On September 7, 1918, at the height of World War I, a soldier at an army training camp outside Boston came to sick call with a high fever. Doctors diagnosed him with meningitis but changed their minds the next day when a dozen more soldiers were hospitalized with respiratory symptoms. Thirty-six new cases of this unknown illness appeared on the 16th. Incredibly, by September 23rd, 12,604 cases had been reported in the camp of 45,000 soldiers. By the end of the outbreak, one third of the camp's population would come down with this severe disease, and nearly 800 of them would die. The soldiers who perished often developed a bluish skin color and struggled horribly before succumbing to death by suffocation. Many died less than 48 hours after their symptoms appeared, and at autopsy their lungs were filled with fluid or blood.

Because this unusual suite of symptoms did not fit any known malady, a distinguished pathologist of the era, William Henry Welch, speculated that "this must be some new kind of infection or plague." Yet the disease was neither plague nor even new. It was just influenza. Still, this particularly virulent and infectious strain of the flu virus is thought to have killed as many as 40 million people around the world between 1918 and 1919.

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