'She was always the one who went and helped': Spanish flu nurse's tales as told her daughter

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Vera Giles never forgot the children for whom she cared, who died — isolated — during the Spanish flu pandemic a century ago. Her daughter made sure to ask her about her experiences, to honour her memory.

Vera Giles was just a teenager when she put her hand up to care for Spanish flu patients in a hotspot during the 1919 pandemic, and she held onto the memories of the people she looked after right through to her death in 2004 at the age of 105.

Vera Giles, then Vera King, as a teenager a few years before her work during the Spanish Flu pandemic. "We washed the patients and attended to them and then gave them their breakfasts, after which we had ours." From 1910 to 1912, Warrnambool's average flu death rate was 13.55 per 1,000 people, but in 1919 it jumped to 18.13 per 1,000 people, with 136 deaths recorded that year.

"That was keeping them hydrated, containing them to bed, trying to keep their fevers down and that task fell to nurses."Ms Sheehan said the coronavirus pandemic had awakened a "community memory" of the Spanish flu, which had largely been forgotten.

 

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