Pandemic influenza from 1889 to 1895

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"Everyone has influenza" (contemporary French caricature)

The influenza pandemic 1889-1895 was a worldwide influenza - epidemic that at the time in the newspapers and later in the literature Russian Influenza was called. The pandemic began in Central Asia in the summer of 1889 , from where it spread following trade routes to Russia , China, and from Russia to Europe and then worldwide. The propagation took place in waves. The first wave of 1889/1890 was followed by three more waves of different characteristics until 1895. With up to one million victims worldwide, the Russian flu was the most severe influenza epidemic to date, only surpassed by the Spanish flu , which claimed well over 25 million victims from 1918 onwards.

course

The first cases of Russian flu became known when the disease reached St. Petersburg in October 1889 , where a significant proportion of the population fell ill within a short period of time. The disease was often brief but severe with fever, headache, pain in the limbs, nausea and vomiting, but occasionally took a longer course with complications such as pneumonia . Because of the rapid course that often lasted only three days, the flu was also known in German as "lightning catarrh", as the Spanish flu was also called in 1918/19.

According to the German doctor Johann Heyfelder, however, the disease had its origin in the Emirate of Bukhara on the Silk Road . The expansion took place from there to the west via the Trans Caspian Railway, which was completed in the previous year . According to other opinions, the origin of the disease was in western Siberia, from where it spread to the west through Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan . In mid-September, the epidemic reached Chelyabinsk on the Trans-Siberian Railway , which was still under construction at the time , crossed the Urals in early October and reached St. Petersburg in mid-October. Thanks to rail connections, it quickly spread to the capitals of Europe, where there were outbreaks in November and December in Berlin , Vienna and Paris .

At the beginning of 1890 the disease reached England. In London alone, 10 to 15 percent of the population, i.e. over 400,000 people, died from the disease, over 4,000 people, mainly children and old people. Over 250,000 people died in Europe, the number of deaths around the world was arguably two or three times as high.

The epidemic spread worldwide within four months: in mid-December the flu reached Boston and New York , in January Montreal , North and South Africa and Kashmir , in February India and China and in March East Africa, Australia , New Zealand and Borneo . The pandemic from 1831 to 1833 took eleven months to spread globally in a time before the railways and steamers.

The first wave was followed in Great Britain in April / May 1891 by a second wave, the third in January / February 1892 and the fourth from December 1893 to January 1894. The first wave claimed an estimated 27,000 deaths in Great Britain, the second 58,000, a total of died by 1894 probably 100,000 Brits with the flu. In the following years there were individual outbreaks, namely in 1895 and 1899/1900.

World map from 1891 with data on the course of the pandemic

A determination of the lethality of the infection also proves to be difficult where - as in Great Britain, for example - the causes of death were already statistically recorded at that time. In the first few years in particular, influenza was only rarely mentioned as the cause of death and pneumonia or non-specific respiratory diseases were instead mentioned as a diagnosis. The frequency of such other illnesses also makes it difficult to statistically identify additional deaths due to the influenza epidemic.

Pathogen

According to a study published in 2010, some clues point to the subtype A / H3N8 , the so-called equine influenza . However, the subtype A / H2N2 had also been mentioned repeatedly in the specialist discussion . According to a Belgian research group led by Marc van Ranst, the disease was not at all influenza, rather it was caused by the HCoV-OC43 coronavirus .

The Russian flu 1977/1978 was caused by a different pathogen.

Effects and reactions

The victorious epidemic : Mr. Punch sits in front of the fire with gruel : "No fun being a joker with the flu." (Cartoon from the magazine Punch from 1891)

The pandemic of 1889 differed from previous influenza pandemics in several ways, on the one hand in the number of victims and the severity of the illnesses, on the other hand in the speed of spread and perception. In this respect, it is comparable to the pandemics of the 21st century. Just as the spread of infectious diseases has accelerated significantly today due to the global traffic with millions of passengers, the Russian flu was the first pandemic in which the spread along the railway lines played a major role.

Just as the Internet is changing the perception of threats today and dangers that would previously have been perceived as being far away are coming into close proximity, so for the first time reporting by newspapers as the first modern mass medium caused a different, less distant perception. Not only had the number and diversification of newspapers and magazines increased significantly, but now there were also news agencies such as Reuters , who competed with each other and tried to outdo each other with the latest news, so that established media such as The Times faced numerous new competition from were faced with regional daily newspapers and tabloids, from which the newspaper reader was informed almost daily about the development of the epidemic in St. Petersburg, for example. There were also publications such as the satirical magazine Punch or the women's magazine Women's Penny Paper , which conveyed their specific view of the epidemic to their audience.

