Left: Valentine's Meat Juice trade card (Image courtesy The Valentine) Right: Students washing hands before lunch at the old Cary Street School (Photo courtesy The Valentine) Inset: 20th century pinback button (Image courtesy Terry Brown)
Less than a century ago, to combat mass illness, medicine offered palliative care and patent medicine, including Richmond’s own Valentine Meat Juice. Thus, it is appropriate that “Pandemic,” an exhibition surveying contagious disease throughout Richmond’s history, is on display at The Valentine museum until Feb. 24, 2019.
Meg Hughes, director of The Valentine's archives, and Elizabeth Outka, an associate professor of English at the University of Richmond and author of the upcoming “Raising the Dead,” about modernist literature and the Great Influenza of 1918-19, have created an insightful exhibition that is distressing and thought-provoking.
Hughes observes that we no longer possess personal experience of a seasonal cycle of diseases. “Because of the medical advances, especially in the 20th century, we’ve not had that worry as much,” she says, “but that has also has led to some complacency.”
Outka adds, “Epidemiologists working today will tell you: It’s not a question of ‘if’ another pandemic will occur, it’s ‘when.’ ”
In a 19th-century version of watching ominous weather forecasts tracking the approach of a powerful but wobbly hurricane, Richmonders read newspaper accounts of cholera, smallpox and yellow fever spreading from nearby cities, powerless to halt their advance.
The germ of “Pandemic” began with the Great Influenza. “We were expecting impressive exhibitions and new histories about [the World War I centennial],” Hughes says, "but weren’t sure, at least locally, that there’d be a look at the flu pandemic.”
The disease killed approximately 100 million people in about six months — perhaps a fifth of the world’s population — making it worse than Europe’s 14th-century “Black Death” (the bubonic plague) and exceeding the grim totals of HIV/AIDS. Flu deaths were about 10 times greater than the casualty toll of World War I. Some 1,000 Richmonders succumbed, and about 15,000 died statewide, with 200,000 or more who fell ill but lived. More Virginians died at home than in the war.
The exhibition spread to encompass a wider history of sickness, in part because interpretive materials about 1918-1919 in Richmond are sparse. For example, there is no known image of the flu wards assembled in the downtown John Marshall High School. On video, however, there are people recounting their experiences of the Great Influenza, polio and HIV/AIDS.
Race and class are threaded through these stories, too, with poor African-Americans and immigrants being criticized in news reports for unhygienic living conditions. While people today have, theoretically, more education, and public health officials work to provide accurate information, there are less effective vaccines against prejudice, as during the early days of HIV/AIDS, when it was labeled “the gay plague.”
The Great Influenza caught Richmond, like the rest of the country, with its first responders mostly absent: They were in the trenches of Europe.
Outka recounts how, at the height of the Great Influenza here, the indomitable Maggie Walker, an African-American entrepreneur and teacher, led a group to John Marshall High to volunteer. They found that black flu patients were in the windowless basement. Walker and company marched straight to the governor’s mansion to demand assistance. The Baker School — closed due to the pandemic — became available. Outka says, “At Baker, African-American doctors and nurses ran a fantastic emergency hospital.”
The first line in a healthy defense is vigilance. During the course of the exhibition, The Valentine will host a blood drive, a flu shot clinic and an HIV screening.
“Pandemic” continues at The Valentine through February 2019. 1015 E. Clay St., 804-649-0711 or valentine.org.
