Detailed description of 1918 flu symptoms

There is evidence that the Spanish Flu did have hemorrhagic symptoms.
Vickie Menear, MD and homeopath, was doing some research on Flu for her
class at Hahnemann Homeopathic College, Albany, California, when she ran
into a great deal of literature that supports this possibility. I called
her and she said that if you had questions, she'd be happy too answer them.
Again, Email me and I'll give you her phone number.
In the meantime, let me quote some of her source material. If you
are interested in following up this new "lead" on the Spanish Flu epidemic,
this is a good place to start. Here are the references:

1. THE PLAGUE OF THE SPANISH LADY: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919
by Richard Collier, Atheneum Publishing, New York, 1974

QUOTE:

Page 7:
"It began, undramatically, after a two-day incubation period, with a cough.
Next there was pain--behind the eyes, in the ears, in the lumbar region.
Soon a drowsy numbness invaded the body, and fervor set in; often the
temperature soared to 104 degrees F. The pulse was thready and unstable;
the victim's tongue was thickly coated...every mortal fiber ached
indescribably--the throat, the head, the naso-pharynx.."

Page 35:
"But which disease? All over the world, doctors were noting symptoms so at
variance with the spring epidemic --and with any known form of influenza
--that it might have been an unknown sickness...that each time a man so
much as stirred on his pillow, serous fluid poured from his mouth and
nostrils...a burning pain above the diaphragm...the frontal headache that
recalled Typhoid fever...painfully congested conjunctivae...coated tongues
with bright red tips...another maverick symptoms: what doctors term 'silent
lungs', an absence of breath so total he was convinced his stethoscope had
given out."

Page 37:
"...case after case of leucopenia--a kind of leukaemia in reverse, where
the white corpuscles of the blood are strangely reduced in numbers...lost
her sight within six days...gangrene of the sexual organs...afflicted by
diarrhoea so intense he endured twenty movements a day....On one factor, at
least, all doctors were agreed: only in Cholera did the collapse come so
suddenly that most victims could fix the precise moment when they fell...a
man staggering home at a run, handkerchief clapped to a bleeding nose--but
most often this killer-virus struck like a lightning-bolt."

Page 69:
"One moment she could see her face, mirrored opaquely in a bowl of water
that her mother held (she was having Epistaxis, nosebleed while in the
throes of the Spanish Flu). Next instant it had vanished, blotted from
view by the blood pouring from her mouth and nose....Dr. Hennewig arrived.
His verdict..."I have seen many such cases -- without the haemorrhage she
would not have recovered."

Page 69:
"Later, Germany's Public Health Administration was to report that in many
areas Epistaxis affected up to HALF of all influenza victims--often as much
as a pint of blood at a time."

Page 69:
"Major Charles Mix, of the Army Medical Corps, saw a greater significance.
Among doughboys at Camp Mills, New York, Mix noted interference with the
passage of blood from the heart's right ventricle to the lungs caused
enough damming back of venous blood 'to make possible nasal haemorrhage on
the slightest occasion'. Many were even then cyanotic, and some, despite
this haemorrhage, developed pneumonia..."

Page 220-221:
"....why should the sickness affect so many organs of the body normally
untouched?...most often the disease resembled encephalitis, with the
patient lapsing into a coma...a dilation of the heart but even of fatty
degeneration...a cough so intense that it ruptured the muscles of a
soldier's rectum...retention of urine...puffy faces and swollen ankles of
acute nephritis...the lungs were the organs most vitally affected...a
patient's face so contorted in death that even close friends couldn't
recognize him...and autopsy surgeons were encountering what one doctor
termed 'a pathological nightmare'; lungs up to six times their normal
weight, looking 'like melted red currant jelly.'"

2. EPIDEMIC AND PEACE, 1918 by Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., Greenwood Press,
Westport, CT, London, England

Page 4:
"The Surgeon General's office dispatched Colonel Welch to Devens (Army
base)...included in that group Colonel Victor C. Vaughan, ex-president of
the American Medical Association; Rufus Cole of the Rockefeller Institute;
and Simeon Walbach of the Harvard Medical School....(p.7)...Welch and his
colleagues...glanced in at the wards with their lines of cots and
prostrated soldiers, whose linens were often stained with bloody sputum and
the sudden nosebleeds that were symptoms of the Spanish Influenza..."

Page 7:
"In the open chest of a cadaver Welch saw the blue, swollen lungs of a
Spanish Influenza...Cause of death? That at least was clear: what in a
healthy man are the lightest parts of his body, the lungs, were in this
cadaver two sacks filled with a thin, bloody, frothy fluid.....The lungs of
those who died quickly, sometimes only 48 hours after the first ache and
cough, were such as he had never seen before...Their most conspicuous
feature was the enormous quantity of thin, bloody fluid. It oozed out of
their lungs sectioned for examination, and in the large air passages
leading to the throat it mixed with air in a bloody froth. As rigor mortis
set in, the fluid often poured from the nose and stained the body
wrappings."

Page 8:
"If there was anyone at Devens (the Army base) who could be depended upon
as a pillar of strength, it was this safe of Johns Hopkins. But when he
saw the wet lungs of influenza pneumonia in the fall of 1918, the pillar
trembled. "This must be some new kind of infection...or plague."

Dr. Menear has a list of other books and articles supporting the
hemorrhagic symptoms of the Spanish Flu. Should you want the list
published here, on OUTBREAK, I'll be happy to call her and get it sent to
you. She also has information on Crotalus Horridus being utilized as a
remedy during the pandemic.
I can only note that the symptoms of the 1918 "influenza" and the
Ebola of 1995, have marked similarities .
My percentages of homeopathic remedies used versus traditional
medicine (drugs) during 1918 influenza come from an article that appeared
in Homeopathy Today, January, 1990. It was the following and I'll quote:

"Dean W.A. Pearson of Philadelphia (Hahnemann College) collected 26,795
cases of (1918) influenza treated by homeopathic physicians with a
mortality rate of 1.05 percent while the average old school (traditional
medicine/drugs) mortality was 30 percent."

I'd like to credit Julian Winston, New Zealand, one of our foremost
homeopathic archives experts, and homeopathy@dungeon.com, in which this
article appeared.
This article was originally published by the Journal of the
American Institute for Homeopathy, May, 1921 and I'd like to share the
entire article and you can draw your own conclusions. This article was a
culling of information after the Spanish Flu epidemic had occurred. In it,
you will find mentioned other remedies, other than Crotalus Horridus, that
were used to save lives--Gelsemium, Eupatorium Perfoliatum, and Bryonia.
Unfortunately, I wasn't given the space at this website to share this
information with you before this.