By October, ten residents had died of influenza and thirty-five cases were reported during the epidemic, which was called "the greatest scourge Peabody has ever known."

Despite opposition from the city's "foreign population", the Board of Health carried out a quarantine that sent sick people to a Community House on Holten Street in a further effort to check the spread of the disease.  The city's Board of Health ordered all Turkish and Greek coffee houses to close and banned public funerals.

The Peabody Enterprise in a front page article under the headline: "Why are not more school teachers volunteering to help the sick?  The article complained about how few of the city's school teachers had volunteered to "enter the afflicted homes of Peabody" - especially since schools were closed for two weeks due to the epidemic.

As a school nurse, twenty-six-year-old Lucie Nelson of Chestnut Street was idle when a call was made in the local press for teacher to aid residents suffering from influenza.  "She eagerly came forward to give that aid which saved many lives.  It was while she toiled to alleviate the sufferings of the sick that she contracted her own illness which resulted in her untimely death," read the article in the Peabody Enterprise, October 10.

"When the need of nurses to attend the sick became urgent, Miss Nelson quickly responded and braved the dangers of possible contagion.  Doubly heroic is her death because she was is poor health when she took her humanitarian task.

An editorial on October 18 reads, "The spirit that keeps American women braving German gas shells near the front line trenches in their efforts to help our wounded boys was the same spirit that sent Miss Lucie Nelson to volunteer her services among the families afflicted with influenza."

by S. M. Smoller
Source for information on Lucie Nelson: Peabody School Committee Records, 10/1/1918