Forgotten Plague—The Spanish Flu in Northern Minnesota
In 2022, our understanding of epidemics and pandemics is far greater than it was ten years ago. It is not difficult to imagine the fear and confusion the epidemics in the twentieth century caused. When we think of quarantines, whole towns shutting down, sick lists, and the race for vaccination, we could just as easily be talking about 2020 as 1918. What sets the more recent pandemic apart from the great influenza epidemic of the early twentieth century is that we were not on the backend of a gruesome war, the largest and deadliest the world had ever seen. The unimaginable losses of hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded soldiers in Europe and America was about to be compounded by a sickness that would leave 50 million people dead worldwide and over 675,000 dead in the United States in only a few months. Because the flu did not originate in America, it makes sense that the first ones to fall victim to the sickness were returning soldiers who infected one another within military trai...
