Sue Wootton

In March 1917, a school leaver called Frances McAllister travelled from her North Island home to the southern city of Dunedin. She was one of seven or eight females among thirty new entrants at the Otago Medical School. (The 1917 intake was much smaller than usual due to military conscription.) McAllister graduated as a doctor in 1922. Her memoir (published under her married name Frances Preston), Lady Doctor, Vintage Model, is a fascinating window into New Zealand life in the first half of the twentieth century. As the blurb puts it:

The early days of New Zealand medicine were not for the squeamish. Tuberculosis, hydatids, osteomyelitis and syphilis were common, bush-felling and saw-milling accidents abounded, and the 1918 Influenza Epidemic cut a swath through the country.”

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John Ryan McLane 

A blunder which amounts to a crime.”

In 1918 the Samoan archipelago was split between American Samoa (a United States territory) and Western Samoa (previously a German colony but under New Zealand governance from 1914). The 1918 influenza pandemic killed a quarter of Western Samoans, while leaving American Samoa unscathed. Why were their experiences so different?

In late 1918 a second wave within a single pandemic of influenza was spreading throughout Asia and the Pacific. On 30 October 1918 the Union Steamship Company’s Talune left Auckland for its run through Polynesia. The new, more lethal influenza variant had arrived in Auckland with the spring, and several crew members were ill. On 7 November the Talune reached Apia, the main port of New Zealand-occupied Western Samoa.

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