There are several books available about the Flu. I recently read The Great Influenza (John M. Barry) and can contribute this info: It got to be called Spanish Flu because Spain was not at war, had no censorship, and therefore was first to publish news of Flu. In fact, it started on a hog farm in Haskell County Kansas in late Jan - early Feb of 1918. It was spread to Camp Funston, where 56,000 young troops were prepared for the war in cold, dirty, overcrowded conditions. From Camp Funston, the young troops were sent all over the world, often into very overcrowded camps, and spread the flu far and wide, especially in France. By Sept. 1918, the flu seemed to erupt around the world at the same time, but this was just because it had reached a critical flash point because so many were infected. There were two general courses that the virus followed. The most common was a very, very severe flu that lasted for 3 weeks. Then the person would either get better slowly or develop pneumonia and die in another 3 days or so. (No antibiotics in those days) Violent headaches, body aches, high fever, cough severe enough to tear muscles, exhaustion, bleeding from nose, eyes and ears, and bruising, skin turning almost black. Often there were mental disturbances, delirium, stupor, psychosis, sometimes lingering for months afterward. The second course of the disease, perhaps caused by a mutation in the virus, perhaps caused by individual response to the virus, caused people to catch the disease and drop dead within HOURS!. Apparently, due to lung damage from the virus, their bodies flooded their lungs with fluid, sort of like a huge allergy reaction, and they essentially drowned. What a horror! People were dropping dead in the streets, bodies were stacked like logs in the corridors of hospitals and morgues, people were terrified. Often an entire family would be sick, no one left to clean up after them, no one to haul the bodies away for days. It seemed to attack young adults most severely, apparently because older folks had some immunity from a previous related strain. This book was not very good, mostly about the development of science and the people who worked on the epidemic. There are probably better descriptions of the epidemic elsewhere. My son's great grandfather was a butcher in Ohio and died of pneumonia 3 weeks after contracting severe flu in April 1918. He was probably among the earliest to die from Spanish flu. Susan in San Jose Ca