In April 1918, Army Surgeon General William Crawford Gorgas received a letter from Major General

Hugh Scott, commander of the 78th Division at Camp Dix in New Jersey. Scott was worried about disease in this camp, saying this,

I feel perturbed over the pneumonia and scarlet fever situation. No one here seems to be able to give me a cause sufficient for the effects I see.

The camp is as clean as a hound's tooth.

Gorgas responded quickly. He acknowledged the problem of pneumonia and recalled a time earlier in his career when he beat back a disease that threatened men in his care.

He wrote back this,

Gorgas assured Scott that despite these practical obstacles, medical science endowed them with all the knowledge necessary to control the outbreak. I haven't the least doubt that if you tomorrow could give every man in Camp Dix his own individual hut, the pneumonia would ease at once.

This note, sent during the pandemic of 1918, revealed that Gorgas was overconfident and did not appreciate the scale of the problem that he faced.

The influenza outbreak was rapidly spreading and mutating in the trenches of World War I.

The virus would soon be responsible for more deaths of American soldiers than combat and would spread all over the world.

Even after the pandemic subsided, the failure of men like Gorgas to fully control, a wreck-and-wither, even understand the pandemic would become an afterthought.

It was overwhelmed by the all-reaching war propaganda machine, but it's more that the inconvenience of the pandemic would cause its story to be nearly erased from cultural consciousness for decades afterwards.

I'm Travis Fiew and this is Trickle Down, a podcast about what happens when bad ideas flow from the top.

With me are Julian Field and Jake Rockatansky.

Episode 6 War, Disease, and Amnesia

You'll like a lot of people as a consequence of the pandemic we're still living through today.

I became interested in the pandemic of 1918 and this one is commonly referred to as the Spanish influenza after the erroneous belief that it originated in Spain.

Now it's only real competition for the title of the deadliest pandemic in history is the Black Death.

Is this made that about 500 million people or one third of the world's population became infected with the virus?

The number of deaths is estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States alone.

Even remote and isolated communities of people were not spared.

Some native villages in Alaska were decimated, 20% of western Samoans perished.

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