Demons of Illness and Poverty Stalking the Lucky Gods, by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, 1884. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Herbert R. Cole Collection.

Epidemic

Volume XIII, Number 3 | summer 2020

Miscellany

Although many New York City theaters closed during the influenza pandemic of 1918, Broadway’s Plymouth Theater went ahead with its October 3 premiere of Leo Tolstoy’s Redemption. Frustrated by the audience’s coughing at one performance, lead actor John Barrymore returned to the stage after intermission and threw a “fair-sized sea bass” into the crowd, shouting, “Busy yourselves with this, you damned walruses!”

Charts & Graphs

Flu Fallout

A majority of the estimated 675,000 American deaths from the influenza pandemic of 1918–19 occurred during the second wave, which swept the country throughout the fall of 1918.

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Hygienic law, like martial law, supersedes rights in crises.

—Samuel Hopkins Adams, 1913