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God be with you till we meet again (1918)
- Insanity 7y agoQuestion, about this part of the letter: "I have four day nurses and five night nurses (female) a ward-master, and four orderlies". Does anyone know why it was important to point out they were female? Were army nurses typically male? Anyways, I'm reading about the 1918 flu a lot lately and came upon parts of this text multiple times. I'm still not sure if it's making me more or less paranoid about Covid-19, but it's definitely fascinating.
- bArray 7y agoI'm sure if we start a Twitter storm about it, we can get him cancelled. /s Personally I think it was just observational, perhaps they were the only women in the place, so they were the exception. From what I know, historically nurses have been mostly female - but would be interested to find out if this was different.
- Insanity 7y agoYup that was my understanding as well. Not sure why I'm being downvoted, it was a genuine question lol
- Waterluvian 7y agoPeople are positively petrified of anything that even uses the same words as politically incorrect speech.
- Tade0 7y agoI wonder how well this approach is going to survive the current pandemic? I mean, is it me, or the amount of posts calling to get someone cancelled subsided?
- alharith 7y agoAre you kidding me? Look at the current hash tags on twitter. Miserable people never stop.
- Waterluvian 7y agoThe canary I'm watching is the whole "Chinese" or "Wuhan" vs. "COVID" virus naming issue. I think it is very clearly not the right time to point fingers. But when this is all past us, a post-mortem and finger pointing is probably warranted. I don't think we need to resort to name calling, but I'm curious to see how much people bend over backwards to absolve China of responsibility.
- whatshisface 7y agoI think the most evenhanded answer would be to use the correct names (SARS-CoV-2 for the virus, Sars 2 for short, COVID-19 for the disease, Covid for short) while freely reminding people that China's initial cover-up was a necessary condition for the present global crisis.
- zaat 7y agoWhile these are all correct and proper, everyone I know is on first terms with it and so we all call the virus and the disease Corona.
- SCHiM 7y agoWhile I think that's a valid point to make. My perspective on that is that, given contradicting reports and initial confusion, you can't fault any organization or person not picking out the correct response in the total state space. Hindsight and all that. I think a much more powerful complaint is pointing out that, despite numerous warnings, studies, SARS, and having successfully isolated the root cause of the SARS outbreak (Civets). Only four months later these animals were back on the menu. The government made a rational choice to allow the conditions for the current situation to exist. The whole world is paying the price for this rational, prolonged and often pointed out mistake. That, I think, is a complaint we can lay wholly on the government.
- sdegutis 7y agoExplains the “playing the straight man” story recently in another thread.
- cheez 7y agoIs this going to go away with the virus?
- gowld 7y agoOften a valid tangentialy comment gets rightly downvoted simply because its current vote total puts it higher on the page than more relevant comments.
- brlewis 7y agoDon't read anything into downvoting, especially soon after your comment is posted. Give it time to settle out.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoThis gives me a cert warning, but it quotes something in a way that implies that may have been sort of the formal designation: Nurses Corps (female) https://history.amedd.army.mil/ANCWebsite/articles/malenurses.html https://history.amedd.army.mil/ANCWebsite/articles/malenurse... I've googled around a bit and when Florence Nightingale did her thing, it was mostly male nurses in the military. By early 1900s, this had changed, at least in the US, and most nurses were female.
- Insanity 7y agoThanks, I suppose that might have been why indeed!
- jiveturkey 7y agoIs he referring to the ward-master? Which maybe is more often male?
- prox 7y agoI found a newspaper message from the 19th century that described a flu that gave pneumonia and undertakers hadn’t seen anything like it since the Cholera epidemics, this article was from Spain around 1840’s.
- ekianjo 7y agodo you have a copy?
- prox 7y agoI have, but it is old Dutch. Don’t know if that is of help... I am still going through the archives for older mentions.
- agustif 7y agoCan you provide specific dates to try and find something in Spanish?
- narag 7y agoWikipedia says there were three outbreaks 1833 and 1834, then in 1855: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemias_de_c%C3%B3lera_en_Espa%C3%B1a https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemias_de_c%C3%B3lera_en_Es... Edit: it seems I misunderstood. The original comment didn't talk about cholera, but used it as a comparison.
- prox 7y agoTrue, it was under the header “news from Spain” , I added a translation.
- gbrits 7y agoFacinating. There's a lot of Dutch people here. Some might want to translate
- david_draco 7y agoWhat does "Keep the Bouells open" mean?
