This isn’t Cleveland’s first pandemic. It's the first big one in a long time. You have to go all the way back to 1918-19 to find one this bad. I’m talking about the Spanish Flu, which killed 50 million people worldwide, 675,000 of them in the United States; 4,400 of those were right here in Cleveland. What was that pandemic like for the people who lived in Cleveland 100 years ago? Are there similarities to now? Lessons we can learn? For answers to those questions, I spoke with John Grabowski, a professor and historian at Case Western Reserve University a day after he gave a talk called "Pestilence and War,” about Cleveland at the end of World War I and the start of our last great pandemic.
Show links:
- Encyclopedia of Cleveland History Spanish Flu of 1918-19 entry
- Influenza Encyclopedia article on Cleveland
- CDC: 1918 Pandemic
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