President Wilson became intellectually dull and distracted. “There was something weird going on in his head,” one of his closest associates later said.
The president fell ill in the afternoon. The coughing fit was so severe that, although statesmen of the day were more likely to die from gunshots, his personal physician suspected it was an attack using old-fashioned poison . To the respiratory problems were quickly added a high fever of nearly 40 degrees and severe diarrhea.
The patient lay unconscious in his bed, unable to make the slightest movement. The colleagues gathered around were horrified by the physical changes that had affected him: dark circles under his eyes, sunken eyes, and a pale, haggard complexion made his face resemble a skull. Other, even more worrying symptoms would soon appear.
Great Allied offensive
And yet, this spring in Paris, no one was surprised. For several months, an epidemic of influenza or, as it was then called, flu, had been raging in the city where the President of the United States was going. The number of cases was in the hundreds of thousands. By Thursday, April 3, 1919, the president’s wife, his daughter, his senior advisor, his personal physician, and his housekeeper had already fallen ill. A young assistant infected the same day died four days later. Between the beginning of October 1918 and the end of February of the following year, nearly 20,000 people lost their lives in the metropolis due to the flu and the complications that resulted from it.
