While male doctors flailed, women took charge of the day-to-day care for flu sufferers. Perhaps this is another reason why the flu epidemic faded in memory: It was the women who did most of the work, and that work was dangerous drudgery. In the United States, home-based care for sickness was de rigueur in the 19th century, and “it was still customary in the second decade of the twentieth century for serious illnesses to be treated at home,” historian Emily Abel writes. Care for the flu was an hour-by-hour labor of love—or duty. The nurse would keep the patient hydrated and nourished, ventilate the room and make sure it was warm enough, and administer whatever remedies the doctor had recommended. Along the way, of course, the nurse risked being infected herself.
Some people had no female relative to care for them, or the women in their families were sick too. These patients looked to professional nurses—privately engaged in their homes, visiting under the auspices of the government, or working in hospitals—to fill the gap. For these professionals, the epidemic was the ultimate test. Professional nurses, who were already in high demand because of the war, actually seem to have found the epidemic—despite its dangers—a time of great professional fulfillment. Nancy Bristow found, through reading their memoirs and writings, that such nurses remembered the epidemic period with something you could even call fondness. She quotes Mabel Chilson, a student nurse who recalled how it felt to start to work in 1918: “The nurses soon became the happiest family and when off duty we had jolly good times. The greatest comfort we possessed was the knowledge that each girl was doing her best and making good as a nurse.”
Bristow found similar responses in diaries and letters written by nurses across the country. Their cheerfulness is jarring. “The happy memories of the epidemic are many. … The list of treasured experiences is long,” wrote one. “Terrible as was the influenza epidemic, with its frightful toll, there was a certain tremendous exhilaration to be felt as well as many lessons to be learned from such a terrific test,” wrote another. Nurses at the time insisted that their job, which some saw as simply the natural work of women, should be respected as a legitimate career, and they saw their record during the epidemic as a way to claim professional recognition. One nurse wrote: “It was a most horrible and yet most beautiful experience. … The nurses rendered as noble service as any soldiers in battle.” In 1918, Bristow points out, male physicians believed that doctors should be heroes, a perspective the flu compromised: “They embraced an understanding of their profession as one that healed patients and cured disease, standards difficult to meet during the pandemic.” The nurses, on the other hand, needed simply to administer care—not to fix the disease. They could not only do this, but be proud of having done it.