Sodium Bicarbonate and it's use during the Spanish Flu of 1918

 

American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic

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Sodium bicarbonate

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For the leavening agent of which baking soda is a common ingredient, see Baking powder.

History[edit]

In 1791, French chemist Nicolas Leblanc produced sodium carbonate, also known as soda ash. In 1846, two American bakers, John Dwight and Austin Church, established the first factory in the United States to produce baking soda from sodium carbonate and carbon dioxide.^[75]

Saleratus, potassium or sodium bicarbonate, is mentioned in the novel Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling as being used extensively in the 1800s in commercial fishing to prevent freshly caught fish from spoiling.^[76]

In 1919, a U.S. Senator declared that bicarbonate of soda could cure the Spanish flu.... In the midst of the debate on January 26, 1919, Senator Overman interrupted the discussion to announce the discovery of a cure. "I want to say, for the benefit of those who are making this investigation," he reported, "that I was told by a judge of a superior court in the mountain country of North Carolina they have discovered a remedy for this disease." The purported cure implied a critique of modern science and an appreciation for the simple wisdom of simple people. "They say that common baking soda will cure the disease," he continued, "that they have cured it with it, that they have no deaths up there at all; they use common baking soda, which cures the disease." - American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic, Oxford University Press, March 15, 2012, page 178

You can see this printed in "America - A Catholic Review Of the Week, Volume 22, 1919-1920"  on page 381, which you can read in Google Books:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/xFc_AQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=overman