The influenza autumn of 1918: the toll, from the state board's own tables

SEPTEMBER 1918 — FEBRUARY 1919

The gap this closes: The epidemics record of this history prints the autumn of 1918 at state size — the closure order, the January 1920 return in the city's own press — and names its gap plainly: no South Bend death toll for the autumn of 1918 stood in the record it reached, and the city's October and November newspapers were the pull that would settle it. The toll is settled here from a stronger record than the newspapers: the Indiana State Board of Health's own Monthly Bulletin, whose mortality tables — Table 1, deaths by counties, and Table 2, deaths by cities — were compiled from the death certificates the law required local health officers to report. The figures below are read from the board's published issues for September 1918 through February 1919 (Volume XXI, Nos. 9–12, and Volume XXII, Nos. 1–2), in the copies held by Indiana University Indianapolis ScholarWorks. They are the board's final monthly returns, by month, and they count two causes the board tabulated side by side: influenza, and lobar and broncho-pneumonia — the pneumonia that was the epidemic's usual instrument of death.

The city: South Bend's autumn, in the board's tables (the board carried the city's population at 72,898):

The epidemic arrived late and struck fast. September was a quiet month — no influenza death at all in the city, and fewer deaths in total than the September before. October was the catastrophe: 212 deaths from all causes against 63 in October 1917, an annual death rate of 34.9 per thousand against 11.3 a year earlier, and 147 of the dead — seven in ten — certified to influenza or its pneumonia. November added 97 and December 62: 306 South Bend residents died of influenza or lobar and broncho-pneumonia in the three autumn months, 194 of them under the influenza heading itself. The tail ran through the winter — 23 in January 1919, 21 in February — bringing the five months October through February to 350. The count is a certificate count, with the limits of its era: deaths the certifying physician assigned to other causes are not in it, and the board's own all-causes figures show 283 more deaths in the city in October–December 1918 than in the same months of 1917, a sum the 306 counted epidemic deaths broadly account for.

The county: St. Joseph County's tables (the board carried the county at 105,450 people) run one month deeper in each direction and tell the same shape at county size: September 1918, no influenza deaths and 4 pneumonia deaths; October, 105 influenza and 81 pneumonia — 186 together; November, 112 and 42 — 154; December, 63 and 30 — 93; January 1919, 22 and 14 — 36; February, 10 and 16 — 26. The county's autumn quarter, October through December, totals 433 influenza and pneumonia deaths, and the five months through February, 495. The difference between the county and city lines is the epidemic in Mishawaka, in the townships, and at Notre Dame, which the county table counts and the city table does not.

The relay, tested: The WWI home-front record of this history carried a candidate answer at second hand: Notre Dame Magazine's account of the fall of 1918, relaying state-board figures, gives South Bend 152 influenza and pneumonia deaths and St. Joseph County 185, as reported by 20 November 1918, in a state reporting 3,386 such deaths in the previous month. Set against the board's own tables, the relay holds up in scale and, for the county, almost to the death: the board's completed October county table totals 186 against the relay's 185 reported by 20 November — a running count overtaken by one late return. The city figure of 152 sits nearest the board's October city total of 147 without matching it, on a basis the magazine does not state — most plausibly the board's running tally through 20 November, which mixed October's completed returns with November's partial ones. The statewide frame is of the same family: the board's October tables count 2,030 influenza deaths and 1,261 pneumonia deaths in Indiana, 3,291 together, against the relay's 3,386 for the month as reported by 20 November. And the figure the epidemics record already prints — the Indianapolis News's 3,266 Indiana dead by the end of November — is a newspaper's running count on its own basis and window. All three stand in this history attributed, as they should; the toll itself is governed by the board's final monthly tables, which are the only one of the three built from the certificates. Indiana's influenza deaths alone, from those tables, ran 61 in September 1918, 2,030 in October, 1,683 in November, 1,917 in December, 898 in January and 519 in February — the state's December second crest, which South Bend's smaller December shares.

What remains open: The board's tables settle the toll; they do not tell the autumn. The city's newspapers of October and November 1918 — the pull the epidemics record named — remain the source for the story at street level, and the board's tables for the epidemic's 1920 return (Volume XXIII of the Bulletin) exist as a conform if assembly wants the January 1920 toll at the same strength as this one. Neither gap touches the figures printed here.

Sources:

1. Indiana State Board of Health, Monthly Bulletin, Vol. XXI No. 9 (September 1918) through No. 12 (December 1918) and Vol. XXII Nos. 1–2 (January–February 1919): Table 1, "Deaths and Births in Indiana by Counties," and Table 2, "Deaths and Births in Indiana by Cities" — read first-hand from the published issues (IU Indianapolis ScholarWorks copies); every South Bend monthly figure above is the board's printed cell, and the second-class city group totals printed in the same tables reconcile with the city rows.
2. Notre Dame Magazine, "The Fall of 1918" — the relay evaluated above; its figures are the WWI home-front record's candidate, printed here at relay strength with its carrier named.
3. Indianapolis News, as carried in the epidemics record of this history — the 3,266 statewide figure, on the newspaper's own basis.