Mother credited with defying doctor
By Gene Warner
NEWS STAFF REPORTER
FORT ERIE, Ont.—The prognosis was dire. Doctors told 5-year-old Donald Jacobi’s family that he would be dead by the next morning, another victim of the Spanish flu that, starting in 1918, killed 50 million people.
Authorities wouldn’t even let the severely ill young Donald into the old Meyer Hospital — since replaced with Erie County Medical Center. Instead, he was dispatched to the “pest house” behind the hospital, where flu sufferers were sent to die.
“What are you going to do for him?” his persistent mother, Magdalena — all 4-foot-11 of her — asked the doctor at the hospital.
“There’s nothing we can do for him, because he’ll be dead by morning,” the doctor replied.
His family wasn’t even allowed to take him home to die. The law said he had to remain in the “pest house,” to be fully quarantined.
But you couldn’t tell that to Magdalena Jacobi. She then uttered the punch line that’s been passed down through the generations of the large Jacobi clan:
“If he’s going to die, he’s going to die at home.”
So the family bundled up young Donald G. Jacobi— there were no car heaters in those days — and took him back to South Buffalo, where he lay unconscious for about seven days. And then recovered.
Jacobi, now 96, lived through perhaps the worst flu in history, a pandemic that killed three times as many people as died in World War I.
http://www.buffalonews.com/cityregio...658.html?imw=Y
Survivor relishes triumph over 1918 Spanish flu
Linear Mode
