Mass death and mass illness in an isolated Canadian town: coping with pandemic influenza in Kenora, Ontario, in 1918–1921

Abstract

In -1920, pandemic influenza spread across Canada and around the world, striking in three separate waves. The majority of existing research on the Canadian experience during the second and most deadly wave of the epidemic suggests that there were enormous difficulties in dealing with the dead. While it seemed likely that Kenora, an isolated Northern Ontario community, would have faced the same challenges, this was not entirely the case. There were changes in death rituals: for example, church services were banned so that funerals had to be held in homes or at gravesides. Surprisingly, though the death rate in Kenora during the peak would reach nearly 30 times normal, the handling of the dead does not seem to have become a significant issue. During the fall and winter of 1918, the largest concern for the communities of Kenora and Keewatin (the two were separate communities at this time) was not responding to the demand for daily burials, but attempting to prevent further infection in the community.

An Underlying Affliction

“…Conversely, the northern community of Kenora, Ontario, which was not geographically divided by class, did not see the same correlation between the poor and high influenza mortality. 86 Kenora's small population in 1918 meant that the city's rich and poor were not spatially divided as they were in Winnipeg and Hamilton. This suggests that high mortality rates were not inherently associated with poor Canadians, as many contemporaries may have believed, but rather unhealthy urban living conditions.…”

“…In a less class-divided town such as Kenora, there was no apparent distinction in mortality between the rich and the poor. 87 Therefore, the living conditions in poor working-class neighbourhoods contributed to the greater prevalence of influenza in these communities and higher mortality. In this way, these individuals were victims of both influenza and the inequities of industrialization and urbanization.…”