How The Globe covered two pandemics, a century apart

On the morning of Oct. 25, 1918, The Globe ran a letter on its front page from the widow of an army chaplain who died of Spanish influenza.

“Canada can well be ashamed,” the headline read, quoting what the widow said were some of the last words of her husband, Captain Roy Kain. He perished at a military base hospital in Toronto, crammed in a room with five other dying men and, according to his wife, ignored by doctors struggling to care for more than 800 soldiers in a building fit for 300, at most.

“I shall never forget the horror of that room,” Lillian Kain wrote. “Can any front-line trench be worse than to be placed in a room with the most advanced cases, to hear the cries of the dying, to realize your own time is coming as surely as the sun will rise, to feel that you are suffering and dying from the neglect and carelessness of others?”

The letter is one of the few front-page items that The Globe – the newspaper that would later absorb a competitor and become The Globe and Mail – ran about the catastrophic wave of influenza that swept across Canada and the world in the autumn of 1918.

There should have been far more of them. Despite killing an estimated 50,000 Canadians over two years at a time when the country’s population was just over eight million, the Spanish influenza was often relegated to The Globe’s inside pages.

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To be fair, it’s not as though The Globe ignored the flu’s toll on civilians. It carried 356 articles mentioning influenza in October, 1918, the height of the pandemic. Many of those stories would be hauntingly familiar to anyone who lived through the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools, theatres, dance halls and other public gathering places were closed. Hospitals were overrun. Gauze masks came into vogue. Toronto’s medical officer of health, Charles Hastings, encouraged people to shop by phone and pleaded with bosses to let their symptomatic employees stay home, lest they spread the flu to more workers.

However, such stories rarely received front-page treatment.

Moreover, The Globe’s editorial pages in 1918 lacked the kinds of crusading columns, editorials and investigative reporting that would mark its coverage of COVID-19 a century later. Veteran health columnist André Picard set the tone on March 11, 2020, when he called on Canada’s leaders to “Shut it down,” a few days before officials began closing schools, businesses and major public events in the face of the frightening new virus.

In contrast, the paper’s editorials at the peak of the Spanish influenza crisis were uncharacteristically tepid, sometimes amounting to little more than the reprinting of public-health advice and the commending of volunteers for tending to the sick. “Effective methods of combatting the Spanish influenza must be mainly personal,” wrote Junius, as The Globe calls the authors of its unsigned editorials, on Oct. 9, 1918. Closing schools, churches and other public gathering places hadn’t saved Boston from the ravages of the flu, so a “minimum of community disturbance” should be the order of the day in Toronto, Junius wrote – though when the city’s medical officer of health began enacting closings a week later, The Globe didn’t push back.

Looking back at the coverage from the vantage point of a journalist who reported on COVID-19 nearly every day for 18 months, The Globe’s underplaying of the far deadlier Spanish influenza pandemic seems puzzling. But unlike reporters in the COVID era, Globe journalists and editors in 1918 were consumed with covering a world war that was weeks from ending as Spanish influenza peaked in Toronto. They were also working in a different media world, one shaped by the space limitations of a physical newspaper instead of the infinite space of the internet.

Today, medical historians believe the Spanish influenza first came to Canada in a spring 1918 herald wave mistaken for a bad season of “la grippe,” the French word for influenza.

The Globe’s first mention of an unusually dangerous type of flu was contained in a May 29, 1918, news brief out of Spain that described Madrid’s business sector as paralyzed by a “grip” that had infected a third of the population, including King Alfonso.

The true origins of the 1918 pandemic are still contested, but what is known is that it didn’t begin in Spain. However, that country’s neutral status made it the first place from which correspondents could report on the disease’s toll without their stories being quashed by wartime censors. Throughout nearly two years of coverage, The Globe referred to pandemic influenza as being of the “Spanish” type.

In early 20th-century Canada, protecting public health fell to municipalities and provinces. Ottawa’s only relevant job was enforcing quarantine regulations for ships of immigrants presumed to be carrying contagious scourges such as cholera and smallpox.