- rob74 7y agoMight be "keep the bowels open"? A very medical greeting, so would be fitting here...
- adventured 7y agoUnless it's something specific between them, perhaps it means to keep the heart open, to stay in kindness and compassion. Which would be a traditional, positive thing to say to a dear friend at the end of a letter. Or a physician joke between them, alternatively. https://www.etymonline.com/word/bowel https://www.etymonline.com/word/bowel
- emmelaich 7y agoKYBO is a common acronym in Scouting. "Keep Your Bowels Open" Whether Bouells is a typo or pun I don't know.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoBut what does it mean/come from?
- throwanem 7y agoIt literally means to make sure you avoid getting constipated.
- lnyng 7y agoBowel seems to originate from old French “Bouel,” which I guess are related?
- gowld 7y agoSince "Bouell" isn't a word, but it is a name, and "Bouells" is a plausible misspelling of "bowels", it could be a pun connecting the two. (medical bowel care and a person named Bouell)
- Dahoon 7y agoThe Spanish flu from Kansas.
- Kye 7y agoI wonder if, like with the 1918 pandemic, we'll find later that the first cases were somewhere other than China, but that place was better at keeping it under wraps.
- rubinelli 7y agoGiven how contagious it is and how much faster information moves today, that is highly unlikely.
- triangleman 7y agoA shrimp vendor at the Wuhan seafood market reported symptoms starting Dec. 10, so unless someone finds earlier cases elsewhere, I think that's as good a place as any to call the starting point. https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/coronavirus-patient-zero-at-wuhan-seafood-market-identified/news-story/2d6706018d09b7daa4567521f8cae3e3 https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/cor...
- chrisco255 7y agohttps://www.foxnews.com/world/coronavirus-investigators-one-step-closer-to-solving-mystery-of-patient-zero https://www.foxnews.com/world/coronavirus-investigators-one-... Reports of a 70+ year old that had the disease on Nov. 17th. Patient zero probably originated in October or thereabouts, and was probably never tested for it.
- lonelappde 7y agoBetter article: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coronavirus-chinas-first-confirmed-covid-19-case-traced-back https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coro... But website has a touch of ad cancer.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- draw_down 7y agoOutrageous that they called it the Spanish flu- as we all now know, it is an act of violence to name a viral outbreak after a place.
- mikorym 7y agoIt was called the Spanish flu because they were a neutral country and hence the reporters were allowed to report on the flu. It doesn't have much more than that in common with Spain.
- gjm11 7y agoYour meaning is presumably the opposite of what you say: that since the 1918 influenza was and is commonly called "the Spanish flu", it's unreasonable to complain at certain politicians calling the current pandemic something like "the Chinese virus". I agree with the analogy, but I think it goes the other way. The "Spanish flu" was, so far as anyone can tell, not originally from Spain, nor was it especially bad there. It got called "the Spanish flu" because Spain was more honest than other countries about how much of it they had (there was a lot of deception going around on account of there being a war). And a hundred years later it's still being called "the Spanish flu" as if Spain were somehow to blame for it. That's a really bad outcome. (Obviously, its badness pales in comparison with the badness of the thing itself and the suffering and death it caused. But, as merely terminological things go, it's really bad.) It would be much better if everyone didn't call the 1918 influenza "the Spanish flu", but obviously it's too late for that now. And it would be much better if we didn't spend the next century calling today's pandemic "the Chinese virus". The Chinese have handled it better than a lot of other countries, after all. (It's slightly less unreasonable to call this one "the Chinese virus" than to call the 1918 one "the Spanish flu", because it does seem as if it did in fact originate in China, and an initial bad response by the Chinese authorities may be one reason why it wasn't better contained. I still don't think it's a name China should be saddled with for the next hundred years.)
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoYet we call Ebola that name, because of a place. Lyme disease, same thing. Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever - obviously.\ This isn't some condemnation of the place, and its pretty silly to think of it that way. Doctors go to pains to have diseases named after themselves, proudly. Folks are over-thinking this.
- yingw787 7y agoSo, going beyond the depressing, I think one good thing that will come out of all this since this situation isn't experienced in any of our lifetimes (including our elders) we have to reach back to history to find comparisons. Maybe this will spark a curiosity in history! There's a number of really great history channels on YouTube; I particularly like "The Armchair Historian".
