The Great Influenza of 1918 and The Wrights

By Pete Kauffman -

 

Doctors John and Katherine Wright  had a longtime effect in the city

BY VALERIE MYERS / VALERIE.MYERS@TIMESNEWS.COM




A husband-and-wife team of doctors fought on the front lines of the Spanish influenza epidemic in Erie in 1918 and continued to lead city health efforts until as late as 1960.



John W. Wright, M.D., then 50, was in charge of the city’s Board of Health during the 1918 flu and was appointed by state Health Commissioner Benjamin Franklin Royer to lead the fight against the viral infection in Erie, Crawford and Venango counties.

His wife, Katharine Law Wright, M.D., 41 in 1918, operated a free clinic at West 21st and Peach streets.

“It must have been a terrible time,” said the couple’s grandson, Walter Kauffman III, 79.

Kauffman is descended from J.W. Wright’s first wife, Clara Keller. His wife, Peg Kauffman, has researched his family history. No stories of the 1918 epidemic were passed down through the family, she said. J.W. and Katherine’s only child, Virginia, was only 4 years old in 1918.

“That generation of doctors didn’t really talk about their work or their patients,” Peg Kauffman said. “And Virginia would have been too young to understand.”

The couple was well respected, she said.

“Doctors in those days also did no wrong. Their patients, everyone, thought that they walked on water,” Peg Kauffman said.

By the end of the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic, though, some members of the public thought J.W. Wright should have reimposed a ban on public gatherings after an Armistice Day celebration sparked a resurgence of the virus.

Wright had decided that no ban or quarantine could prevent the spread of the deadly flu and that the only recourse would be to let it run its course. An earlier five-week ban on public gatherings, quarantines of families infected, and arrests for conducting business or spitting in public during the ban had not stopped the virus’ spread.

Still, he was stung by the criticism.

“I feel that we have done everything possible and we are in no way responsible for any deaths,” Wright said on Dec. 19, 1918.

J.W. Wright was a native of Crawford County and earned his medical degree from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. He began practice in Wattsburg in 1891 and moved the practice to Erie, at 247 W. Eighth St., in 1896.

He served as an assistant surgeon during the Spanish-American War.

J.W. Wright was appointed county medical inspector in 1900 and held the position until 1921. He served as
city health officer until his death in 1926.

Katherine Wright was an Erie native and earned her medical degree from the Women’s Medical College of Philadelphia. She did “special duty” for the Pennsylvania Health Department through the influenza epidemic, according to Dr. John Chaffee’s 1990 “Reflections on Erie County Physicians,” and signed the death certificates for a number of its victims.

She was director of the clinic at 21st and Peach streets from its opening during a typhoid epidemic in 1912 until 1960. She died in 1966.

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