Yellow fever was a horrid and feared disease in the Americas, but its impact was almost negligible compared to influenza. While thousands died from yellow fever, the global influenza pandemic of 1918 was a terrifying nightmare that killed 50–100 million people, including over 650,000 in the United States (Nickol and Kindrachuk 2019; Oxford and Gill 2018). Some estimates suggest that by the pandemic’s conclusion roughly one-third of the world’s population had been infected. Sometimes still called the Spanish flu, this is a complete misnomer. No one knows exactly where this lethal influenza strain originated, but it wasn’t Spain. Early outbreaks were observed in the United States, France, and China, suggesting that any one of these locations could have been ground zero for the subsequent pandemic (Brown 2018). Spain, unfortunately, took the blame for this illness merely because it was one of the few countries to widely report on the early cases. Because of the extensive coverage of the disease in the Spanish press, this flu initially became associated with Spain and acquired its inappropriate nickname (Kuszewski and Brydak 2000). Regardless of its origin, World War I in Europe provided a perfect setting for a highly contagious respiratory infection to spread among the troops living in crowded and often unsanitary conditions. With soldiers traveling back and forth from battlefields to their home countries, this virus was quickly and easily dispersed around the globe. As the virus began to sweep through cities and countries, one observer in Massachusetts reported that there were “several thousand cases in the city with a great shortage of nurses and doctors, … theatres, churches, gatherings of every kind stopped” (Solly 2020).