DETAILS
Pandemic! A Cautionary Tale
Until Sunday, March 24
Musée Héritage Museum in St. Albert Place
Call 780-459-1528 or visit www.muséehéritage.ca to learn more.
A century ago, a pandemic of Spanish flu ripped a course around the world. The strain of the H1N1 virus infected approximately one-third of the planet’s population at the time – an estimated half a billion people – and killed up to 50 million of them. More than 3,000 Albertans lost their lives in the course of a few months – six per cent of the population – including 300 right here in St. Albert, all starting in the spring of 1918.
According to The Black Robe’s Vision, “The death toll was high and a frequent sound throughout the district was the mournful tolling of the church bells, notifying the surrounding community of yet another loss. Without saying a word, nearby farmers would hitch up their teams and head to the church to find out who had died and how they could help the survivors. There were some people who, unaffected by the flu themselves, helped the priests and brothers at the Mission to pick up the dead bodies from porches and drive them to common graves being thawed and dug by others within the cemetery. A brief prayer would be said over the grave, which was then closed as quickly as possible.”
The history book states that a particularly large number of victims came from the “primarily Indian and Métis population” in the lower Grandin area. It was only in early 1919 that the sickness abated and a sense of normalcy returned. It ran its course fully by 1920.
That would be a painful and unmistakable introduction to the modern pandemic. The Musée Héritage Museum saw the milestone anniversary as an apt opportunity to take a closer look at the Spanish Influenza. Museum officials soon realized that other catastrophic diseases have breached our borders and wrought havoc upon the general populace.
“Originally, we thought we’d do something just pertaining to the Spanish Flu maybe in the smaller gallery. And then we realized that smallpox here was a huge story in 1870. And then there were also other epidemics,” said curator Joanne White of Pandemic! A Cautionary Tale, which opened this week.
By definition, a pandemic is a disease outbreak that spreads over a wide geographic area and affects a very high proportion of the population. The Spanish Flu was just one of many such instances of a pandemic.
Without trying to be too much of a fear-monger, White said she had far too many questions about disease that needed to be posed by the new exhibit.
“In our current world, what are we still dealing with? What’s just about cured? What’s not? What’s potentially coming in? It’s so easy for us to forget in our nice, clean lives that it’s only 50 years ago since the polio [vaccine]. There’s still polio in the world and smallpox, and so [the exhibit] grew.”
Pandemic! A Cautionary Tale does a fine job of helping us to realize the impact of infectious diseases and how some of them have changed the course of history, whether it is just in the St. Albert area or all around the globe. There was the devastating Spanish Influenza in 1918. Smallpox took 300 lives here in 1870, and 15 years before that, there was diphtheria.
“We went through Black Robe’s Vision and picked out everything that had a disease at any point,” White noted.
If you pay attention to the news then you probably hear from time to time about polio, HIV, swine flu and Ebola. Oh yeah … there’s also the Black Plague. Tuberculosis, typhoid, measles, whooping cough, SARS, scarlet fever … this exhibit covers all the bases, with a hearty dose of vaccines and antibiotics brought into the mix, too. One of the displays features an antique vaporizer that was used to help cure people of some respiratory ailment.
“It’s almost like a miniature kerosene lamp with a little dish above it. The little lamp would heat up and you’d put this Cresolene tar-like coal substance that you would then burn and it was supposed to vaporize in your room overnight. It’s a neat little thing.”
It’s a good reminder that ancient treatments used to be considered modern medicine at one point in time. Thankfully, Pandemic! doesn’t have a fish tank full of leeches. The exhibit is already enough to make you sleepless and more than a little germophobic if you’re not careful. That’s probably one reason the exhibit has a nice little hand sanitizer dispenser, too.
It provides that overview in a museum’s standard sterile way – there won’t be gross pictures or used tissues on display – but it’s up to the viewer to decide on how much panic it induces. White is right: even though we only really think about pandemics when the health clinics announce the availability of the annual flu shot do we remember about how quickly diseases can spread. She promised that it’s all meant to be educational.
“It’s just a reminder that we actually live very close to some of these distances, so you need to just keep in mind that they’re there.”
It all starts when you walk through the curtains, courtesy of the former Sturgeon Hospital. Visitors have the option of picking through a stack of cards, each with the details of a real person who experienced a pandemic in this city.
Wiry outlines of a person’s body will be placed on a hospital bed and throughout, offering more than a hint of the macabre and deadly results of pandemics. Elsewhere, there’s a student’s desk from the 1940s with a white chalk X drawn on the top. Apparently, if you came to school and saw one of these desks, you were not to touch it or even go near it. The student who sat there the day previously had contracted polio.
There’s a myriad of stories and lessons to be learned here, one of which is about transportation. Transportation made it not only easier for people to get from place to place, but it did so as well for the diseases they carried. There’s also a lot to be learned about stopping pandemics in their tracks.
“After the armistice even or right in that fall, there was a train of soldiers going all the way across Canada to go to Siberia to be stationed there. They had the flu. Cities and towns were still talking about quarantining themselves and taking measures not knowing that these guys had gone through the night before, and two had been taken off the train and brought to the hospital. It was much quicker travelling because of trains.”
