Dean Shalhoup

The chairman of the local Board of Health, a Dr. Sanders, issued notice that the order prohibiting “all meetings, entertainments, schools and churches” was to remain in effect for another week.

But, Dr. Sanders told the Derry News, if conditions “continue to improve,” he was hoping to remove the restrictions in time to allow “Saturday evening entertainments” and Sunday church services to be held.

Around the same time, William E. Whiteley, the clerk of the Board of Health in Dover, took stock of the situation over there and decided it would be best to extend the order prohibiting “all schools, moving picture houses, theaters, places of amusement and gatherings of all kinds within the limits of the city of Dover” for at least another week.

Public service announcements, some with stern warnings, others offering suggestions on how to stay safe and healthy, still others playing to people’s sense of humor to get the message across, dotted newspaper pages.

The virus at the center of it all was easily caught “via the discharges of the nose and mouth,” experts explained.

So it was important for the citizenry to totally refrain from “expectorating (spitting, for vocabulary-challenged folks), unless the material used to catch the expectoration can be destroyed by burning.”

For those who carried “hankies,” or smoked cigarettes, cigars or pipes, or had that rather unsavory habit of chewing on their pencils — do not swap, lend or borrow those items.

The briefest bullet-point on the list of “do’s and don’ts” was likely also the most sobering: “Do not kiss.”

Another bullet-point, however, offered what might amount to a loophole in the kissing-abstention order: If it was impossible for one to avoid going into, or staying in, the sick room — such as to bring food, water or medicine to a bedridden family member — one should “cover the nose and mouth with 4-6 layers of gauze,” and make sure to keep plenty on hand “and boil them several times a day.”

But outside of New Hampshire, mainly in the larger population centers, officials tried to soften somewhat the sharpest edges of the kissing ban.

A bulletin issued by the New York City Board of Health, for example, implied that occasional kissing was OK — as long as said kissing was done through a handkerchief.

The board conceded that “this may be considered poor taste by some, but the doctors declare it is the only safe way.”

Suddenly, second base seemed so far away.

The U.S. Treasury Department even got in on the public-service-bulletin trend, for instance, issuing a poster signed by a man named F. R. Smyth, the assistant surgeon of the U.S. Public Health Service, headquartered in Bismarck, North Dakota.

Among Dr. Smyth’s directives was the warning, “do not spit on the floor or the sidewalk.” The “sidewalk” part is understandable, but folks who needed to be reminded to not spit on the floor were already on board a leaky boat.

Given all these suggestions, pleas, appeals, warnings and so on from presumably well-researched, straight-shooting public health officials whose only mission was to educate the public, giving them the tools to remain safe and healthy, one might wonder why some folks say “thanks but no thanks” when offered tools that could very well come in handy at some point down the line.

Well, I don’t have the answer, but it’s become pretty well known these days by anyone who feels like looking it up that indeed, the anti-mask, anti-vaccine movements of today played out with almost the same exact script a bit more than a century ago.

Indeed, the examples I cited are from 1918, when the citizenry battled not a COVID-19 pandemic, but one that stemmed from the rapid spread of influenza, sometimes called “Spanish Influenza,” mainly by the folks who felt the need to tie it to a nation or region that wasn’t the United States.

“Anti-Mask Meeting. Tonight, Saturday, Jan. 25. The Dreamland Rink. Admission: Free. To Protest Against the Unhealthy Mask Ordinance.

“Extracts will be read from state Board of Health bulletin showing compulsory mask-wearing to be a failure. Eugene E. Schmitz and Other Interesting Speakers.”

I looked it up; Dreamland Rink was in San Francisco, which appears to be, or was, a really neat old building that, like our beloved original Boston Garden and its more recent incarnations, was designed to be transformed from an ice rink to a basketball or theater floor.

Like today, such ads and events were countered by mask proponents — in other words, officials and citizens who base their viewpoints on scientific research and facts.

“Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases” was a little ditty that appeared on PSAs and posters tying the pandemic to America’s World War I effort.

“As Dangerous as a Poison Gas Shell: Spread of Spanish Influenza Menaces our War Production,” it reads.

In an era more “Old West” than a progressive urban center of today, San Francisco seemed to have more than its share of clashes between pro-mask and anti-mask factions.

In one such incident, it appears a city Health Department inspector named Henry D. Miller got a tad carried away in his zeal to enforce the city’s mask mandate.

Miller “discharged his revolver in a battle with James Wisser, a blacksmith, who refused to don a gauze influenza mask at the order of the health officer,” according to a newspaper report.

Miller fired four shots, hitting Wisser in the arm and leg and striking Henry Appleton, age 63, in the leg.

The fourth shot grazed a woman who “went at once to her home” with a slight wound.

The investigation sort of vindicates inspector Miller.

Wisser, according to the report, was standing on the corner of Powell and Market streets “waving his arms and urging a crowd to dispense with their masks.

“‘They are the bunk,’ he is reported to have said.”

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears weekly in The Sunday Telegraph. He may be reached at 594-1256 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.