It always seemed strange on opening one’s eyes to see the level cots and the dimly lit long tent looking so calm, when one was dozing in pandemonium.” He wrote that he lay there, “with the accompaniment of groans of wounded, and the chokings and coughing of gassed men, which was a nightmare. Sargent was cared for and convalesced in a hospital tent in France. In early summer 1918, late in his renowned career when living in England, Sargent was invited back to France on commission by British Prime Minister Lloyd George, Field Marshal Douglas Haig, and the British Department of Information, War Memorials Committee, to depict the Anglo-American effort in the war.ĭuring late September, while preparing sketches for his iconic painting Gassed in a military camp near Roisel (Péronne), Sargent fell ill with influenza. Home-schooled and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he enjoyed a storied career, principally as a portraitist. At the time, the pandemic strain became known as “the Spanish flu,” so called because neutral Spain lacked war censors and was the first country to report on the pandemic publicly however, the geographic origin of the causative organism remains an enigma.Īmong that generation was the artist John Singer Sargent, who was born in Florence in 1856 and raised principally in France, the child of two Americans: an eye doctor turned medical illustrator father, and an amateur artist mother. The highest point of combined influenza and pneumonia mortality occurred in October 1918.

During World War I, the “Great War,” influenza-associated mortality waves occurred in northern Europe, beginning in early summer of 1918 and extending over the course of year influenza accounted for more fatalities than military engagement. The estimate of deaths of Americans attributable to influenza in that pandemic is 675,000, the majority of which were among those from ages 20 through 40 years. The result was staggering mortality: an estimated 20 to 100 million lives were lost worldwide. The influenza strain of that pandemic infected about 500 million people, one third of the world’s population, with extraordinarily high pathogenicity and virulence. The generation that endured through what was perhaps the most devastating epidemic ever-the great influenza pandemic of 1918-is now gone. Imperial War Museums, © IWM ART 1611, Lambeth Road, London SE1 6HZ, England, UIK Watercolor over pencil on paper 16 in × 21 in/39 cm × 53 cm. John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Interior of a Hospital Tent, 1918.

The great war hoi4