Our 1918 Influenza Project

Professor John Oxford (Scientific Director of Retroscreen and Professor of Virology at Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry) in conjunction with his collaborators Dr Rod Daniels (NIMR, UK) and Dr Jeffrey Taubenberger (NIH, USA) is investigating the genetic nature of the virus that caused the devastating 1918 influenza pandemic.

The team are studying a collection of lung tissues from the archives of the Royal London Hospital from 1908 to 1933. Additionally the team has exhumed two bodies of influenza victims from lead-encased coffins buried in 1918 and is getting permission to exhume a third who died in 1919. Professor Oxford and Dr Daniels participated in the exhumation of influenza victims buried in the permafrost in Svalbard.

In addition, in a project with the historian Douglas Gill, funded by the Wellcome Trust, we are investigating the herald waves of influenza prior to 1918 at the British Army base at Etaple in Northern France.

The Influenza Pandemic Window - Heroes and Heroines of 1918-1919
This window is the first memorial to those who died of influenza immediately after the Great War. Every town and village in Britain has a memorial to those soldiers and sailors who died fighting, but this window offers the first remembrance to the casualties of the virus. Nurses, soldiers, pathologists and scientists researching the disease died. There were also many acts of individual heroism as families and friends helped each other, while putting their own lives at risk. Perhaps as many conscious acts of heroism were carried out in ordinary homes as in the European battlefields of the preceding four years. No medals were issued at the time to these heroes and heroines. This window is a tribute to them.

The impact of the influenza virus has been incalculable and the virus remains one of the greatest killer diseases of mankind. Even in recent years the Royal London Hospital has been overwhelmed with influenza cases in the casualty and medical wards. The worst outbreak was the pandemic which followed the ending of hostilities after the First World War. No country escaped. In the UK, Germany and France there were more than 250,000 deaths in each country. 20 million Indians died and in some remote communities 80% of the population perished. It is estimated that there were 50 million deaths worldwide.

The graph in the window, expressed in tens of thousands, refers diagramatically to the outbreak of Russian Flu in the 1890s which gave partial immunity to some of the survivors, the quiescent period before the war and the inexorable rise in deaths in the war's aftermath when the soldiers returning home took the disease to the different countries of Europe and further afield to Australia, India, America and Africa. The blood red mark above the fateful year 1919 marks this tragedy.

The white area of glass in the right hand window acts as a 'healing field' and suggests the sense of optimism supported by the certainty that molecular science has the capacity to prevent these disasters. Careful research and public health planning for a new pandemic with full use of vaccines and anti influenza drugs would certainly prevent a wave of deaths similar to that experienced in 1918.

The Influenza Pandemic has largely gone unrecorded. The window is intended not only to remedy this neglect but to suggest hope for the future. The chemical symbol on the white space at the base of the window points towards hope, it represents the Neuraminidase compound, a contemporary anti viral agent used, after much research, in the treatment of influenza.