COVID 19th Century: The Mysterious & Forgotten Russian Flu Pandemic of 1889-1892

 

        It is November 1889 and the weather in Saint Petersburg, Russia, is beginning to turn much colder.

Frigid arctic winds are whipping through the air, and already, snow has begun to fall on the Romanov Dynasty’s capital city.

Pedestrians walk hurriedly with their heads bowed and pull their coats tighter against their necks for protection against the cold winds.  Many are coughing.  It is a dry, hacking and persistent unproductive cough.  Some, stumble along unable to walk straight, afflicted with a pounding headache, nearly doubled over in pain.

And everywhere on sidewalks, in doorways, alleyways and on benches people can be heard sneezing and sniffling.  They are unwittingly signing the death warrants for their friends, neighbors, spouses and children.

Within months of November 1889 over half the population of St. Petersberg, Russia’s largest city, will fall ill and tens of thousands will die.

By the beginning of January 1890 the dreaded disease will have already spread westward across Europe.  Newspapers around the world quickly take to calling the mysterious sickness the “Russian Flu” because of its supposed nation of origin, despite the fact that no one knows exactly what the disease is, or where exactly it comes from.

The only thing that is obvious about this so-called “Russian Flu” of 1889 is that it is highly contagious, agonizingly painful and unforgivably deadly.

Russian Flu, riding the modern densely packed railroads of the late 19th century, rapidly sweeps across mainland Europe and moves on into the United Kingdom within a matter of weeks.  The disease knows no class or wealth distinctions.  Prince Albert, grandson of Queen Victoria, falls victim to the Russian Flu as do dozens of members of Europe’s leading royal families.

In France the pandemic was called “La Grippe” and daily throughout 1890 newspapers in Paris and London printed running tallies of the dead.  At its height, between October 1889 and June 1890 the “Russian Flu” pandemic was claiming over 10,000 lives per day and most everyone was being turned away from overcrowded hospitals in Europe’s major cities.

        

Illustrated Paris Newspaper Report on La Grippe

        The first sign that one had become infected with “Russian Flu” was a complete loss of the senses of taste and smell.  From that point on, a whole range of outcomes from swelling of the brain to collapsed lungs to mere cold like symptoms could befall the victim of Russian Flu.

From October 1889 when the pandemic first began in Russia until December of 1890 when the disease was at its peak in the United States it is believed that “Russian Flu” killed an estimated one million people worldwide.  And it would come back to kill again and again with major flare ups occuring around the world from March to June of 1891 and then again from October 1891 to June 1892.  

Today, the same infection that was known as the “Russian Flu” and caused the last great worldwide pandemic of the 19th century is still with us as a form of the common cold, because after yearly flare-ups between 1891 and 1895, people began to develop partial immunity to “Russian Flu” and the disease ultimately became far less deadly than it had been when it first appeared.

After the much more widely known Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 it was widely accepted that what had ravaged Europe and North America between 1889 and 1892  was indeed a similar form of influenza.

In 1950 researchers believed that they had identified the strain that caused the 1889 pandemic as a form of H2N2 influenza which most probably passed from livestock to human beings sometime in the summer of 1889.  However, a 2005 virological human genome study speculated that perhaps the 1889 pandemic could have been caused by a human coronavirus called OC43, which is still with us today as a now rather benign form of the common cold that our immune systems have largely adjusted to combating.

The study is quoted as saying, “it is tempting to speculate that the virus might not have been actually an influenza virus, but human coronavirus OC43”.

At first, in the United States, the pandemic of 1889 was largely ignored and considered more of a European problem.  Americans, for the most part, were convinced that the massive expanse of the Atlantic Ocean would keep them safe and it really wasn’t until early spring of 1890, driven by steamship powered travel and immigration, that the pandemic first began to cut a swath of death and suffering across New York City.

In total, the Russian Flu Pandemic of 1889 would claim the lives of 13,000 Americans.  Although this number seems small compared to the nearly 1 million Europeans killed by the disease it is interesting to note that 2500 people, or nearly 20% of the Russian Flu’s total victims in the United States, died from the disease in New York City alone!  This would be the equivalent of 30,000-35,000 New Yorkers dying as a result of COVID-19 out of today’s citywide population of over 8 million.

During the Fall/Winter of 1889 and 1890 newspapers in the United States, just like their European counterparts published a running count of the Russian Flu’s growing worldwide death toll, but oddly enough both political leaders and newspaper editors in America, at first tended to compare the illness to the common cold and asserted that it really wasn’t all that dangerous.

