Castlebar Asylum (St Mary's) and the Flu
“Last month I reported that over one hundred patients and three fourths of the entire staff were stricken down with so called influenza, and that as a consequence, the whole working of the Asylum was completely disorganised. Since the date of that report, the ravages of the disease extended in an alarming manner. Altogether two hundred patients were ill, of whom about forty died, chiefly of pneumonia. At one period there were, out of a total staff of seventy eight, only twelve persons on duty”.
(F.C. Ellison, Castlebar, 1918) The above quote, from the monthly report to the committee of management of the Castlebar District Asylum of December 1918, is similar in tone to the quote taken from the November 1918 report included at the beginning of the introductory chapter of this dissertation. The report describes how the disease has worsened during the month of December and finally began to abate later in the month (however it reappeared in the spring of 1919 in a milder form). The staff and patients of the hospital, and indeed a large number of people throughout the world, had a very anxious five weeks during the height of the disease, in which there was grave peril for those infected. The final paragraph of the monthly report (see Appendix 1) describes how during the peak of the crisis, the coal-fired heating system of the institution became too expensive to run and open turf fires were resorted to, not an ideal state of affairs when treating hundreds of sick patients. |
It seems
the first cases of flu in Mayo were, unusually, on the small island of Achill
Beg (now abandoned) which lies a short distance off Achill Island. The Mayo News reported in July 1918 that
“an influenza epidemic” is “raging on the island” and that there have been
three fatalities. There are no further reports of flu in local papers until
November 2, 1918 when The Mayo News
makes its first reference to “Spanish Flu”, in the Ballyhaunis Notes section of the paper. It reports that forty
people requiring medical assistance, which was not available, were “laid up
with the flu”. It also reports that Irish classes were cancelled in the town
and that new cases of flu were occurring every hour. The same issue of the
paper also reports on the closure of schools due to flu, however, the flu is
described as ‘mild’.[1]
[1] The Mayo News, November 2, 1918 |