The emergency hospital, a partially demolished building hastily enclosed with wooden partitions, was about to open. It was the fall of 1918 in Philadelphia, and influenza was spreading fast. With many of the city’s doctors and nurses serving in World War I, 23-year-old Isaac Starr and his third-year classmates at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine needed to help tend the sick. They’d had just one lecture on influenza. Their first job was to assemble the hospital beds, about 25 to a floor.
Starr’s shift was 4 p.m. to midnight. The beds soon filled with patients who had fevers, he recalled in a 1976 essay for Annals of
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