There existed no national health department at the time. Some reformers, led by recently enfranchised women, pushed for the creation of one during the war years, partly to stem the spread of venereal disease in anticipation of infected soldiers returning from Europe. The Globe supported the establishment of a Dominion health department and the prosecution of a national war on the “social diseases,” as the paper often referred to syphilis and gonorrhea.

“This evil,” Junius wrote of venereal diseases on Aug. 30, 1917, “ramifying through every class, stalking unseen where least expected, and lying in ambush to spring upon the innocent and helpless, who are cursed for the sins of the guilty, has reached such dimensions that it must be brought under control to save society from devastation.”

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In January, 1918, C.K. Clarke, dean of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine and director of the Toronto General Hospital, described the toll of venereal diseases (VD) in a four-part series in The Globe. He heaped blame on prostitutes, 60 per cent of whom he labelled as “mentally defective” girls who ought to be isolated on industrial farms.

The Globe’s drumbeat of editorials, written against the backdrop of an Ontario judge’s inquiry into legal means of controlling VD, used similar language. They bemoaned the “feeble-minded” and “fallen” women who spread disease to men who couldn’t control themselves – men who went on to infect their innocent wives and unborn children.

There was no such moralizing in the pages of The Globe when a terrifying new incarnation of the flu reached Canada. “The big difference? Sex,” says Heather MacDougall, professor emerita of history at the University of Waterloo. “Influenza was indiscriminate in who it attacked and who it killed and didn’t have anything to do with sex.”

Nor did the arrival of Spanish influenza have anything to do with immigrants from overseas, frequent scapegoats in past infectious-disease outbreaks, or with soldiers returning from the battlefields of Europe, a common misconception about the pandemic’s origins in Canada.

In truth, as historian Mark Humphries explains in a 2013 book optimistically titled The Last Plague, influenza spread north to Canada from the United States.

The virus arrived in Canada in mid-September, 1918, in four different places around the same time: the Quebec town of Victoriaville, where a Eucharistic Congress seeded a civilian outbreak The Globe didn’t cover; Sydney, N.S., where a U.S. ship bound for Europe dropped hundreds of infected soldiers on a small-town hospital; a military hospital in St. Jean, Que., where recruits from Boston likely brought the virus north; and Niagara-on-the-Lake, where a training camp for Polish-American recruits for the French army was the site of the first major outbreak in Ontario.

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Capt. Kain was ministering with the Polish camp, as The Globe called it, when he caught the flu. His wife took him to the base hospital, located inside a previously shuttered Toronto General Hospital building, hoping he would receive better care, only to see him die there.

Lillian Kain’s letter in The Globe came via Toronto mayor Tommy Church, a colourful conservative who used the press to harangue military leaders over conditions at the base hospital and military camps, including one for Canadians at Niagara. He received the widow’s letter in his capacity as head of the police commission and apparently shared it with the press.

Giving prominent play to coverage of the base hospital scandal was, for The Globe and other papers, a back door to criticizing Robert Borden’s Union government without running afoul of press censors or condemning a war The Globe supported. Putting Kain’s letter on the front page, “would have been a very political act,” says Humphries, a professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University.

At the time of Capt. Kain’s death, a coroner’s inquest was already under way at Toronto’s morgue, ostensibly into the death of one member of the Royal Air Force, 26-year-old Cadet Freeman A. Davidson, a law student and conscript who died at the base hospital on Oct. 13, 1918. The inquest morphed into an investigation of whether the facility was properly equipped to care for the crush of infected men who streamed through its doors when influenza struck.

The Globe covered every turn of the proceedings, from Church’s testimony blaming Ottawa for “bungling everything,” to the fire chief declaring the base hospital a “fire trap,” to surgeon-general J.T. Fotheringham, the acting director-general of medical services for Canada, “flaying” the press for what he deemed their unfair coverage of the scandal.

“It is the duty of the Government not only to investigate and discipline the men responsible for this state of affairs,” The Globe editorial board wrote on Oct. 30, 1918, “but to see that they are replaced by men who are competent and ready to undertake, without a moment of unnecessary delay, the institution of a new and a better system under which Canadian citizens may be assured that their suffering soldier sons are being cared for as they deserve. The government must act at once.”

