blood-stained sputum.”

Not something to look forward to.