That Others Might Live: Sarah Harvey MacKendrick and Her Courageous Colleagues
By William F. Hanna
Sarah Harvey MacKendrick’s gravestone rises only a few inches above the ground in Section 13 of the Mayflower Hill Cemetery. In winter, snow and ice sometimes cover it completely, and even in good weather scattered colonies of lichens mask the words inscribed on its face. When the stone is hidden so is the whisper of Mrs. MacKendrick’s sacrifice.
Born Sarah Harvey in Easthampton, Massachusetts in 1884, she moved to Taunton as a child when her father, an English emigrant, found work in a North End textile mill. His death in 1898, when she was fourteen years old, may have influenced her to pursue a career in nursing. Sarah graduated from the nurses' training program at Boston’s New England Baptist Hospital and afterward returned to Taunton. In 1912, she married Ralph F. MacKendrick, who worked as the export manager at Reed & Barton Silversmiths. Their son Paul was born in 1914 and the family lived at 32 Warren Street in Taunton.¹
Sometimes gravestones give no hint as to how a person lived or died. Just their name and dates of birth and death are all that’s offered in summation of a life. Not so with Sarah Harvey MacKendrick. Her stone notes that she died on October 16, 1918, and her epitaph states that “SHE GAVE HER LIFE THAT OTHERS MIGHT LIVE.” Sarah’s training, the time of her death, and the epitaph are enough to lead us in the direction of the 1918 influenza pandemic.
Sarah died during the deadliest month in U.S. history. She was one of 195,000 Americans who succumbed to the flu in October 1918. By 1920 the disease had claimed 675,000 lives in the U.S. and at least fifty million worldwide.²
To make matters infinitely worse, the tragedy of the epidemic was played against the backdrop of a catastrophic world war. While American entry in April 1917 had brought decisive industrial and military aid to the Allied nations, it also had grave consequences at home. In addition to painful shortages of food and fuel, the home front faced a serious shortage of health care professionals, and especially nurses. By August 1918, an estimated 21,000 nurses had been recruited by the Army Nurse Corps and more than half had sailed for Europe by the time the epidemic hit with full force. With four million Americans under arms, and with influenza ravaging the Western Front, military hospitals both at home and abroad were overwhelmed by the crisis.³
It’s fair to say that every American city and town felt the effects of the nursing shortage and Taunton was no exception. After a mild outbreak of influenza in the spring of 1918, the highly contagious disease returned with a vengeance in early September, and by mid-month Taunton officials were reporting more than 200 new cases every day. Schools, theaters and poolrooms were closed; churches cancelled Sunday services and public funerals were prohibited. With almost 3,800 cases reported in October, Taunton was contending with what a Board of Health official would later call “the greatest scourge the city has ever had.”⁴
It was through this crisis that Sarah Harvey MacKendrick would take her place in Taunton history. With the number of sick increasing daily, especially in densely populated sections of the city, she accepted employment with the Whittenton Manufacturing Company to care for its mill workers who were suffering with influenza. According to the Taunton Daily Gazette, she “worked night and day visiting the stricken victims of the disease, mostly in the tenement districts of the north end of the city. . .”.⁵ While we have no firsthand account of Sarah at work in the crowded, fearful neighborhoods surrounding the Whittenton Mill, a colleague in another city described a nurse’s typical experience. “The people watch at their doors and windows,” she wrote, “beckoning for the nurse to come in. One day a nurse who started out with fifteen patients to see, saw nearly fifty before night.”⁶
We’re not sure exactly when Sarah began her work for Whittenton Mills, but we know that she became sick with influenza on Sunday, October 13. Her condition declined rapidly after she contracted pneumonia, and she died at home three days later, on the sixteenth. In the cruelest of ironies, according to the Daily Gazette, the critically ill nurse suffered further because “it was impossible to secure a nurse to aid Mrs. MacKendrick in her illness.”⁷ She was buried at Mayflower Hill on Friday, October 18, 1918.
