My proposal for my final project for the class, “Intro to Digital Humanities,” was initially to be an exhibit website based on my grandfather’s history of being a POW in Stalag 3C. But in one of his letters, he complained about quarantine in basic training. So, after learning about text mapping and searching quotes within Chronicling America’s Newspapers at the Library of Congress, I decided to put in the word meningitis for just 1943. I found over 330 news articles and reports of a meningitis epidemic in multiple locations in the United States. I found several articles stating that the military decreased the death rate by a drug called Sulfadiazine. The aim of my project became to focus on meningitis in the year,1943, in the military that decreased the rate of cases and more importantly, the death rate. I wanted to add information about the United States population numbers but limited this to focus the story from government documents in the military and in the public domain.
The sources were predominantly digitized government documents, but most of the history of the different infectious disease commissions is not digitized and housed at Walter Reed. I was limited to just telling the story about the Army and their experimentation and success with decreasing the number of deaths after recognizing epidemic numbers of meningitis. These findings then helped the United States population, and I found articles detailing this information in public health journals. Most of this information was medical and technical, which would not be attractive on a website. While I put two graphs on the website, there were significantly hundreds more and would be very medical and frankly dull, as my professor, Dr. Mullen, pointed out. So I switched to just doing an audio version of my findings from the National Library of Medicine, Newspapers, U.S. government documents, and the Army Medical Museum to tell the story of how successful the military was in decreasing the death rate compared to World War I. While 3.7 percent of healthy people still died who contracted meningitis, it was a staggering 40 percent in the earlier war. The number of cases still reached epidemic levels in the United States and the military for the year of 1943, but like newspapers reports and the Army’s commission found out that giving this drug to almost everyone prevented cases and death.
I did not know that bacterial meningitis numbers were that high, nor did I know that quarantine was still attempted for this disease. If I had the time, I would like to research more in the physical archives of the Army’s records to add to this story or expand on the different experiments done on recruits. Also, there was data about black troops having a higher death rate due to meningitis in World War I and World War II. The explanations for this were varied within government documents with significant racial reasons. This needs further exploration as well. The Army Epidemiological Board has records in a library at Walter Reed from 1942 to the 1990s, not digitized. From feedback, my fellow students recommended that I include the audio transcript, which I did under the mp3 metadata. I also had the current vaccination website and CDC website to tie in the public health brochure released after the war in 1948 and is on the website. My final project website is located at my lastname and initials, Browse Exhibits · Meningitis Epidemic of 1943 (shumanmss.com)
The audio is also just listed on soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/mary-s-20/epidemic-of-1943?si=1d7f0650fd394cb49688c4826947c259&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
