I went looking for information on the Parfitt Brothers construction company yesterday morning but got waylaid by the chronology at the front of This Old House (Victoria’s Heritage Neighborhoods - Volume One - Fernwood & Victoria West). A recurring feature is outbreaks of diseases important enough to disrupt the economy.
We are living through the first epidemic/global pandemic to hit the region hard since 1953. Up til then (the timeline begins in 1850) something sinister and sickening swept through the community about once a decade. No wonder people wore gloves, grocers had clerks to handle the produce, and children were kept home until two days after their fevers subsided as a matter of course,
Long before Victoria was settled - but after the arrival of Europeans - the smallpox epidemic of 1633-34 reduced the population of Native Americans by 70% in one year. Indigenous peoples are at higher risk to the Coronavirus Covid 19.
Epidemics in Victoria
1848 Measles and influenza
1862-63 Smallpox carried by a miner from San Francisco
1864 Diptheria
1872 Smallpox
1888 Diptheria
1892 Smallpox
1897 Typhoid fever
1911 Diptheria
1918 Spanish Influenza (October & November (forces closure of public places kills more people than World War I)
1927 Smallpox
1934 Smallpox
1953 Polio epidemic (worst in Canada) the Salk vaccine introduced the following year
2020 Coronavirus Covid 19
Learn more about epidemics see this BBC story, summary of the worst disease outbreaks in history from Healthline and on the eradication of smallpox considered the greatest achievement in the history of world health.