But, as more and more people began to die throughout the five boroughs, and rapid travel via the transcontinental railroad took Russian Flu all across the country, leaders in the United States could no longer turn a blind eye to the seriousness of the situation.

        One of the early scapegoats for the pandemic was the telegraph.  Telegraph poles and their wires which criss-crossed the skyline of every major city in America and Europe at the time were routinely blamed for spreading the Russian Flu through urban populations.

Even more deadly when it came to infecting the population than the telegraph was the brand new and largely misunderstood technology of electricity and specifically the electric light.

The January 31, 1890 edition of The New York Herald stated, “the disease has raged chiefly in areas where the electric light is in common use,” in other words, urban centers.

The 1880’s and 1890’s were an odd time for medical science because late-Victorian medicine in many ways straddled an era between medieval pseudoscience and modern medical technology.

On the one hand, by 1889 Louis Pasteur and Edward Jenner had already developed and perfected the concept of vaccination as a means to effectively help treat and prevent certain contagious diseases, but on the other hand, the first virus would not even be discovered until 1892 and virology as a medical concept or field of study would not really be in existence until well into the 20th century.

Even the more deadly, and more well known, Great Pandemic of 1918 a generation after the Russian Flu Pandemic, would not actually be definitively determined to have been caused by a virus until 1933 a full fifteen years after the Spanish Flu had killed upwards of 50 million people worldwide!

Doctors knew that illnesses most often spread through the air from person to person by 1890, but not all subscribed at the time of the Russian Flu Pandemic to the concept, or theory as they called it, of germ transmission.  With modern medical knowledge still in its infancy and with the growth of more rapid worldwide transport in the form of both the railroad and the steamship coming into popular use by the end of the 19th century, it's actually a wonder that the Russian Flu Pandemic of 1889 claimed as few lives as it did!

At the time, doctors, scientists and government officials were often all too well aware of their limitations when it came to taking effective measures to combat the pandemic.  Simply put, given the limits of medical science at the time, there was not much that anyone could do to stop the onslaught of “La Grippe”.

“Our want of complete knowledge of the nature of the disease renders it difficult to suggest means of prophylaxis other than the universal observance of hygienic rules.” (The Lancet  from December 1889)

The above is quoted from what was, and in many ways still is, the world’s premiere academic medical journal The Lancet from December of 1889 during the peak of the outbreak in London.  Its suggestion of “universal hygiene” such as washing hands and covering your mouth when you sneeze or cough as a means to at least blunt the spread, or flatten the curve, of the Russian Flu pandemic sounds eerily familiar today.

One doctor in Chicago named William Gentry said that he had isolated specific microbes that were the cause of Russian Flu and he reported that these microbes had come from comet, or meteor dust, that had fallen into the earth’s atmosphere!

Castor oil, drinking excessive amounts of brandy and even shocking yourself with electric batteries (odd how electricity was said to both cause and prevent the spread of Russian Flu) were all touted at one time or another as cures for the pandemic.

In the end, the only thing which would truly stop the spread of Russian Flu was time.  Human beings, eventually, with the dawn of the 20th century proved themselves to be more resilient than the virus which had spread from cattle to humans and caused the worldwide pandemic known as the Russian Flu Pandemic of 1889.

British Hospital During 1889-92 Pandemic

So, was the Russian Flu of 1889 really a form of COVID 19, a novel coronavirus similar to the one which is so ravaging the world today and not a form of influenza as was previously thought?  Well, it would appear so.

Not only were scientists at the start of the 21st century turning away from influenza as the true cause of the pandemic of 1889, but more recently in 2020, Danish researchers looking into the nature of the current COVID-19 virus said that they believed the genetic signatures for both the virus that caused the Russian Flu Pandemic of 1889 and the one currently known as COVID-19 were very similar and they echoed the findings of the previous study that had been published in 2005 asserting that the Russian Flu could have in fact been human coronavirus OC43, which would have been novel and deadly back in 1889, but simply causes the common cold today after generations of human to human transmission.

Despite recent research, however, the jury still remains out on whether or not the Russian Flu Pandemic was in fact caused by an influenza virus such as H2N2 or a more novel human coronavirus such as OC43 which is more akin to COVID-19.

In the end, maybe, such medical details are not all that important when it comes to the study of the human experience of history.

What is important to note is that the Russian Flu Pandemic of 1889 was a tragic time for the western world that was filled with speculation, panic, misinformation and ignorance, but in the end, the better nature of humanity proved resilient and triumphant.  Today, in the midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic (the first and hopefully last pandemic of the 21st century) our world is filled with wild speculation, panic, misinformation and ignorance, but in the end we can all hope that the better nature of humanity will prove resilient and triumphant once again.