Page 9 - Bulletin 23- 2020

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develop an ad hoc anti-flu vaccine in double-quick time. But these measures were not co-
ordinated and were as effective as trying to fight a veld-fire with an armful of watering-cans.

Given the sub-department’s serious organisational and staffing deficiencies, the best co-

ordinated official action to combat the epidemic was taken by municipal authorities around
the country. With the assistance of thousands of public-spirited volunteers eager to do their

bit during the war, they set up temporary hospitals, opened relief depots to supply soup, food
and medicine to badly affected households, disinfected houses where cases had occurred, and

conducted vigorous clean-ups of what were identified as insanitary areas. Not that the last

two steps were of any actual use against influenza; they appear to have been more knee-jerk
responses to the presence of an epidemic, reminiscent of steps taken in previous centuries

during epidemics and intended more as evidence that authorities were indeed doing
something and not just standing by as a plague claimed one victim after another.

The Union Defence Force also lent a biomedical hand once Spanish flu had waned in its

camps, as many of the country’s doctors and nurses were still under its control because of the

war. Some of them it dispatched to specific towns and villages where their services were
most desperately needed, while others were organized into three field ambulances to tour the

rural Transkei and Transvaal, dispensing emergency medical care. In several places the
Defence Force not only supplied medical equipment from its stores, but also admitted serious

civilian cases to its military hospitals. To stricken Kimberley it sent its Acting Director of

Medical Services, Colonel A.J. Orenstein, to assume control of that city’s faltering efforts to
stem the epidemic’s tide. “Please come at once”, the town council had begged him. “You will

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be in absolute control.”

With this mandate, within 24 hours Orenstein had created a comprehensive and tight-knit

system which embraced all local doctors, pharmacists and hospitals and rationalized their
efforts. For example, the town was divided into 12 medical districts to each of which one

doctor was assigned to deal with all calls, while pharmacists were instructed to dispense only
three anti-flu mixtures; doctors had to confine their prescriptions to one of these.

Bloemfontein municipality’s counter-offensive against the epidemic was equally authori-

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tarian – “a sort of ad hoc Soviet system” one contemporary called it – only here the town’s
doctors dug in their heels against being assigned to one particular district. In the city’s
Waaihoek township, however, “They commandeered everything they could find,” admitted