Influenza in a Kentucky Coal-Mining Camp

Editor's note: From its first issue in 1900 through to the present day, AJN has unparalleled archives detailing nurses' work and lives over more than a century. These articles not only chronicle nursing's growth as a profession within the context of the events of the day, but also reveal prevailing societal attitudes about women, health care, and human rights. Today's nursing school curricula rarely include nursing's history, but it's a history worth knowing. To this end, From the AJN Archives highlights articles selected to fit today's topics and times. In AJN's May 1919 issue, nurses shared their experiences from the 1918 influenza pandemic in an article entitled "Experiences During the Epidemic." Their stories offer a glimpse of the enormous challenges of pandemic public health nursing in "forgotten" places, far from urban centers. In a fishing village on Bogue Sound in North Carolina, one nurse describes how she, along with three practical nurses, spent an afternoon in a house filled with sick family members "cleaning the cottage and the people." And in the excerpt shown here, in a coal-mining camp in southeast Kentucky, two camp doctors were ill and the single nurse "had been doing the doctoring and nursing, working day and night" to care for an estimated 600 people with influenza. (For the full article go to http://links.lww.com/AJN/A211.) For more reflections on the 1918 influenza pandemic, see "The Flu Pandemic of 1918: A Nurse's Story" in this issue.-Betsy Todd, MPH, RN.