Epidemics during O'Shea's early years

This year is not the first time O’Sheas have dealt with a pandemic or epidemic. (Generally speaking, a pandemic crosses countries while an epidemic is more local or group-specific). About one hundred years ago, O’Shea Builders’ founder -- Bud O’Shea’s grandfather John O’Shea -- dealt with an epidemic and pandemic within ten years.

The last one may have killed his son.

The first outbreak was an epidemic of Scarlet Fever in 1907 and 1908. There was no vaccination (and there still isn’t) for this bacterial infection which typically strikes children and causes a rash, sore throat, fever, swollen lymph nodes, and blisters in the throat.

“The city board of health yesterday placed the home of John T. O’Shea, 1715 E. Cook Street, under quarantine,” reported the November 3, 1908 Springfield newspaper, the Illinois State Register. “Mr. O’Shea’s son Robert being ill with scarlet fever. The case is a mild one.” Robert was six years old.

The epidemic started the year before in northern Illinois, according to the April 4, 1908 Journal of the American Medical Association. Experts believed it was caused by infected milk and diseased milk factory workers. Scarlet Fever could be spread by touch, droplets in the air, or ingesting products with the bacteria. Some of the infected died within 48 hours.

Scarlatina, as it’s also called, “is the worst of the eruptive diseases of childhood,” stated the November 11, 1908 Illinois State Register. “It remains a puzzle…we are in doubt as to its cause and there is no drug or antitoxin that will cure it.” While antibiotics treat it today, Scarlet Fever lead to many deaths before the mid-1900s.

Robert O’Shea recovered, but became ill again during the flu pandemic of 1918 when one third of the world’s population contracted the bug and at least 50 million died from it, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We don’t know if Robert had influenza (his death certificate is missing from the county records), but the Register reported that he’d been hospitalized in September, 1918.

Springfield papers were full of articles then about people in the city and nation coming down with the flu and dying from it. Again, there was no cure or vaccine. Like today, businesses and schools closed, social gatherings were shut down, and temporary hospitals erected to stem the disease, which hit in three waves between 1918 and 1919.

In November, Robert O’Shea died three months shy of his seventeenth birthday. His obituary in the November 11, 1918 Illinois State Journal reported that funeral services would be held at his home and the Church of the Immaculate Conception.