FLU AND FEAR

Hokitika Guardian, 25 November 1918, Page 4

FLU AND FEAR

Writes Givis in the Otago Daily Times Said the Cholera Morbus to the Plague as they met and greeted at Bagdad City Gate: “Not much left foi’ me ! —I hear you slew JiO.OOO.” “ Only 20,000,” said the Plague;— “ Pear slew the rest.” There is a timely reminder in this Eastern apologue—the value of an equal mind and a, steady nerve. Influenza is and always has been a nerve-shaking trouble. Its very name tells of panic. Unable to keep pace with its caprices, still less able to explain the whence and the bow and the why of it, Italian doctors in the 17th century ascribed it to the “ influence ” of the stars, and named it “ influenza.” The word “ influence ” —a flowing in or into, or on or on to, —like the word “ disaster,” and like the more open-faced word

“ill-starred,” has for- us lost all suggestion of astrology and i>s nonsense. But in Shakespeare and his contemporaries “ influence ” is never free from this association. Historically, “ influenza” is magic, the influence of

the stars. Not for that reason, however, is the twentieth century man (or woman either, for that matter) going to be afraid of it. But when every quack in the country is np and doing, when Dr Thacker gets on the job, when the Health Officer prescribes officially, when an inhalation chamber is the imperative prelude, to railway travel, when onr roadways are to be sprayed with formalin and our libraries with Jeyes’ Fluid, and when in the customs and habits of our life we are to be officially cabined, cribbed, and confined ; when these things are so, there are all the ma-

terials of a first-class panic. I too can prescribe, on occasion ; my formula is simple—keep cool, just that. Remember what Plague said to Cholera Morbus : “ I killed so many, and only so many'. Fear killed the rest.”