In the winter of 1918, the city of Milwaukee faced a crisis almost exactly like our own. A highly contagious and deadly virus found its way to the city. This disease was the great influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919; and like the coronavirus pandemic today it completely upended life in our city.

What might we learn about our own moment by looking to the past? What can the history of Milwaukee's other pandemic teach us about navigating our own crisis?

From the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Department of History and the Milwaukee County Historical Society comes a new podcast about our city and its pandemics. And it's called The Healthiest City.

The Healthiest City is a production of UWM's Department of History, in partnership with the Milwaukee County Historical Society. It is produced by Chris Cantwell and the students in his "History and New Media." 

The music in this trailer is "Summit" by the Blue Dot Sessions.  

In the years after its effective response to the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic, Milwaukee became known as “the healthiest city.” But that reputation, and the public health preparedness that made it possible, wasn’t built up overnight: Milwaukee learned how to respond to a dangerous epidemic the hard way. In episode one of The Healthiest City podcast, Maddy Tabor and Olivia Hoff explore how Milwaukee’s public health policies were affected by the smallpox outbreak of 1894. 

German and Polish immigrants on Milwaukee’s South Side feared government control and saw the city’s isolation of children as a threat. Walter Kempster, the city’s public health commissioner, failed to soothe their concerns. Instead of communicating with these communities on their own terms and in their own languages, Kempster reacted to their resistance with force, provoking widespread outrage that only made matters worse. Judy Leavitt, a historian of medicine and the author of The Healthiest City, joins our hosts to discuss how Milwaukee learned lasting lessons from this devastating failure.

For more information, including photographs and documents from the era, visit https://milwaukeehistory.net/podcast/. 

In episode two of The Healthiest City podcast, hosts Bailey Green and Roman Lulloff explore how the rise of the Socialist Party in Milwaukee helped build up the city’s public health programs in the years before the 1918 flu pandemic struck. Emil Seidel was elected as the city’s first Socialist mayor in 1910, and the party captured a majority in the Common Council the same year. 

The Socialists kept their campaign promises when it came to public health, building new isolation hospitals and neighborhood clinics for children. They also built a sewer system and pressed for sanitation inspections to be conducted across the city. While Republicans and Democrats alike opposed these reforms, they were popular with the public, and they managed to continue after the Socialists’ short-lived control of city government was over. As you will hear, these changes were essential when Milwaukee and the rest of the world faced the “Spanish flu” just a few years later.

For more information, visit milwaukeehistory.net/podcast. 

As the 1918 influenza pandemic tore its way across the globe, the damage it caused went hand-in-hand with the ongoing combat of World War I. The massive mobilization of troops from around the world provided the perfect conditions for the disease to spread. And with the need to keep sending troops to the trenches, and to keep morale up on the home front, efforts to slow the spread were hampered. 

In episode three of The Healthiest City podcast, Christina Grev and Katie Bischof discuss how, in the midst of war, the flu made its way into Milwaukee. Ports up and down America’s coasts had become hotspots, sending and receiving floating petri dishes filled with sailors to and from Europe. When the pandemic hit the Great Lakes Naval Station in Illinois that September, sailors going on leave almost immediately introduced the disease to Milwaukee for the first time.

For more information, visit https://milwaukeehistory.net/podcast/.

When a disease folks then called the "Spanish Flu" was first detected in Milwaukee, the city's public health officials faced a choice not unlike the one we've debated for most of this last year: whether to close the community's schools. This episode of The Healthiest City follows the story of George Ruhland, who was Milwaukee Public Health Commissioner at the time of the influenza pandemic. It also features a current Milwaukee public school teacher to learn about how virtual learning over this last year.

For more information about the show, including images and documents from 1918, check out https://milwaukeehistory.net/podcast/. 

While pandemics can seem to disrupt every facet of our daily lives, they are, at their core, medical crises. This week on The Healthiest City we talk about how doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals face these challenges. We open by talking with an ICU nurse in Milwaukee who worked in the unit that treated the first wave of coronavirus patients back in March, 2020. Then, we explore how doctors and nurses in the past dealt with the flu. Health Commissioner George Ruhland makes another experience, expanding Milwaukee's medical facilities to deal with the sick. But we also discuss what it was like to have the 1918, what treatments doctors could offer, and how nurses felt about their work.

For more information, including photographs and documents from the era, check out https://milwaukeehistory.net/podcast/.

Milwaukee's success at handling the influenza pandemic did not mean the going was easy. For the city's bars and restaurants, shut down orders and consumer fear made business difficult. On this week's episode of The Healthiest City, we explore how Milwaukee's entertainment and retail establishments navigated the influenza pandemic, and consider what this tells us about how to navigate the coronavirus pandemic today.

For more information, including photographs and documents from the era, check out https://milwaukeehistory.net/podcast/.

By the end of the epidemic, the United States had lost 0.6% of the population to the Spanish Flu, with around 675,000 deaths. Yet Milwaukee suffered a relatively low death rate. In 1918, Milwaukee was the thirteenth largest city in the US and one of the nation’s most densely populated cities. Perhaps Milwaukee’s response can account for some of this discrepancy; per capita, the city outspent 9 of the 12 most populous cities, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, on health and sanitation. In this episode, we explore the global impact of the epidemic and the personal experience of Wisconsinites whose families lived through it.

For more information about the show, including images and documents from 1918, check out https://milwaukeehistory.net/podcast/.