Flu pandemic topic of 2019 exhibition

By Stephan Salisbury CULTURE WRITER

The museum seeks to convey what a pandemic feels like. National Museum of Health & Medicine

Just in time for what could be a virulent flu season, the Mütter Museum has invited interested viewers to jump into the potentially infectious waters of exhibition creation.

At 2:30 Tuesday, the museum hosted a Facebook Live event to announce a major exhibition — tentatively titled “Spit Spreads Death” and scheduled to open in 2019 — that will explore the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 in Philadelphia and seek to convey what it feels like when deadly disease strikes half a million people in a city of nearly two million.

In coming weeks and months, the museum will invite the public to follow along in blog posts as the exhibition begins to come together. In May, another online gathering will be held to give an update of where planning for the show has taken its creators. The show is scheduled to open in mid-2019.

The museum has commissioned the British art collective Blast Theory, known for its use of interactive media and the integration of performance, visual art, and digital broadcasting, to create a work of art to serve as a centerpiece of the exhibit, curators announced on Face-book.

Matt Adams, one of three members of Blast Theory, known for his work in theater and with interactive media, said the exhibition process had just begun and the result remained a mystery. He called the prospect of the exhibit exciting.

In addition to Adams, two guest curators have been brought in to work on the project: Jane E. Boyd, an independent curator based in Philadelphia, and Trevor Smith, contemporary-art curator at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. The project is funded by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.

Mütter Museum officials said they were seeking to engage audiences in new ways, not just through the museum collection. They are also keen on showing how an exhibition is created — and interpreted by a contemporary artist.

Speaking from the Mütter’s library on South 22d Street, beneath the portrait of late 19th-century surgeon Samuel Gross, curators and artist said they’d work collaboratively to shape both artwork and exhibition and to ensure that all is “fused.”

“What we don’t want is, here is the history exhibition and over here is the piece of art,” said Robert Hicks, director of the Mütter library and leader of the collaborative group. ssalisbury@phillynews.com

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Wednesday, March 12, 2014

1918 Influenza Pandemic Kills 50 Million+ In Just A Few Months! Say WHAT! Who Knew?!

Are you kidding me? I am not making this up. Say WHAT! Who knew!!

The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor, March 11, 2014:

It was on this day in 1918 that the first cases of what would become the influenza pandemic were reported in the U.S. when 107 soldiers got sick at Fort Riley, Kansas.

It was the worst pandemic in world history. The flu that year killed only 2.5 percent of its victims, but more than a fifth of the world's entire population caught it, and so it's estimated that between 50 million and 100 million people died in just a few months.

Historians believe at least 500,000 people died in the United States alone. That's more than the number of Americans killed in combat in all the wars of the 20th century combined. Usually, the flu would have been most likely to kill babies and the elderly, but the flu of 1918 somehow targeted healthy people in their 20s and 30s. And it was an extremely virulent strain. In the worst cases, victims' skin would turn dark red, and their feet would turn black.

No one is sure exactly how many people died, because it wasn't even clear at the time what the disease was. World War I was currently under way, and there were rumors that German soldiers had sneaked into Boston Harbor and released some new kind of germ weapon. One of the strangest aspects of the pandemic in this country was that it was barely reported in the media. President Woodrow Wilson had passed laws to censor all kinds of news stories about the war, and newspaper editors were terrified of printing anything that might cause a scandal.

As the flu epidemic spread across the country in large cities, people were dying of the flu so rapidly that undertakers ran out of coffins, streetcars had to be used as hearses, and mass graves were dug. The newspapers barely commented on it. In the fall of 1918, doctors tried to get newspapers to warn people in Philadelphia against attending a parade. The newspapers refused. In the week after the parade, almost 5,000 Philadelphians died of the flu.