Sarah Harvey MacKendrick’s death brings to mind one of the most elusive aspects of the 1918 flu epidemic: the death toll among nurses who died in the line of duty. Sarah was not alone in her consummate bravery. One author has written that overall, thousands of nurses contracted influenza and hundreds died, but it’s impossible to arrive at a more precise figure on a global scale.⁸ In Taunton, however, we can be a bit more exact and say that in addition to Mrs. MacKendrick, at least four other nurses lost their lives caring for the city’s sick during the pandemic. These were women who showed extraordinary courage in the face of a deadly, fast-moving crisis.
The epidemic peaked in Taunton throughout the first week of October 1918. During the first weekend of that month 380 new cases were reported. Morton Hospital suspended its longstanding rule of prohibiting admission to people with contagious diseases and was soon overwhelmed with flu patients. On October 4, the city opened a temporary influenza hospital at the Broadway Church which would help accommodate Morton’s overflow.
The new Broadway facility was in desperate need of staffing, and help came from an unexpected source. In addition to Morton Hospital’s nursing school, one of the better training programs of that time was located at the Taunton State Hospital. Although the medical staff there had been reduced by fifty percent since the beginning of the war, the epidemic, though raging in the rest of the city, had not yet reached the crisis stage at the State Hospital. Officials therefore, decided to allow two of their senior student nurses to volunteer at the Broadway Church. Three young women stepped forward: Mary Jane Flynn, Annie Hall and Mary Roberta Grierson. Like many of the hospital’s student nurses, these young women were Canadians, drawn largely from the Maritime provinces. Hospital officials could spare only two, so Janie Flynn and Annie Hall went to Broadway while Maisie Grierson remained at Taunton State.⁹
While the Broadway Church hospital helped relieve the overcrowding at Morton, conditions there were far from ideal. Since there was no therapeutic way to treat the flu, all a nurse could do was keep her patients hydrated, administer cooling compresses to relieve symptoms of fever, and offer encouragement and compassion. While the number of individuals treated at the Broadway facility is difficult to ascertain, many seriously ill victims were admitted, and twenty-nine flu patients died there.¹⁰
Treating a highly contagious disease in such tight quarters was both exhausting and dangerous. Within days of their arrival both student nurses were sick with influenza and were sent back to Taunton State. Janie Flynn, twenty-five years old, died on October 18, while Annie Hall, “desperately ill,” was placed under treatment.
Miss Hall, near death, returned to a hospital in full crisis. With a total patient population of just over 1,400, Taunton State saw a nursing corps that was stretched to its limit. In the course of their duties, Minnie Sheehan, another student nurse from Nova Scotia, died sometime in the second week of October, and nurse Mary E. Smalley died on October 19. Although never having graduated from a formal nursing program, the thirty-four-year-old English immigrant had worked at the State Hospital for six years and was much beloved. Nurse Smalley, said the Taunton Daily Gazette, “was one that will be greatly missed. . . .” She was buried at Mayflower Hill Cemetery two days after the funeral of Sarah Harvey MacKendrick.¹¹
In their Annual Report for the year 1918, the trustees of the Taunton State Hospital stated that 373 cases of influenza had been treated during the epidemic, and fifty-seven persons had died from the disease. More than fifty employees had been stricken, and in addition to the three nurses, two male attendants had lost their lives.¹²
Even as the number of new cases of influenza began to decrease during the middle of October, many Tauntonians remained very sick. Nurses continued to call at the homes of those who needed help, and thus their lives remained in jeopardy. The last nurse to die in the city during the epidemic was Mrs. Mary J. Littleton, a forty-six-year-old widow. Born in England, we don’t know much about her except for what was published in a small newspaper announcement of her death. According to the Daily Gazette writer, she “was one more of those who gave her life through sacrifice in the service of humanity” by answering the call of the city’s Emergency Health Committee for volunteer nurses.¹³ She died on Friday, October 18, 1918, and was buried at St. Francis Old Cemetery in Taunton.
