Maude Essig's Account of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

This entry holds three artifacts that share how IWU students responded to the Spanish Influenza Pandemic. These documents are a Nurses World War I diary, Phi Gamma Delta (FIJI) Infirmary, and Argus "The Flu" Poem.

During the final months of World War I, Maude Essig kept a diary detailing her time working overseas with the Red Cross. Among her diary entries are brief but telling descriptions of a mysterious illness that ran through her unit—fever, coughs, and sudden deaths. With the document briefly mentioning the flu and the timing of the epidemic, she records her experience with one of the worst tragedies to befall the world. Her reporting not only puts a price on the medical cost of the disease, but also on the emotional exhaustion of the people at the front. Her diary is an unusual and intimate chronicle of IWU's global reach during the pandemic, and how the flu was already making its way into the lives of its alumni.
Back home in Bloomington, the arrival of the virus was abrupt and devastating. In an incredible display of campus community, members of the Phi Gamma Delta (FIJI) fraternity welcomed IWU students who fell ill into their home, converting their living area into an unofficial infirmary. This single reference, preserved in the Day-by-Day Account of McLean County in World War One, illustrates how student organizations at IWU substituted public health roles when hospital resources were limited.. Although brief, this moment tells a great deal about the university's capacity for ground-level response and mass support in times of crisis.
Yet amid the illness and improvised caregiving, students found ways to process their experiences through creativity and humor. The Argus' November 1918 issue contained a poem titled, "The Flu," a satirical take on the outbreak’s disruptions to daily life. The poem, written with wit, laid bare the impossibilities of quarantine, suspended classes, and the widely shared unease that left the campus atmosphere derelict. Humor was a significant outlet, used as a way for students to confront the unfamiliar and reclaim some semblance of normalcy. In combination, the nurse's diary, the fraternity's service, and the poem's ironic commentary give us a fuller picture of IWU's pandemic experience: one marked by care, resilience, and the countless ways people find to survive.