Last Tango of the “Sick Man of Europe” with the Spanish Lady

**This topic has been presented orally by Prof. Arda, at the 42th World Congress of History of Medicine (ISHM), Cairo, 9-13 October 2010 and the authors have a published article on the same subject in Turkish (Arda B, Acıduman A: Türk’ ün H1N1’ le İlk İmtihanı: 191819 Influenza Pandemisinin Ülkemizdeki Görünümü., Klinik Gelișim 23(3): 28-35, 2010; with permission from the editor) The influenza (H1N1) pandemic 1918-19 (Spanish flu) was one of the most catastrophic events in the history of medicine. Disease primarily affected the adults in the contrary with the general expectation to children and older people. The recent articles emphasized that the real mortality was 50-100 million. This article devoted on the Ottoman Empire had been affected by this pandemic or not. According to the general dissemination of the pandemic this question should be answered positively. A detailed description of H1N1 pandemic on this country, in the agony days of the “sick man of Europe”, has been drawn in the light of archive documents; the Otoman Archives in Istanbul and Kızılay Archive in Ankara.