Kain herself testified at the inquest on Nov. 5, 1918. The Globe described the widow as a frank but “somewhat nervous” witness who “bore up well” under questioning, considering officials at the base hospital called a key aspect of her letter false. They testified that doctors examined Capt. Kain’s chest daily, and that he received the best of care. She wrote that her husband went five days without a chest exam.

Realistically, there wasn’t much doctors anywhere could do for the infected. Antibiotics for the bacterial pneumonias that preyed on influenza-weakened patients were more than a decade away. The pathogen that caused the flu pandemic wasn’t even identified as a virus until the 1930s. The only recourse was preventing infection in the first place; cramming soldiers cheek-by-jowl into an old hospital building did the opposite.

When the coroner’s jury in the base hospital scandal delivered its verdict, it exonerated local doctors and nurses, and instead pinned the blame squarely on Ottawa “for not providing better hospital accommodation for soldiers after four years’ duration of the war.”

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Spanish influenza, unlike COVID, struck young adults with a particular ferocity, further hollowing out the same demographic group felled on the battlefield. Medical historians can’t say for certain why Spanish influenza was deadliest to people in their 20s and 30s, but a leading theory is that less-lethal versions of influenza A didn’t circulate much during their childhoods, leaving their immune systems ill-prepared for the fight in 1918.

Either way, influenza’s penchant for killing people in the prime of their lives meant The Globe regularly printed stories of children orphaned and parents devastated multiple times over by the war and the flu.

The paper also printed partial lists of the dead, often with street addresses – a violation of medical privacy unthinkable today. If the circumstances were tragic enough, the deaths merited their own stories, as happened in the case of the Hare brothers.

Young John William Hare of 147 De Grassi St. succumbed to pneumonia in mid-October, 1918. “Scarcely was the funeral over,” The Globe wrote, “when the news came from across the sea to an already heartbroken mother telling her that her other son, Gunner Arthur Hare, died in England on the same day as his brother, stricken by the same disease.”

The final weeks of the war, which coincided with the height of the influenza pandemic, cast an inescapable shadow over The Globe’s coverage of the flu. Of 12 front-page stories in October and November of 1918 that mention influenza, three were about the base hospital scandal and four were about Victory Bond fundraising with the flu mentioned only in passing.

By contrast, The Globe and Mail ran 116 front-page stories about COVID-19 in March and April of 2020.

In 1919, as soldiers streamed home and Canada suffered sporadic outbreaks of flu and venereal disease, the federal government established a national department of health, a precursor to today’s Health Canada.

Funding and political support for the department waxed and waned over the decades as public-health challenges of different magnitudes hit the country: tuberculosis, polio, the less-lethal influenza pandemics of 1957 and 1968, AIDS, the original SARS outbreak in 2003 and another minor flu pandemic caused by H1N1 in 2009.

The SARS crisis led to the creation of the Public Health Agency of Canada, the entity that would pilot the federal response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that killed tens of thousands of Canadians and upended the lives of everyone in this country.

COVID emerged into a media landscape that would have been unrecognizable to anyone who read the old black-and-white Globe broadsheet as the Spanish influenza raged. Not only was there no headline-dominating corollary to the First World War to distract reporters and editors from COVID, but there had also been a sea change in how people consumed the news.

By 2020, the news was omnipresent, cacophonous and relentless. It spilled from earbuds, blared from TVs and buzzed from smartphones at all hours of the day. Yes, The Globe and Mail still published a daily paper. But it also had a website with infinite space and, in the first year of the pandemic, The Globe seemed determined to fill almost all of it with COVID content.

The pandemic dominated The Globe and Mail for nearly two years in a fashion that pushed all other stories aside. That didn’t make sense in 1918, when Canada, and the world, were at war. The main exceptions to The Globe’s passive take on Spanish influenza were stories where the flu and the war collided, such as the paper’s campaign on behalf of the soldiers dying inside the Toronto base hospital where Capt. Kain spent his final days.

The Globe’s coverage of influenza is a reminder of how a story can be shaped by the stories happening around it.

Kelly Grant is a health reporter at The Globe and Mail.

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