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<\/a>Hospital beds had been in short supply, and the city, which had purchased the buildings of the Medico-Chirurgical College, turned them over to the American Red Cross. \u201cHumanity dictated\u201d this \u201cshall be kept as an emergency hospital\u201d and with wards \u201cdecorated with flags of the allies,\u201d Red Cross staff made ready for the arrival of \u201cthe first contingent of wounded French and English soldiers from the battlefields of Europe.<\/p>\n
As the war began to come to a close in the fall of 1918, Philadelphia\u2019s medical community heeded a call for even more hospital beds as the Great Influenza Pandemic made its fatal foothold.<\/p>\n
In little more than a two week period in October 1918, the city saw more than 33,000 new cases of influenza<\/a> resulting in 3,900 deaths. Medical schools postponed the start of the fall semester for 3rd and 4th year students, assigning them as staff to temporary “Emergency Hospitals.” In just two days, workmen took a \u201chalf knocked down\u201d building at the Medico- Chirurgical site and installed \u201ctemporary wooden partitions that enclosed spaces previously opened by the demolition.\u201d A temporary boiler installed on the street provided heat, and on October 7th<\/sup>, water and electrical connections were restored.<\/p>\n According to Isaac Starr<\/a>, a University of Pennsylvania medical student who later wrote of his experience, five floors of a salvaged Medico- Chirurgical building were turned into a hospital ward, each with about 25 beds assembled by the students themselves. After only a single lecture on influenza, Starr was assigned to the top floor, where he served as \u201chead nurse\u201d for the 4 p.m. to midnight shift.<\/p>\n At first, thought Starr, many patients \u201cseemed to have sought admission chiefly because everybody in the family was sick and no one was left at home who could take care of them.\u201d But the \u201cclinical features of many soon changed drastically. As their lungs filled with rales the patients became short of breath and increasingly cyanotic. After gasping for several hours they became delirious and incontinent, and many died struggling to clear their airways of a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed from their nose and mouth. After a day or two of intense struggle, they died.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I returned to duty at 4 p.m,\u201d remembered Starr, I found few whom I had seen before.\u201d \u201cThis happened night after night. The deaths in the hospital as a whole exceeded 25% per night during the peak of the epidemic. To make room for others the bodies were being tossed from the cellar into trucks, which when filled carted them away. It was a dreadful business.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSeeing one case after another go to pieces after admission to our hospital made us wonder whether there was a reservoir of infection in the hospital itself that was responsible for the heavy mortality. Perhaps the masks, gowns, and hand washing did more to protect us than we had a right to expect. Certainly, with death all around us, we had every encouragement to be as careful as we could, but we were so busy and so tired that we forgot about precautions, and patient after patient coughed into our faces as we tended to their needs.\u201d<\/p>\n The worst was over by the end of October. As new cases of the influenza declined medical school classes resumed. \u201cOur lives slowly returned to normal.\u201d recalled Starr, and the makeshift hospital wards closed on Saturday November 16, 1918.<\/p>\n Soon demolition crews returned. And by February 1919, they delivered on the promise of a completed boulevard. The city would soon have its mile-long stretch of fresh blacktop, a \u201cStately Parkway, Dream of Years.\u201d<\/p>\n What would Philadelphia make of it? That’s the story of the next 100 years.<\/p>\n [Sources: Philadelphia in the World War, 1914-1919<\/a>, (Published for the Philadelphia War History Committee 1922); Isaac Starr, MD, Influenza in 1918: Recollections of the Epidemic in Philadelphia<\/a>. Annals of Internal Medicine<\/em>, July 18, 2006 Vol 145, No 2, p. 139; in The Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>: \u00a0\u201cEntire Parkway is to be open within 5 months,\u201d December 28, 1916; \u201cRed Cross Gets Hospital,\u201c December 15, 1917; \u201cForeign Wounded Here Within Month,\u201c July 19, 1917; \u201cParkway Project Nears Completion,\u201d\u00a0 August 31, 1917; \u201cDatesman Prepares to Finish Parkway from 17th to 18th,\u201d September 30, 1917; \u201cEmergency Hospital No. 2 will be opened at once in the buildings of the old Medico-Chirugical College,\u201d October 7, 1918; \u201cHolds Influenza is at its Crest,\u201d October 8, 1918; \u201cStately Parkway, Dream of Years, Almost Complete,\u201d February 16, 1919.]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cEntire Parkway Is To Be Open Within 5 Months,\u201d read a headline in late December, 1916. \u201cCity Officials Make Definite Promise\u201d to demolish everything in the way of a mile-long, blacktop boulevard stretching from City Hall to Fairmount. Everything, that is, except for a cluster of buildings at 17th and Cherry Streets, the Medico-Chirurgical College. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11847\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/Medico-Chirurgical-demolition-8403-9-18-17-14383-0.jpg\")
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