Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, April 2nd, 1919, Woodrow Wilson has the flu.

The influenza pandemic is sometimes called the 1918 flu pandemic.

It started in spring, 1918, but it was the second wave, as we are all learning. In the fall of 1918, but it was the second wave as we are all learning. In the fall of

1918 that was the most devastating, with the disease spreading into

1919. That is when President Wilson reportedly caught the flu

either right before or right after he arrived in

Paris for another round of talks to try and bring an end to the First World War.

We're joined as always by Nicole Hemmer of Columbia University.

I'll lay out what we know and don't know about

this moment in a second, but we should say right off the bat, Nicky, that there's a

little bit of controversy about whether he actually had the flu or there were some

other things going on. Yeah, so one of the things that people know about Wilson and his health

is that he suffers a pretty serious stroke near the end of his presidency.

So for a long time historians talked about this illness as a mini stroke that he had had but if you

actually look at the set of symptoms that he had including a really high fever

and none of them really fit a stroke and they all sound a whole lot like this

pandemic that was ravaging the world at the time.

Yeah, I mean by all accounts and we'll talk a little bit about what the ramifications of this were but he was very out of it, he was fever strict,

he was sort of deteriorating rapidly over the course of these

negotiations in Paris one thing that's interesting is that it was it was underplayed at the

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