Toronto 1918 – a city of a half-million people, but the streets seem empty, the result of 70,000 young Torontonians having enlisted in World War I. Suddenly and without warning, an enemy deadlier than any German weapon appears in one of many military camps across town.
Toronto 1918 – a city of a half-million people, but the streets seem empty, the result of 70,000 young Torontonians having enlisted in World War I. Suddenly and without warning, an enemy deadlier than any German weapon appears in one of many military camps across town.
The Spanish flu reached Toronto on Sept. 29, 1918. Within a month, half the population was infected by this highly infectious pathogen. Once the fever, diarrhea and other symptoms had dissipated, more than 1,750 Torontonians were dead. Across Canada, some 50,000 people died from that flu, many of them between 20 and 40 years old. One way the flu strain killed was by triggering an extreme reaction in the immune system. Around the world the death toll is estimated to have reached upwards of 40 million, compared to roughly 10 million victims of the Great War.
For years the World Health Organization has warned that the world is overdue for the next great pandemic. Recent fears that avian flu might kill millions have been replaced in recent weeks by fears of swine flu. But it still isn’t clear whether this flu is the one we’ve been warned about.
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Few people alive today remember the last great pandemic that gripped the globe in 1918-1919.
In 2005, the Star asked readers to share family stories about that pandemic. The responses told of lines of horse-drawn hearses on the Danforth and volunteers digging mass graves in Prospect Cemetery.
Christine Featherstone recounted a story told by her grandfather, Dr. Charles Clark, an ear nose and throat specialist in Toronto in 1918.
“He arrived at a patient’s home late in the evening, his last call of the day. No one answered the front door, but it was open, so he went in. He found two children dead in the living room, then went upstairs and found the mother dead in the bedroom with her baby dead in the bassinette beside her.”
The flu worked its way into the trenches of Western Europe in early 1918, but its severity wasn’t recognized until troops began transporting it back to their homelands.
When it appeared in Toronto on Sept. 29, few paid it much notice. Ten days later a Toronto schoolgirl died at Toronto General Hospital. Some speculated she was Toronto’s first civilian flu victim. Two days later Dr. Charles Hastings, Toronto’s medical officer of health, asked the press to “tell the people to keep as fit as possible, to avoid anything which might give them colds, and not to worry any more about it.” By Oct. 3, the Military Base Hospital on Gerrard St. E. had 500 cases of the flu.
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By Oct. 8, nearly 260 teachers and 10,000 students were reported absent from school.
Hotels began doubling as emergency hospitals, and the Star began calling for local schools to be closed.
By Oct. 9, undertakers couldn’t keep up with the death toll. Cemeteries were ordered to stay open for Sunday burials, and on Oct. 19, the city ordered theatres, movie halls and other public areas closed.
Only medical personnel were ordered to wear masks. Still, the Star reported that women on the streets were wearing veils over their faces.
By Oct. 26, thousands of railway operators across the country were ill, exacerbating a coal shortage.
Even after the last flu deaths were recorded in early November, normalcy took its time to return to the city. Children were left without parents, parents were left without children, and thousands were left to grieve even as news broke that peace had been declared in Europe.