The impression that the epidemic flared up on the audience in the fall of 1889 can be seen in a poem about the Russian Flu written by the future Prime Minister Winston Churchill , who was then 15 and attended the elite school in Harrow . There it says:

The rich, the poor, the high, the low
Alike the various symptoms know
Alike before it droop.

Churchill addresses a characteristic of the epidemic that was perceived at the time, namely its democratic character, which also did not spare the rich, powerful and famous. Not only did the top of society not be spared, it even gave the impression that it was they who were thrown down by the disease. One of the first people in England whose illness became publicly known was then Prime Minister Lord Salisbury , which led the Liverpool Mercury to the thoughtful remark that, in the face of such an epidemic, "the ruler is as much in danger as the street vendor". In addition to the illnesses of prominent people, it was noted that railway and postal workers were disproportionately affected.

Another characteristic, namely the apparent helplessness of doctors and medical professionals in the face of the deadly threat, was the subject of a caricature published in the French satirical magazine Le Grelot in 1890 , which shows an unhappy patient with a doctor happily waving a prescription, surrounded by rows of doctors and pharmacists and personifications of antipyretics used at the time, such as quinine or sodium salicylate , which at best can alleviate symptoms of a viral flu. It is played by a combo made up of three skeletons. Flu treatment also was well strychnine used. The Local Government Board's "Preliminary Precautions" from the Local Government Board responsible for public health in England and Wales suggested that "staying in bed, keeping warm, drinking brandy , taking quinine and opium , and disinfecting bedding and clothing" should be noted in the case of influenza .

The countermeasures taken, for example, to decontaminate the Westminster Parliament building in May 1891, consisted of scrubbing the floors with carbolic soap , smoking with sulfur and camphor, and extensive ventilation. All of them were not very effective for the prophylaxis of a viral disease and were based on the miasming theory , which was actually already discredited at the time , which proved to be quite persistent, if one suspected that the origin of the disease was in China, from where the wind dried the fine dust Carry corpses west. In 1887, a catastrophic flood from the Yellow River left up to two million dead. Accordingly, and following the principle that epidemics always come from somewhere else, the epidemic in Russia was referred to as the "Chinese runny nose". In addition to such long-range effects of particulate matter, the atmospheric-miasmatic effects of earthquakes (since 1875 seismographs have provided increasingly more precise data on this topic ), volcanic eruptions (the long-range effects of the Krakatau eruption in 1883 in the form of spectacular sunsets were still remembered) as the causes of the epidemic, or electrical ones Phenomena such as conspicuous northern lights are discussed. Extraterrestrial influences were also taken into consideration, namely the appearance of comets.

Especially in the course of the waves that followed the first wave, the public became increasingly indifferent and fatalistic to the epidemic, they renounced doctor visits, ridiculed the medical professionals and lost part of the belief in the ability of modern science to treat all diseases and Ultimately defeating epidemics. In 1892, the bacteriologist Richard Pfeiffer believed that he had discovered the pathogen in the " Pfeiffer influenza bacterium ". However, this discovery did not lead to therapy, but to confusion about the causes of influenza that persisted into the 1930s. In fact, Pfeiffer's influenza bacillus is a bacterial pathogen that occurs secondarily in influenza - often, but not always.

Influenza inspired? The Scream by Edvard Munch (1893)

Finally, a third characteristic of Russian flu are the psychological effects that often appear in the reports and that persisted or only appeared after the actual illness had been overcome. There was talk of “nervous invalids”, tormented by “post-influential depression”, “lethargy”, “flu-like catalepsy ”, “hysterical coma”, “ melancholy ” and “ neurasthenia ”. FB Smith and Mark Honigsbaum speculate that the cultural shift in the 1890s towards literature of decadence , the art of symbolism, and the fin de siècle obsession with disease, insanity, and death were linked to a long-term impact of surviving influenza. Such a connection has been suggested, for example, in Edvard Munch's famous painting The Scream , the first versions of which were made in 1893. However, such assumptions cannot be directly substantiated. The attempt to establish a connection between an increase in the suicide rate in the years from 1890 onwards and the influenza epidemic also ultimately remains anecdotal. However, this does not mean that such connections do not exist or are even improbable.

