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Workers transform the Dockland’s ExCel centre into the NHS Nightingale field hospital to deal with an expected ‘tsunami’ of new Covid-19 cases. “One poor nurse, I remember, with a terribly acute influenzal pneumonia, became so distressed she could not stay in bed and insisted on being propped up against the wall by her bed until she was finally drowned in her profuse, thin blood-stained sputum.” When he returned in February, the epidemic was still raging and two more nurses had died, bringing the fatalities to nine. She was consumed with a burning desire to save her … inevitably, the nurse developed a lung infection, dying soon after the woman she had been nursing.”īy December, Hood was exhausted and went on sick leave. In the case of one nurse, Hood noted: “Nothing I could do or say had the slightest effect in influencing her to diminish the risks to herself. But when it came to tending to a fellow nurse, many refused to wear the masks for fear of distressing their colleague. Hood made the nurses wear lint masks and advised them “not to interpose their faces too near the blast of those coughing”. “Sad to relate some of these gallant girls lost their lives in this never-to-be-forgotten scourge and as I write I can see some of them now literally fighting to save their friends then going down and dying themselves.”Īn engraving of the St Marylebone Infirmary when it opened in 1881. “Each day the difficulties became more pronounced as the patients increased and the nurses decreased, going down like ninepins themselves,” Hood wrote. Having been decorated for bravery under fire, many nurses now fell victim to influenza. In normal circumstances, St Marylebone Infirmary ought to have been able to cope, but 1918 was not a normal time: by November, when the first world war came to an end, around half of the hospital’s nurses had been called to military service. “The staff fought like Trojans to feed the patients, scramble as best they could through the most elementary nursing and keep the delirious in bed!” “All training, and indeed every sort of trimming, went by the board,” Hood recalled in his notebook 30 years later. Short film created by Mark Honigsbaum, Patrick Blower and Malcolm Willett from for the exhibition. Hood’s harrowing frontline account is the centerpiece of an online exhibition and animation created by created by Viralanimation for London’s Florence Nightingale Museum (temporarily closed). According to the infirmary’s medical superintendent, Basil Hood, the hospital “literally reeled”. In October 1918, as a second wave of Spanish influenza spread across Britain, its wards were inundated with pneumonia cases. But in 1918 it was known as St Marylebone Infirmary and had 744 beds for the “sick poor”, many of whom had tuberculosis and other chronic lung conditions. Today, that hospital is named St Charles and offers walk-in care at the northern end of Ladbroke Grove, Kensington. NHS workers could do worse than examine the experience of another London hospital during the Spanish influenza pandemic just over 100 years ago. But if the worst happens, what can doctors and nurses expect? It is to hoped this onslaught never comes and infections spread less rapidly than projections show. Many will have pneumonia and require ventilators, which is why cubicles in the new 4,000-bed facility all have oxygen equipment. If predictions about the spread of Covid-19 are correct, the new NHS Nightingale hospital at the ExCel centre in London’s Docklands could soon see a “tsunami” of coronavirus patients.