Members of the Student Army Training Corps go through drills on a cold 1918 day behind Hathorn Hall. The old wood-frame gym is at left; Roger Williams is in the distance at right.
MUSKIE ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS LIBRARY
h i st o ry le sso n
The Best Preventive
A century ago, quarantines, distancing, and washing up were key to beating infectious bugs at Bates by h . jay burns
in april of this year, a surge of COVID-19
cases among students prompted Bates to implement a campus-wide quarantine. Students were restricted to their residences, except to pick up meals at Commons or go outside, physically distanced, for fresh air and exercise. It was the first (and last, we hope) quarantine of the pandemic at Bates — and the first in nearly a century. During three quarantine episodes in the early 1900s, measures included such extremes as sleeping with dormitory windows wide open as the “fury” of cleansing October winds whipped through and one dramatic recapture of a student who fled quarantine and made it all the way to Portsmouth.
1907 Some Outside Institution Whittier House and Cheney House went into quarantine in November 1907 for a time due to diphtheria, a bacterial illness now largely eliminated thanks to vaccines. The illness was “brought in by some outside institution,” the Student believed. 92
Spring 2021
In April of that year, a room in Parker Hall was quarantined after one of its residents became ill. The college credited its excellent drainage and sewage system with stopping the spread, though diphtheria is more of an airborne disease spread person-to-person by respiratory droplets.
1918 Avoidance of Crowds The global 1918–19 influenza pandemic, which killed around 675,000 Americans and many millions worldwide, came in three waves, the deadliest being the second, in fall 1918. The Bates Student, in its debut issue of the academic year, on Oct. 18, 1918, reported the recent deaths of five alumni, four of them in the military. In Maine, more than 2,500 people died in October 1918 alone. That month in Lewiston, most businesses and gathering places were shut down. (Lewiston’s Catholic churches, meanwhile, held indoor services, against the city’s Board of Health advice.) The Bates campus was in quarantine for most of October. Even so, the flu hit hard. “On the first Friday of the year, a case of influenza appeared. For
