Philadelphia was the hardest-hit American city in the 1918 flu pandemic, and Tourscher concentrated on the events of October of that year. The city saw a huge spike of cases after organizers went forward with the September 28 Liberty Loan Parade, despite concerns from local medical experts about the disease’s presence in the population. Six weeks later, 12,000 would be dead.
The immediate effect was to overwhelm the healthcare system. Makeshift hospitals were set up in gymnasiums and event halls—large gathering spaces that were no longer needed as the city’s social life shut down. What was really needed were more nurses, especially as medical workers themselves became ill. On October 10, 1918, Archbishop Dennis Joseph Dougherty wrote a letter not only authorizing the opening of parish buildings to care for the sick, but also permitting uncloistered nuns to step in as nurses.
Sisters from across the city volunteered. They mostly did not have medical training, just the will to help. “I was struck, at first, with a fearful dread, for I never came in close contact with death but once in my life,” said one nun who worked at an emergency hospital on South Broad Street. “But realizing what must be done, I quickly put on my gown and mask.” Another described her first day, October 12, at Philadelphia General Hospital, a charity hospital in West Philadelphia:
That walk from the entrance to the wards seemed unending. One of the Sisters whispered to me: “How shall we ever get in?”—meaning the next day. I replied: “I think we’re getting in beautifully; what worries me is, how shall we get out?”
What they found there in the wards, as other Sisters did around the city, were bodies in every bed and not enough hands or resources to care for them. At an emergency hospital at Broad Street and Snyder Avenue, a Sister related how new patients would have to wait in an office until someone died and a bed was free. At St. Patrick’s Emergency Hospital, another Sister recalled, were “conditions beyond the power of description”:
It is one thing to read or hear of suffering, quite another to behold it in reality. About the Hall were arranged cots, containing men, on the first floor, women and children on the second. Nearly every race and condition were there represented.
Many of Philadelphia’s hospitals were segregated, and the Sisters performed essential work visiting the sick who were at home and had nowhere else to go and often no one to care for them. Frequently they were suffering as much from starvation and neglect as from the illness itself. One Sister remarked that it was “not always poverty that left the people destitute,” it was “the fear and dread of the scourge” that kept others away.