Staggering Losses: World War 1 and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918

Currently installed in Ebling’s 3rd floor Historical Reading Room: Staggering Losses: World War 1 & the Influenza Pandemic of 1918

Come join us for the official opening:

Where: Ebling Library, Historical Reading Room, 3rd floor.
When: Thursday, Feb. 7th, 3:00-6:00
Health Science Learning Center: 750 Highland Ave.
Light refreshment will be served.

Parking available in the UW Hospital Parking Ramp, just across the street.
If you are able to come, please arrive before 5:30 is possible- otherwise the big doors are locked and it takes all kinds of gyrations to get you in without a swipe card.

Through photographs, postcards, books, newspaper clippings, personal journals and published clinical articles, Staggering Losses conveys a narrative of medical care, casualty management, individual prowess, trench warfare realities, impactful weaponry, and a virulent virus that wreaked havoc on an ill-prepared population. The losses were in the millions. These losses were not just in lives and limbs, but also in livelihoods, students, love, potential children, artistic talents, musical prowess, educations, mental health, and creative minds; a loss of a generation of usually men, but also women. There was the loss of opportunity and inclusion; Native American, African-American and Latino troops who, usually segregated during the war effort, still contributed to the American effort; particularly the French effort, then came home and continued to be victims of Jim Crow and other restrictive political realities and social agendas.

The loss of people like Canadian, Patrick McCrae, the poet/physician/soldier who wrote Flanders Fields, then died in the war at 38. The loss of black physician, Urbane Bass, father of four, who joined General Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force (AEF), joining the all-black 93rd Division under French command as a First Lieutenant. While working on wounded soldiers he was hit with shrapnel and both legs were severed. He died before he could be taken from the field, October 17, 1918. Jane Delano, the founder of the Red Cross Nursing Service, who organized the troops of nurses, inspired them to do the heinous work of trying to repair the bodies and spirits of soldiers who were double, triple and quadruple amputees (coined one physician as “trunks,”) and then died at a base camp at the age of 57. Harry Dillon, originally from Mondovi, Wisconsin, a UW graduate in the School of Agriculture. He specialized in proper silage for draft horses and was killed by a shrapnel shell, just a month before the Armistice.

My goal is to bring renewed attention to themes and events that happened 100+ years ago. My mission was to honor millions through the mention of a handful. Perhaps memorializing a few of brave soldiers, tireless nurses, intrepid doctors, determined horses, and poets who fought bravely, who treated others without thinking of their own vulnerability. We must never forget the weight of history, or in these cases, the small, important voices that contributed to the larger theater of conflict and hard-earned resolution.

The exhibition runs through the end of May. Questions? Micaela Sullivan-Fowler, curator. micaela.sullivan-fowler@wisc.edu 608 262-2402

Photo of maxillofacial patients in France, from the photos of Roy Bard Sheetz, chronicled in from the National Library of Medicine’s Circulating Now.

from Ebling Library News http://bit.ly/2QvcIFa