Judge Robert Woodside, in his memoir, My Life and Town, published in 1979, reflected on his memory of the 1918 Flu in Millersburg. At the time, he was a boy of fourteen. His recollection included the high school building being used as a hospital, getting the flu in 1919, and receiving some sort of new “shot” which may have helped him recover.
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THE FLU
When the 1918 flu hit Millersburg, as it did the rest of the world… all meeting places were closed. As it spread, the healthy nursed sick relatives until they too fell victim. Mother rushed to Philadelphia when she learned her sister, her husband and three children were all in bed with no person to look after them, It soon became evident that many of the ill in Millersburg could not receive the care they needed, so all the seats and desks were removed from the Moore Street High School building and a hospital with over a hundred beds was established. Two army doctors were sent to help the local doctors treat the ill. How the army could spare them when war casualties were at their height and thousands of soldiers were dying from the flu, I never could understand, but they did. The nurses and orderlies, all volunteers, most untrained and unpaid, worked long hours rushing about behind their gauze masks. Although only fourteen, I worked as an orderly for two weeks. Some patients went home after several days, most stayed several weeks, and a number never went home. How many Millersburgers died, I don’t remember – thirty to fifty, I would guess. Many days ministers spend hours going from one funeral to another.
Strangely, no person in our family got the flu and the hospital was dismantled, a second round hit in early 1919, and I was one of the casualties. I had been sleeping at the home of Aunt Jennie Williamson several blocks from my home. I got up in the morning “dizzy and with fever.” I remember how the buildings, the street and the pavement all seemed to move and distort in the strangest way as I walked home, where I went to bed with a high fever. When Dr. Ulrich arrived, he gave me a shot – something new, recently developed, which he had just received, he said. In a day or two my fever broke. I perspired so profusely that Mother had to change all the bed clothes three times in one night. Then I got well, but Mother insisted I stay in bed another day. When she found me standing on it (I was obedient!) delivering Theodore Roosevelt‘s last address with the gusto I thought he used, she discharged her patient and permitted me to go downstairs. I regained my strength rapidly and was soon back to normal.
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Portrait of Robert Woodside as a young boy from My Life and Town.
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