Looking to History for Reassurance

Way back at the beginning of 2020 a friend lent me a copy of The first fifty years : a history of nursing at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney from 1882 to 1932.

When it came time to return the book, COVID-19 was being referred to as CoronaVirus and it was something that was happening in China, barely credible it would spread worldwide. Nevertheless, I took a snapshot of the page referring to the pneumonic influenza which first emerged in Australia in 1919, supposedly brought here by returning soldiers. It is said that the earliest documented case of this influenza strain was March 1918 in Kansas, United States, although a type of bird-flu had already emerged in the military hospitals in Etaples, France in 1916-1917. The devastation of the misnamed “Spanish Flu” on world population is well known, but by around 1921, the term ceased to be daily news in the Australian papers, and gradually morphed into the less noteworthy “influenza”.

I find it comforting to look to history and reassure myself that ‘this too, shall pass’. One day, all that we are experiencing in these times will be reduced to one long paragraph in a history book.

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In 1904 Miss Mabel Newill was appointed Matron of Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (RPA). She faced off against a raging typhoid epidemic which saw hundreds of patients admitted daily, and implemented innovative and groundbreaking quarantine measures to reduce the patient to nurse, nurse to patient transmission. But we read that even then, as today, in 1919 the flu virus was so virulent as to regularly take nurses out of action. To put the hospital’s statistics into perspective, in 1919 the entire population of Australia was five million, about 800,000 of those in Sydney. Today, the population of Sydney is in excess of five million. In NSW, in the three months since 16 June 2021, when the current outbreak began, there have been 316 COVID-19 related deaths, across a network of modern hospitals.

In this context, it can be appreciated what strain a single hospital was under to experience 180 deaths in six months, and RPA was not the only hospital in Sydney.

Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (RPA) was named after Queen Victoria’s second son, His Royal Highness Prince Alfred, later Duke of Edinburgh. During a visit to Australia in 1868 Prince Alfred was the victim of an assassination attempt while on a picnic in the northern Sydney suburb of Clontarf

Australians opened a public subscription fund to build a hospital as a memorial to his safe recovery.

RPA opened as a 146-bed hospital and received its first patients in 1882. During that year 1069 patients were admitted.

Today, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital is one of Australia’s premier tertiary referral hospitals and is recognised as a worldwide leader in healthcare excellence and innovation. It is a pioneer in patient care and boasts many Australian “firsts” in surgical, clinical and research healthcare innovations.

https://www.slhd.nsw.gov.au/rpa/about_us.html accessed 28 September 2021