The Russell’s pandemic cure

About 1918 or so was the year of the big influenza epidemic. I know not it if reached our island but as a precautionary measure we employed what must have been thought at the time to be effective.

This is an excerpt from the memoirs of William Albert Russell. His father, William Henry Russell, worked as a caretaker for the Nooksack Cannery from about 1915 to 1922. The cannery later became the Echo Lodge Resort, and is now a neighborhood at Sunrise Cove Rd.

William lived in the house indicated in the photo below. This is also same house that our walking historical repository, Roger Granger, remembers living in 1943 as a child and where his sister Sally was born.

Echo Point Lodge in the 1940s.

Little William had many adventures on Lummi Island, but this story of surviving the Spanish Flu—and the flu cure—seems timely a century on, as we enter another pandemic winter…

All admonished to breathe deeply

Our heating for the raw, wet, cool season was a wood-burning round oak stove in the living room. At times the weather would get cold enough to freeze the overflow from the water supply tanks over behind the barn, This, of course, caused a fantasy of ice figures. And occasionally it would snow. Nearly always in “winter” it was wet and raw.

So, our stove was a favorite spot around which the family would gather each evening and, in our night clothes, we would get up as close as we could to the cherry-red side of the stove, get ourselves and clothes toasty warm, say our prayers at Mom’s knees, then run like a rooster for bed and hope to war it up before it cooled us off.

Oh, the flu cure!

While we were gathered around, Dad opened a bottle of formaldehyde, a disinfectant with a sharp, acrid odor. He would very, very, carefully pour a few drops onto the hot flat stove top whereupon we were all admonished to breathe deeply. It didn’t smell at all good but it was fun to see the droplets dance like crazy until they shrank to nothingness and vanished. And we didn’t get the flu - because of or in spite of.

Highly toxic

Formaldehyde is a highly toxic systemic poison that is absorbed well by inhalation. The vapor is a severe respiratory tract and skin irritant and may cause dizziness or suffocation. Contact with formaldehyde solution may cause severe burns to the eyes and skin. And children may be more susceptible than adults to the respiratory effects of formaldehyde. See more information about the dangers of formaldehyde at ATSDR.

It was a common cure at the time

In Oklahoma, Tusla streets were washed twice daily with formaldehyde, which apparently was the preferred disinfectant at the time.

Other remedies included tying garlic and camphor balls wrapped in cheesecloth around the neck, and sugar cubes soaked in kerosene. The first flu vaccine was not developed until 1938.

Much sickness on island

Peggy Aiston’s Lummi Island Chronological History of February 1920 reports, “Much sickness on island. Thanks to Miss Hull the nurse sent here by the Red Cross of Bellingham, all patients are doing as well as could be expected. Miss Hull has been untiring in her efforts and perhaps saved island from an epidemic of flu."

History repeats

The Washington State Board of Health did not impose statewide measures to combat the pandemic until it was well underway, according to John Caldbick in the article Flu in Washington: The 1918 "Spanish Flu" Pandemic. “The only preventive regulation of statewide application that the board issued came on November 3, 1918, when it required that surgical masks of a specified size and thickness 'entirely covering the nose and mouth' be worn in virtually all public places where people came into close contact with one another."