• Excerpted from Untold Tales of Old British Columbia by Daniel Marshall (Ronsdale Press, 2024)
In 1918, a medical health officer in the City of Victoria became one of the great unsung heroes in British Columbia history.
To combat the rising tide of the (misnamed) Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, he set up immediate prevention programs and closed all public venues in the Capital Regional District.
He had good reason. Some 500 million persons worldwide had apparently contracted the disease, resulting in the deaths of at least 50 million people — vastly more than the total attributed to the First World War.
From 1918 to 1920, three successive waves of this virulent influenza raged, seemingly originating in China.
The Canadian military historian Mark Humphries asserts that “newly unearthed records confirm that one of the side stories of the war — the mobilization of 96,000 Chinese labourers to work behind the British and French lines on World War I’s Western Front — may have been the source of the pandemic.”
There is a connection to Vancouver. Humphries’ research “found medical records indicating that more than 3,000 of the 25,000 Chinese Labor Corps workers who were transported across Canada … ended up in medical quarantine, many with flu-like symptoms.”
Rather than transport the labourers around Africa, “British officials turned to shipping the laborers to Vancouver on the Canadian West Coast and sending them by train to Halifax on the East Coast, from which they could be sent to Europe.”
Masked by symptoms most often associated with a common cold bug (chills, fever, headaches, sore throat, respiratory infection and so forth), the misdiagnosed fever quickly swept the continents into a full-fledged pandemic — and physicians and pathologists in British Columbia were caught in a state of unpreparedness.
At the time, Canada had no centralized government health authority to launch a national defence plan. As a consequence, emergency programs fell to provincial and local municipal authorities, who enacted differing responses to the threat.
Enter Victoria’s medical health officer, Dr. Arthur G. Price.
By early October 1918 increasing reports from Canadian cities detailed the death toll of those who had succumbed to the virulent disease; this was the likely impetus for Dr. Price to institute immediate prevention programs in Victoria.
A little over one hundred years later, official health advisements on curbing the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) were fundamentally the same as in 1918: avoid crowds, if you feel ill, self-isolate and get immediate bedrest.
Human nature being what it is, mandatory measures soon followed — not unlike what occurred in in 2020 and 2021.
In a Victoria Daily Times article published on October 8, 1918, entitled “Prohibitions of meetings to check spread of germs,” the B.C. Provincial Board of Health issued new regulations to support local community efforts to halt the spread of the contagious disease with “the closing of all places of assembly as a preventative measure against the spread of Spanish influenza.”
The Honourable J.D. MacLean, B.C.’s minister of health and education (and later premier), used the Public Health Act to empower the city’s medical health officer to close public spaces at will, enforced by the police.
Apparently Dr. Price had strongly urged a closure in Victoria while Vancouver remained wide open (according to an article in the Daily Colonist on October 8, 1918).
Upwards of one hundred cases of the influenza had already been reported in Victoria, and so Dr. Price was quick to implement the closure power he had sought over all public and private gathering places. Shortly thereafter, schools, churches, libraries, theatres, colleges and dance halls were shuttered for a total of thirty-three days, and community gatherings in general were banned.
In addition to closures and a ban on public gatherings, Price repeatedly issued ongoing advice to maintain good health (diet and exercise) and steer clear of potential carriers of the disease that might be transmitted through coughing and sneezing. Furthermore, if one was exhibiting any of the symptoms, they should immediately go to bed and call a doctor; the first twenty-four hours were deemed critical to ward off severe pneumonia and potentially encourage an early recovery.
Along with these measures came an extensive regime of disinfection plans for public institutions. In 1918, Dr. Price catalogued a total of 166 Victoria-wide fumigations of “dwellings, hospitals, schools, churches, hotels, stores, offices, and salesrooms.” (Disinfections of this sort were also carried out in the face of other diseases such as smallpox, measles and diphtheria.)
In Victoria, private businesses took measures to reassure a doubting public, in some cases publicizing that regular disinfections were being undertaken every twenty-four hours. Some would go further, recommending that local banks should disinfect paper currency every night, though Price rightly stated, “I am afraid they are too prone to rely upon this means of combating the disease.”
As the contagion spread, Victoria’s hospitals were soon stretched to the limit. Other facilities were quickly prepared where patients could be isolated, including two fire halls. Closing public spaces and banning community events also impacted the revenues of both the municipal government and commercial enterprises — but apparently the shortfall was in part covered by an increase in liquor sales!
And so, just like today, the sheer necessity of getting people back to work, of buying and selling goods and services — in short, of maintaining a healthy economy — placed increasing pressure on medical authorities like Dr. Price to lift the restrictions placed upon Victoria’s business community and public alike.
