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Aside from news articles and advertisements, newspapers frequently read anecdotes, poems, jokes, and other forms of entertainment to cope with the influenza pandemic. Entertainment might be too strong of a word, however; some of these items were light-hearted and affable, while others were serious and featured sobering, dark humor. This poem, "When You Have the 'Flu,'" here is somewhere in between.

Published in the Greeneville Daily Sun on February 10th, 1919, the poem details the harsh realities of what influenza symptoms felt like. Headache, fever, and other symptoms of the flu are described with detailed comparisons that emphasized how miserable those with the flu would feel. The line "And your doggone sure that you're gonna die, but you're skeered you won't and afraid you will" captures that feeling of misery and despair that those with the flu experienced. People with the flu often felt like they were dying while also being afraid that they realistically could end up dying.

By February 1919 the flu pandemic had been around for months, and the fears and dangers associated with it were well known and well founded by that point. As many of the advertisements and other stories about the flu frequently mentioned, people in the U.S. and around the world had long been used to influenza and its symptoms by the time the pandemic started. The particular strain of flu that led to the pandemic, coupled with its rapid spread and high fatality rate, took something that had been somewhat familiar and turned it into something that was increasingly devastating and terrifying. Something that had the ability to hit at anytime, and bring entire communities to a standstill.

News updates and reports are helpful in understanding how the pandemic impacted the communities; poems, stories, and comics are helpful in understanding how people coped with the situation. In 2020 you can see similar responses from artists, writers, and organizations that are using a variety of mediums to help people get through this current pandemic. Future historians will be able to use these items to understand our own pandemic coping mechanisms in a similar way.

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10/20/1918, p.6

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10/15/1918, p.5

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10/24/1918, p.5

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02/10/1919, p.3

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11/14/1918, p. 6

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