Perhaps the most extraordinary story related to the 1918 influenza outbreak comes nearly a century later, when three people among the millions who died of the flu are turning out to contain, within their miraculously preserved lung tissue, a sort of Rosetta stone for the killer flu virus. Unknown to anyone when these three people suddenly died, they alone would hold the clues to protect the world in the twenty-first century.\u00a0 (Ha! – DeSpair<\/em>)<\/p>\n The first of the three to become ill with influenza was an Army private, Roscoe Vaughan, just twenty-one years old in September 1918. Like every soldier, he must have been frightened and full of bravado. He must have expected to be in battles and have hoped he could be strong and true. As he arrived at Camp Jackson, seven miles east of Columbia, South Carolina, he joined a contingent of more than 43,000 young men being trained in artillery before they went overseas.\u00a0 They practiced maneuvers on the dunes, struggling over the loose, drifting sand, squinting in the bright glare of the South Carolina sun. Roscoe Vaughan was among them, fit and healthy. He surely thought that the adventure of his life was about to begin. In a way, it was.<\/p>\n Private Vaughan was unlucky enough to have come to a camp staggering under a sudden onslaught of influenza. The soldiers were easy prey for the flu, and the hospital, built high on a sandy hill, was flooded with sick young men. In August, 4,807 men were admitted as patients. In September, 9,598. One young doctor there, James Howard Park, Jr.., said he literally watched men drop dead as they walked across the paths at the camp. One day he himself tagged thirty corpses.<\/p>\n Interior of a hospital ward at the Base Hospital, Camp Jackson, South Carolina, during the influenza epidemic (1918). Original image from National Museum of Health and Medicine. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.<\/p><\/div>\n Private Vaughan’s medical records show that he became ill during the third week of September, feeling achy and feverish. It did not take long for the virus to do its work. On September 19, he reported to sick call, stricken with the flu. At 6:30 in the morning of September 26, he died, gasping for breath.<\/p>\n At 2 p.m., an Army doctor, Captain K.P. Hegeforth, arrived to do an autopsy. Private Vaughan, he wrote, was a “fairly well developed, well nourished man measuring five feet ten inches.” He was chubby, with a “moderately thick layer of subcutaneous fat.” But he was fit, with “muscles in good condition.”<\/p>\n Private Vaughan had about 300 cc, or 1 1\/4 cups, of clear fluid in his chest cavity. Over the entire surface of his left lung were small seepages of blood, ranging in size from a pinhead to a dime or larger. The air sacs were clogged with fluid.<\/p>\n Captain Hegeforth cut off a slice of one of Private Vaughan’s sodden lungs for examination, impregnating the slice of lung with formaldehyde to preserve it, embedding it in a chunk of candle wax about the size of a thumbnail. Then he sent it to Washington, where it was stored in a small brown box on a shelf of a vast government warehouse.<\/p>\n [To be continued…<\/em>]<\/p>\n Culled from:\u00a0Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/874e93d1-81a9-1b0b-5597-56da79b1806a.jpg\")
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\nCamp Jackson during the pandemic<\/em><\/p>\n<\/a>
\nRoscoe’s death certificate<\/em><\/p>\nDissection Photo Du Jour!<\/h3>\n