Time for this week’s Sepia Saturday post and a time to take a look back in history. Sepia Saturday challenges bloggers to share images and posts of bygone days. This week we’re inspired to find photos based on the photo above, photos that show healthcare workers.
Source LOC, Washington, DC, 1918
Above Red Cross nurses in Washington, DC
If you’d like to see more of the week’s Sepia Saturday posts, click here to get to the main page.
Internet Archives, p 607 of Industrial Medicine and Surgery, 1919
LOC, nurse working in Walter Reed Hospital’s Influenza Ward, 1918
LOC, Seattle, circa 1918
No mask, no streetcar. In Seattle during the Spanish flu one had to have a face mask if you wanted to get on a streetcar.
Compulsory mask – State Library of New South Wales, 1919
The Flickr Commons entry has this note:
The skull and crossbones on the mask was a joke, not part of the mask as issued, in an attempt to halt the disease. 12,000 died in Australia and between 20-100 million around the world, more than were killed in the War
LOC, Flu Fighters, Montenegro, 1918
Healthcare workers with the American Red Cross. They went to Montenegro to care for small pox and typhus patients. Then the Spanish Flu broke out and brought them more patients.
Ruined for Life: Phoenix Edition 
Great photos. Keeping people off the streetcars without masks was a good idea. I wonder how well that was received? They need to so that again!
LikeLike
When I first started learning about the Spanish flu in my early years of doing genealogy, I do not recall seeing photos of people in masks. Now we are reminded how similar our days and lives are to those in 1918.
LikeLike
Excellent set of photos with the earlier pandemic and how efforts were made to mask as protection, and how health care workers wore them as well.
LikeLike
A good choice of photos that not only fit the prompt but tie right into what we’re currently going through. Nice job!
LikeLike
I’ve read a lot about the Great Influenza pandemic and the doctors and nurses who cared for the sick were incredibly courageous. Especially because of the limitations of medical science then. The virus did not originate in Spain either, but in Kansas.
LikeLike
The vintage photos really bring that 102-year-old epidemic alive for us.
LikeLike