After it was over, city officials reported that influenza had infected at least 4,000 Tauntonians and had killed 237, most between the ages of twenty and forty years old.¹⁴
As the pandemic waned so did the world war and within a year both were relegated to the basket of nightmarish memory. Janie Flynn and Minnie Sheehan were returned to Nova Scotia for burial. The Flynn family had suffered inconsolable loss even before Janie’s death; two of her brothers had been killed while serving in the Canadian army. In March 1919, a plaque was dedicated in her memory at the Taunton State Hospital. Local Red Cross chairman Albert Fuller’s eloquence came as close as possible to capturing the inexpressible. “In the springtime of her life,” he said of Nurse Flynn, “she gave all she had, all her youthful ambitions, all her expectations and all her hopes for the years that were to come.”¹⁵
On a happier note, Annie Hall, Janie’s friend who in 1918 was returned to the State Hospital at death’s door, recovered. She lived a long life and enjoyed a productive nursing career. The last two decades of it were spent as the director of nursing at the Taunton State Hospital. Annie retired in 1951 and died in 1975. She was eighty-two years old, and along with Sarah Harvey MacKendrick and Mary Smalley, she rests today in the Mayflower Hill Cemetery.¹⁶
Finally, back to Sarah MacKendrick. Her son Paul was only four and a half years old when his mother died. With a doctorate from Harvard in the Classics, he became a renowned teacher and writer, spending the most productive years of his career at the University of Wisconsin. Widely respected on both sides of the Atlantic, he died in 1998, one day before his eighty-fourth birthday.¹⁷
End Notes
¹ Taunton Daily Gazette, 17 October 1918. An overview of the flu epidemic in Taunton can be found in William F. Hanna, A History of Taunton, Massachusetts (Taunton, Mass.: Old Colony Historical Society, 2007), 348–53.
² Center for Disease Control, “History of the 1918 Flu Pandemic,” an online source found at https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918- commemoration/1918-pandemic-history.htm/ Accessed on March 2, 2025; see also
Christopher Klein, “Why October 1918 was America’s Deadliest Month Ever,” an online source found at: https://www.history.com/news/spanish-flu-deaths-october- 1918/ Accessed on March 1, 2025.
³ Jessie Kratz, “Pandemic Nursing: The 1918 Influenza Outbreak,” found in “Pieces of History,” a blog published by the National Archives. This is an online site found at:
https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2023/05/24/pandemic-nursing-the-1918- influenza-outbreak/ Accessed on February 28, 2025.
⁴ City of Taunton, Report of the Board of Health, Municipal Register, 1919, 250–51.
⁵ Taunton Daily Gazette, 17 October 1918.
⁶ Frieda Paton, “Nursing During the Deadliest Influenza Epidemic of 1918.” An online resource found in Nurselabs: https://nurseslabs.com/nursing-during-the-deadliest- influenza-pandemic-of-1918/ Accessed on February 20, 2025.
⁷ Taunton Daily Gazette, 17 October 1918.
⁸ Kratz.
⁹ Trustees’ Report delivered by Charles C. Cain, Jr., and Superintendent’s Report delivered by Arthur Goss, M.D., found in the Sixty-Fifth Report of the Trustees for the Taunton State Hospital for the Year Ending November 30, 1918 (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1919), 7–12; hereinafter cited as Goss Report.
¹⁰ City of Taunton, Report of the Board of Health, Municipal Register, 1919, 253.
¹¹ Taunton Daily Gazette, 20 October 1918.
¹² Goss Report, 12.
¹³ Taunton Daily Gazette, 19 October 1918.
¹⁴ City of Taunton, Report of the Board of Health, Municipal Register, 1919, 250–51.
¹⁵ Taunton Daily Gazette, 14 March 1919.
¹⁶ Taunton Daily Gazette, 30 December 1975.
¹⁷ A summary of Paul MacKendrick’s career is found online at: https://www.wisconsinlitmap.com/paul-mackendrick.html/ Accessed on March 3, 2025. When Dr. MacKendrick was beginning his teaching career, he taught Latin at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. One of his students was future president George H.W. Bush.
