Lessons of history are there to be learned from

Sometimes, it can be rather startling, to look back over a piece that you’ve written, even just a few short months ago, when our world was a completely different place. Back on January 17, during a week when everyone I met seemed to be coughing and spluttering with some kind of cold or cough, it was just taken as the norm. “Get over it and get on with,” was the guiding philosophy with the help of a few Lemsips or Paracetamol tablets.

Now, just over three months later if someone in your company, or even yourself, has more than two sneezes in a row, there’s a sense of being watched, with the question silently being asked inside the caverns of the mind: “Has he/she got the corona?” I grew up in a house where my father recalled quite vividly tales of how the infamous Spanish Flu (incongruously named because it didn’t start there) of 1918 – it actually lingered on in places through 1919 and 1920 – spread fear through households not only in Ireland but across the world.

Although over a century separates the Spanish Flu and the coronavirus, there are still a lot of similarities in what was going on. Back in 1918 there was no flu vaccine . . . there was no effective treatment for it . . . people were advised to stay away from public gatherings and to avoid close contact with other people . . . no spitting and no attending wakes  . . . with the best potential ‘cure’ being good nursing, hot drinks and nutritious meals.

For want of a better expression, there was also ‘other stuff’ going on too in terms of madcap cures and recommendations from non-medical people (and even some ‘reliable’ medical sources too). Researcher, Dr. Ida Milne, an authority on the impact of the Spanish Flu in Ireland, has outlined a number of those.

Among the antidotes tried out were quinine (a fever treating drug), opium, significant quantities of brandy and whiskey (an old Irish cure for everything but tending to be very temporary!), calomel (to open the bowels), and the injection of strychnine (up until relatively a particularly deadly type of rat poison).

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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