Page 8 - Bulletin 23- 2020

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For doctors were at a loss to know how to treat the disease. “We had a rough idea that care
was necessary, that fresh air was an essential,” admitted one, “but as to medical treatment our

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minds were fogged.” Thus, the medicines they recommended ranged from aspirin, quinine,
Epsom salts, phenol and cinnamon tablets to hastily concocted special flu mixtures and
vaccine. All were equally useless. Poignantly, the son of a Cape Town doctor recalled his

father’s reaction when a newly-married couple he had been treating for Spanish flu died
within days of each other: “It was then I first saw my father cry”, he recounted. “He was

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sobbing in sorrow and in frustration at his impotence.”

Nor were practitioners of medical systems other than biomedicine any more successful in

their treatment, though this did not stop the quacks among them from making grand claims to
the contrary or commercial opportunists from exploiting the situation. For instance,

Commando Brandy was advertised as being sure proof against “Huns or Flu”, while
Sibbalene antiseptic skin ointment applied to the inside of nostrils was touted as a guarantee

against infection.

In the end, in the absence of any sure cure, most South Africans probably put their faith in

folk remedies, patent medicines and time-honoured nostrums and practices like fleeing to a
remote area or self-imposed isolation. Many Africans turned to traditional herbalists,

sangomas or isanusi (witch-finders) to check the disease. As a result smelling out, by the last-

mentioned, of those deemed responsible for the extraordinary wave of deaths increased
sharply, as did attacks on those whom they identified as witches or wizards – so much so, in

fact, that in 1919 the Transkeian Penal Code was amended to lay down stiffer penalties for
witch-finding.

Biomedicine

Of course, given the commitment of the new South African state to biomedicine, this brand

of doctoring alone enjoyed official support. Thus, the medical assistance it did provide was
exclusively biomedical in nature. For instance, the central government’s fledgling, three-man

sub-department of public health circulated to the public the latest medical advice from Britain

on how to treat epidemic influenza, advertised for doctors and nurses locally to send to
districts where these were in particularly short supply, and pressed state laboratories to