By mid-October, discontent was already rising when Price refused the local clergy’s request to hold open-air services. By month’s end, faced with overwhelming public pressure to assemble in large gatherings with the imminent end of the war, Price issued his strongest warning yet: “Wake up! Realize that there is a war on, a war in our very midst, an epidemic of influenza. Do not sneer at the enemy. Do not belittle it by calling it ‘Flu.’ Give it its full name, be serious and realize that the undertakers are busy.”
While Price was adamant the ban on public assembly remain in place, mounting pressure from both the religious and business communities continued to increase. Ultimately, some days after armistice was declared on November 11, 1918, the month-long ban was rescinded. Fortunately, infections decreased during the remainder of 1918 — but then in January 1919, a third wave of infection rose alarmingly for a brief time. And yet, no comparable closures to Price’s original war on influenza were enacted beyond local schools.
What can be made of all this? Perhaps this one telling statistic: in the influenza epidemic of 1918, Victoria fared much better than Vancouver, where similar closures were delayed for the greater part of the critical month of October, so much so, that while Victoria experienced a mortality rate of 3.6 percent, in Vancouver it was an astounding 10 percent.
As the Vancouver Coastal Health authority noted in 2018, “An estimated 4,000 people died in B.C. from the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic — about a quarter of those in Vancouver. In today’s numbers that would be about 37,000 deaths for B.C. and 9,000 for Vancouver.”
In 2020, we saw the same debate over the need to self-isolate, close public gatherings, and possibly even quarantine — yet always balanced alongside the competing need to maintain trade, travel and the health of local, provincial and national economies.
Not much has changed, really.
Health authorities in countries around the world grappled with a tsunami-like virus and the very real dilemma of securing public health that, at times, was seemingly in competition with the health of imperilled economies.
It seems to me we experienced a delicate dance between two competing goals, that of maintaining the health of interdependent economies and of literal public health. This balancing act informed the global medical debate: a reactive wait-and-see stance versus proactive mandatory measures like those considered by Washington State governor Jay Inslee when Seattle was an epicentre of the coronavirus.
Inslee had a historic precedent to follow: Washington State decreed mandatory public closures over one hundred years ago in response to the 1918 influenza pandemic — about the same time as neighbouring Victoria.
In a Seattle Star article of October 7, 1918, it was reported that our neighbours to the south had taken quick, decisive, proactive measures: “Preparations were under way Monday by Mayor [Ole] Hanson and municipal health authorities to transform Seattle’s big public dance halls, and churches if necessary, into emergency hospitals to care for Spanish influenza cases if the epidemic is not checked. This action was decided upon as a preparatory measure, supplementing the order of Saturday that closed schools, theatres, motion picture houses, pool halls, and all indoor assemblage …
“I have the police to enforce the order, and intend to see that it is observed. The health department is doing everything possible to prevent the spread of the epidemic.”
“Of course we will have kickers,” declared Hanson, “but we would rather have live kickers than have to bury them.”
The mayor’s declaration was swift. When a Seattle pool hall refused to obey closure orders “police locks were placed on the doors.”
Price’s mandatory measures were not limited to the Capital Regional District. By mid-October 1918, some sixteen municipalities in B.C. had implemented similar bans on public gatherings. A general fear began to grow that if Vancouver did not follow suit, the virus would spread to these closed towns. With increasing public pressure, Premier John Oliver’s provincial government began to push Vancouver to get in line — and an impatient Victoria went so far as to ask the B.C. government to institute a quarantine against Vancouver!
Part of the problem stemmed from disagreement between two schools of medical thought on the way to grapple with the highly contagious influenza. Many felt that the City of Vancouver was misguided; as the largest population centre in the province it should ban public assemblies.
The provincial government, at first reluctant to issue stern threats, nevertheless made it abundantly clear that if the pandemic didn’t subside soon, it would intervene with a mandatory closure order. And so it did, moving swiftly on October 18, 1918, to make Vancouver comply, as reported in a Victoria Daily Times article entitled Largest City is Proclaimed under Inhibition Order: “The Provincial Executive passed an Order-in-Council at noon to-day proclaiming the Spanish Influenza Regulations in force in Vancouver immediately and to remain so until such times as the danger from the epidemic shall be deemed past. In other words the Terminal City must now bow to the inevitable and follow the lead set by Victoria, the adjacent municipalities, and more than a dozen other municipalities throughout the province. All forms of public assembly as defined by the regulation … are now forthwith prohibited in the largest city of the Province, after an immunity from restriction extending for ten days … [and] done without application from the civic authorities in the Terminal City.”
Vancouver had been forced to get in line with Victoria and Seattle. “The chief of police has been given orders. Dances halls were ordered closed last night. No private dances must be held. Persons spitting on sidewalks or in street cars are to be immediately placed under arrest.” Police officers served notice to close all theatres, movie houses and other places of public assembly.
Clearly, the institution of closure powers in the transnational triangle of Victoria, Seattle and Vancouver (belated as it was) was more effective when each city, with their historic connections, worked in concert. And in this instance, securing public health was done even at the risk of imperilling these regional economies.
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