Among the worst moments of the 1918 influenza pandemic were Philadelphia's overwhelmed morgue stacking unembalmed bodies without ice on multiple floors until storage was found, or the city resorting to steam shovels for digging mass graves. The 1918 Spanish influenza – a vicious disease, some historians call it – emerged as World War I was ending. It killed an estimated 50 million or more people worldwide, 675,000 in the USA alone. It attacked the lungs, making breathing difficult. But influenza alone did not kill all those people...