- LeoTinnitus 7y agoHundreds of hours in eu4 and wikipedia will do the trick too haha
- shrimp_emoji 7y agoThousands* of hours in EU4 where you listen to an immersive playlist æsthetic to the nation/region you're playing and spend 80% of the time paused and reading Wikipedia about said nation/region. Relevant combos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Debasement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Debasement https://youtu.be/NpCCYadZCNQ https://youtu.be/NpCCYadZCNQ , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_crosses_(Brugherio)#Background_%E2%80%93_Saint_Charles's_plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_crosses_(Brugherio)#Bac... https://youtu.be/BNnrRGNR0Ok https://youtu.be/BNnrRGNR0Ok
- LeoTinnitus 7y agoI'm more of a heavy metal EU4 player actually haha! I'm not a big fan of the cultural music while I'm playing but for some reason heavy metal just amps me up when I'm playing that game. It's (obviously) Sabaton, Black Label Society, Iron Maiden, and Rammstein most of the time. Otherwise I'll have hip hop or deutschrap on. If I'm in the HRE, it's most definitely deustchrap lol.
- favorited 7y agoAn historian on Twitter suggested people should keep journals of how COVID-19 affects their everyday lives. I've been doing it as a method of self-reflection, and found it really valuable. I end up not just enumerating the changes to my life, but exploring how I am responding to them, trying to describe how they're affecting me emotionally, etc. It's just for me, so I don't worry about missing days or being dramatic, or writing in an organized manner. But it's been really interesting, and not at all the chore I expected.
- Merrill 7y ago> It is salutary to remember that we do not really understand why the devastating pandemic of 1918-19 was so severe, and that we cannot therefore be confident that our modern medical measures would succeed against a similar future challenge. From the introduction to the letter in the British Medical Journal published 1979. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1599810/pdf/brmedj00105-0026.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1599810/pdf/brm... This still seems to be the case for Covid-19.
- i_am_new_here 7y agoCould it be that very dangerous viruses emerge more often, but only when they fall on "(very) fertile ground", that they then spread? The WW1-circumstances (a lot of men together on small space and harsh conditions) have contributed a lot, that the "spanish flu" spread, while others did not spread and so never became known to us ?
- CaptArmchair 7y agoHere's a study that exactly goes into your question: https://www.faculty.umb.edu/peter_taylor/epi/oxford05.pdf https://www.faculty.umb.edu/peter_taylor/epi/oxford05.pdf The conclusion of that article is that the basic lessons we learn today, were - in part - learned in 1918... Back then, researchers had already traced the emergence of outbreaks to an encampment in France where men and animals were living in close quarters and unsanitary conditions. As to the first part of your question, the answer is that more people encroaching on the animal and wildlife territory while not adhering to basic sanitary practices will increase the chance of new strains appearing and making the jump to humans. Vox did an excellent video on how this works for Corona: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPpoJGYlW54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPpoJGYlW54 Such events do not only happen in China in particular but they can happen virtually anywhere in the world. Another ongoing pandemic is HIV/AIDS. Well, it is generally accepted that the jump to humans occurred in West-Africa in the 1920's. But it took time and globalization - increasing mobility - before HIV finally spread across the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoDoes anyone know what happened to the doctor? Did he make it out ok?
- WilTimSon 7y agoThis would be quite hard to discover bar someone having access to army records of that time or having a family connection, I think. Not only has more than a century passed, there's also the issue of the letter simply being signed "(Sgd) Roy". Roy isn't that uncommon of a first or last name. One fact that could help the search is in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22703434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22703434 If, indeed, the Burt that the letter is addressed to has the surname Bouell or worked with someone named Bouell, that could help narrow things down substantially. If Burt is found, the Roy in question could be found as well.
- 0x8BADF00D 7y agoStrange how nature works sometimes. An arrangement of proteins sheathed by a layer of lipids can kill billions of people.
- daotoad 7y agoJust a usage note for grammar/spelling obsessed. Is the usage of till correct? Yes it is. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/%27til https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/%27til
- purplezooey 7y agodamn... staff of 7-8 and 168 beds. that's a biblical scene.
- tomjuggler 7y agoOf similar historical interest is "A journal of the plague year" about the great plague in London. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Journal_of_the_Plague_Year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Journal_of_the_Plague_Year The book is free to read on project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/376/376-h/376-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/376/376-h/376-h.htm
- hi41 7y agoI find the language very beautiful. How come we don’t write like this anymore? Where does one learn to speak like that? We don’t see beautiful language on emails.