See also

literature

  • Mark Honigsbaum: The Great Dread: Cultural and Psychological Impacts and Responses to the “Russian” Influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889-1893. In: Social History of Medicine 23, No. 2 (2010), doi : 10.1093 / shm / hkq011 , pp. 299-319.
  • Mark Honigsbaum: Living with Enza: The Forgotten Story of Britain and the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, ISBN 978-0-230-21774-4 , pp. 12-16.
  • FB Smith: The Russian Influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889-1894. In: Social History of Medicine 8, No. 1 (April 1995), doi : 10.1093 / shm / 8.1.55 , pp. 55-73.
contemporary reports
  • Henry Franklin Parsons: Report on the Influenza Epidemic of 1889-90. Volume 6387 of C (Series) (Great Britain. Parliament) Volume 34 of Parliamentary papers. Ed. Local Government Board. Eyre & Spottiswoode, London 1891.
  • Henry Franklin Parsons: Further Report and Papers on Epidemic Influenza 1889-92. Ed. Local Government Board. Eyre & Spottiswoode, London 1893.
  • W. Heß: Die Influenza , in: Die Gartenlaube 1892, pp. 184-187

Web links

Commons : Pandemic Influenza from 1889 to 1895  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ MA Lunz: Some about the influenza epidemic in Moscow in 1889. In: German Medical Wochenschrift 16, No. 18 (1890), pp. 378-380, digitizedhttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.thieme-connect.com%2Fproducts%2Fejournals%2Fpdf%2F10.1055%2Fs-0029-1207174.pdf~GB%3D~IA%3D~ MDZ% ​​3D% 0A ~ SZ% 3D ~ double-sided% 3D ~ LT% 3D ~ PUR% 3D .
  2. ↑ Franz Engel: The influenza epidemic in Egypt in the winter of 1889/90: According to Gesammelte Ärztlichen u. a. To report. Springer, Berlin & Heidelberg 1893 (reprint: Springer 2013, ISBN 978-3-662-33207-8 ), p. 5 ( digitized versionhttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3D~GB%3D-hahBwAAQBAJ~IA%3D~MDZ%3D%0A~SZ%3DPA5~ double-sided%3D~LT%3D~PUR%3D ).
  3. ↑ Mark Honigsbaum: Living with Enza. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 12.
  4. ↑ a b Mark Honigsbaum: Living with Enza. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 14 f.
  5. ↑ Donald Emmeluth: influenza. Chelsea House, 2003, ISBN 0-7910-7305-X , p. 84.
  6. ^ CW Potter: A history of influenza. In: Journal of Applied Microbiology , 91, No. 4 (2001), doi : 10.1046 / j.1365-2672.2001.01492.x , p. 575.
  7. ^ FB Smith: The Russian Influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889 - ?? 1894. In: Social History of Medicine 8, No. 1 (April 1995), p. 67.
  8. ^ FB Smith: The Russian Influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889 - ?? 1894. In: Social History of Medicine 8, No. 1 (April 1995), p. 56.
  9. ^ FB Smith: The Russian Influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889 - ?? 1894. In: Social History of Medicine 8, No. 1 (April 1995), p. 56 ff.
  10. ^ Alain-Jacques Valleron et al .: Transmissibility and geographic spread of the 1889 influenza pandemic. In: PNAS . Volume 107, No. 19, 2010, pp. 8778-8781, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.1000886107
  11. ^ Maurice R. Hilleman: Realities and enigmas of human viral influenza: pathogenesis, epidemiology and control. Review in: Vaccine. Volume 20, 2002, pp. 3068–3087, full text (PDF) ( Memento from February 18, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
  12. ↑ David Cyranoski: Virology: Portrait of a Killer , online edition of the article in Spectrum of Science No. 8, August 2020, pp. 40–49
  13. ↑ Maïthé Chini: Coronavirus possibly caused a million deaths in 1890, says Marc Van Ranst , in: The Brussels Times of June 15, 2020
  14. ↑ Mark Honigsbaum: The Great Dread. In: Social History of Medicine 23, No. 2 (2010), pp. 300, 303.
  15. ↑ Harrovian School Newsletter , December 10, 1940.
  16. ^ "The sovereign is as liable to seizure as the costermonger": Liverpool Mercury , January 2, 1890.
  17. ↑ Mark Honigsbaum: The Great Dread. In: Social History of Medicine 23, No. 2 (2010), pp. 305, 307.
  18. ^ FB Smith: The Russian Influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889-1894. In: Social History of Medicine 8, No. 1 (April 1995), pp. 58, 68.
  19. ^ The Times , Jan. 23, 1890, p. 14.
  20. ^ FB Smith: The Russian Influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889-1894. In: Social History of Medicine 8, No. 1 (April 1995), p. 62 ff.
  21. ^ FB Smith: The Russian Influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889-1894. In: Social History of Medicine 8, No. 1 (April 1995), p. 69.
  22. ↑ Laura Spinney: Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. PublicAffairs 2017, ISBN 978-1-61039-767-4 , chap. 1.
  23. ^ FB Smith: The Russian Influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889 - ?? 1894. In: Social History of Medicine 8, No. 1 (April 1995), p. 69 ff.