Year of the Flu

In 1916, Holbert Nixon, brought his bride, Beatrice, to the coal mining village of Revere in southwestern Pennsylvania to begin his first medical practice. He had signed an agreement with a coal company to care for the several hundred immigrants who lived in the village and worked in the Revere mine. Before he could treat anyone, however, he discovered that he had to learn how to communicate since his patients spoke in foreign dialects. Even their names were hard to pronounce. Although struggling with these early challenges, he and Bea happily settled in to the simple country life and had a baby daughter. Then, in September, 1918, disaster struck. Villagers sickened in rapid succession in the flu pandemic that killed quickly and indiscriminately throughout the world. This is a true story of Nixon's heroic fight to save the lives of an entire town from history's most lethal influenza virus that killed more people in a year than the Black Death killed in a century.